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Monday night’s Weekly Pint had a title before it even started, and the night lived up to it: Rhinegeist’s new pizza corner, a Halloween Saturday that only comes around so often, and a beer experiment ten years in the making. If you missed it live, here’s the episode, and if you caught it, here’s the part where I try to remember what I actually said.

Watch the episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py8JzYo6TSo – The Weekly Pint streams live Mondays at 9:30 PM ET.

Pizza Time at Rhinegeist: great idea, but I want the whole room

Rhinegeist is opening Pizza Time inside the Over-the-Rhine taproom: a 450-square-foot, ’80s-themed pizza corner, New York-style pies with names pulled straight out of the decade: Saved by the Bell (taco sauce, cheddar, chicken, cherry tomato, shredded lettuce, crunchy Fritos, chipotle ranch), Full House (the everything pie), Cherry Bomb (olive oil, garlic, cherry tomato, lemon ricotta, basil, balsamic glaze), plus Buffy, Big Biff, Veg-O-Matic, Hidden Valley Girl, Meatballs, and Hawaii Five-O. It replaces the Mac’s Pizza Pub vending machine, it sits near the new arcade games (part of that theming that we’re talking about), and the drinks come in classic red “pizza place cups”. It’s open, now – so check it out for yourself!

Let me be clear first: I love Rhinegeist. But the names alone don’t do it for me. What I wanted, or what I was hoping for when I first heard a pizza place was coming, was to walk into a room and be transported. Checker tablecloths, red plastic cups, the arcade humming, that smell when you walked into Pizza Hut as a kid, parents with a beer in a mug while the kids ran back and forth for quarters. A skin of nostalgia dropped on top of a pizza corner isn’t the same thing as the room itself.

I’m still going to get down there and try it real pizza that doesn’t come out of a vending machine is a genuine upgrade, and the branding is fun. I just want somebody, somewhere, to rebuild that room for me. HighGrain in the old Brentwood Bowl gets close to a different version of the same itch for me, and that’s a whole article I’ve been working on for a very long time. For now, Pizza Time is worth the trip. Just don’t expect me to stop dreaming about the full Pizza Hut experience.

Halloween Saturday: the drinking holiday, officially

This year Halloween falls on a Saturday, and that hasn’t happened in a while the next one is 2037. We also gain an hour on Sunday with the time change, and there’s an Ohio State football game on the day itself. Put it together and this is, in my humble opinion, now an official drinking holiday. Friday to prepare, Saturday to celebrate, Sunday to recover, with an extra hour thrown in for good measure.

Here’s the map we walked through on the show:

• Streetside Brewery – Demogorgon Day, Saturday, October 31. Demogorgon Day finally falls on Halloween itself. The Granola Bar Demogorgon (almonds, oats, honey, marshmallow) leads batch 2, alongside toasted coconut-vanilla and a pecan coffee cake variant, with more rolling out through the week. The VIP tasting gets an exclusive Thai Banana / Salted Caramel / Coconut variant, attendees only.
• Braxton, Covington – “Nightmare on 7th,” Saturday, 7 PM–midnight. DJ RUZE and costume prizes, plus the Halloween pop-up running at the Barrel House right now.
• Third Eye Brewing, Sharonville – dog costume contest, Saturday. Judging in the front grassy area in the afternoon, gift-card prizes for the top three.
• Little Miami Brewing – Halloween party, Saturday. Live music in the evening and a costume contest, with the Redrum Slushie back for spooky season.
• Cartridge Brewing – 6th anniversary Halloween bash, Saturday, 11 AM–10 PM. Free and all ages, with a spooky movie marathon, a costume party, and an Imperial Pumpkin Ale. (Is Halloween the right timing for a pumpkin beer release? If they made a little of it, it’s perfect timing. If they made ten barrels of it, we’ll see.)
• Fabled Brew Works – Friday warm-up, October 30. Bottle night from 7 PM, with barrel-aged releases to kick the weekend off.

What I keep coming back to is that Halloween might be the most family-friendly drinking holiday we have. St. Patrick’s Day is a blast, but it doesn’t feel like a kids’ holiday. Oktoberfest is heritage, and my kids mostly like finding a patch of grass to sit in. Halloween is a holiday built for kids that we shoehorned drinking into, and the version I love most is the simplest one: sitting around the fire pit with a cooler of beer, passing out candy, sharing a beer with the parents walking up looking a little parched. The costume contests and the big events are great. The fire pit is the holiday.

The science experiment: fresh vs. ten-year-old IPA

The night’s real experiment had nothing to do with the news. I pulled a dusty bottle of blackberry brandy from behind the bar, something I’ve only ever used a splash of in rum runners, never tasted neat, and found a sweet, syrupy, earthy dessert cordial that smells like candy and tastes like almost nothing you’d call brandy. Verdict: it belongs in cocktails, or over ice as a dessert sipper. Probably not a repeat neat pour.

Then the main event: Municipal Brew Works’ 10th Anniversary Double IPA, fresh, against my very last bottle of Anniversary 1, aged roughly a decade. The fresh beer is a big, sweet, assertive 10% double IPA brewed with local honey and six hop varieties, tropical and fruity on the nose, honey-sweet underneath, with a softness I didn’t remember. The aged bottle? That’s not an IPA anymore. The hops are completely gone, there’s a touch of oxidation in the aroma, and what’s left is a honey barleywine, still sweet, still big, still genuinely good beer, just a totally different beer.

So naturally, I blended them. Fresh plus aged, in one glass, and the combination kept the prickliness of the new beer and the earthy depth of the old one. Call it Anniversary 10.1. And if you haven’t been to Municipal in a while, or, god forbid, ever, go sit on that patio. On a beautiful fall evening, blanket and sweatshirt optional, sunset and a great beer: that’s the whole pitch.

The story I set aside

We touched on the Buffalo brewery group that won gold at the Great American Beer Festival for a pumpkin beer and then announced it was closing, all within weeks. I didn’t want to dwell on it. It had been a long day, I was feeling good about beer after a weekend full of charity events, and I’m tired of talking about places closing. The economics are real, and they’re brutal, and a medal, even a gold one, isn’t a business model. But some nights the show is for the good stuff, and Monday was one of those nights.

What’s coming

A few things from the end of the show, for the people who stick around past the beer: the new website and branding are eating most of my time right now, the magazine is timed to the January relaunch (Gnomies get the digital copy first), a reader poll is coming in November, and I’m already working on issue two so the ball doesn’t stop rolling. I’m also toying with a taproom scavenger hunt for the rebrand rollout, hidden gnome stickers around town, hints posted, gift cards for the finders. If you have ideas for that, or a story you think the show should cover, send them my way.

In the meantime: have a safe Halloween. Don’t do anything stupid, or if you do, make sure it’s captured on film. And get out there, drink something, drink something good, drink something local.

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Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py8JzYo6TSo
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The Weekly Pint streams live Mondays at 9:30 PM ET.