I was a guest on the latest episode of DCBeer.com‘s podcast, The DC Beer Show. I talk about the fallout from the sudden shut down (to the public) of Atlas brewery’s Ivy City location, how the local metal scene got involved with the local beer scene to begin with, and how we’re starting to get metal shows going at the DC Brau brewery! Click the play button below to listen or see the post on DC Beer here.
Adroit Theory brewery in Purcellville, Virginia, is hosting their first metal show ever on Saturday, January 26th! Pennsylvania based death metal band Horrendous is one of the hottest underground metal bands around right now and they’re set to headline this first metal show at Adroit Theory with support from Outer Heaven and Foehammer. And because we’re so excited about this show DCHM is going to give away a pair of tickets to one of you lucky DCHM readers! To enter: just leave a comment on this post telling me your favorite metal album of all time. Then at 5pm EST this Tuesday, January 22nd, a winner will be chosen at random (using Random.org) from all valid entries to win the tickets to this show. Be sure to use a valid email you check regularly so I can contact you if you win. Don’t worry, I won’t add you to any spam lists or sell your info or anything sleazy like that. If I haven’t heard back from the winner in 24 hours another winner will be chosen at random. If you can’t wait to see if you win or the contest is already over when you read this, then you can get tickets here.
This show is part of Adroit Theory’s 5th anniversary celebration, known as Dawn Of A Dark Day Fest V. The fest starts at 1pm with 48+ Adroit Theory beers on tap, including variants of some of their best big stouts like Dia De Los Muertos, Death Of Cthulhu and Black As Your Soul (B/A/Y/S), plus another 45+ guest beers from other breweries. You’ll need a ticket to the beer fest part which you can get here (make sure you switch it to the regular ticket for $40, not the VIP, unless you REALLY want the VIP). The metal show will start at 6pm and anyone with a ticket to the beer fest portion of the event will be allowed into the show for free. Please note that the tickets we are giving away are just for the metal show, you won’t have access to the earlier beer fest portion of the event unless you buy a ticket to that. If you’re interested in other metal shows going on at area breweries be sure to check DCHM’s <a href="https://dcheavymetal.com/upcoming-concerts/" upcoming metal concert calendar as Oliver Brewing in Baltimore has a show coming up and of course there are many on the schedule for Atlas Brew Works in NE DC. Now, a bit about the bands…
Horrendous released their debut album, The Chills in 2012 to much fanfare in the underground but their 2014 album, Ecdysis, was their true breakout. It was reviewed very highly in many metal publications and by fans alike and the band started showing up on tours with some big names. In September 2018 they released another modern classic of riff based death metal when Idol showed that this band can still bring the riffs along with the super fun live show they’ve been perfecting from heavy touring. Support band Outer Heaven is also a death metal band from Pennsylvania and they’ve been gaining popularity for putting on some truly brutal shows around the region. Their 2018 full length Realms of Eternal Decay is a pummeling album of demonic death metal. The opening band, Foehammer, is a Northern Virginia based doom metal band that is very slow, very loud and ultra heavy! Their slow, churning riffs carry the weight of oceans and drown the listener in their fuzzy wall of sound. Now leave a comment telling me what your favorite metal album of all time is and check out videos of the bands playing Adroit Theory’s first ever metal show below!
Horrendous – Soothsayer
Outer Heaven – Into Hellfire
Foehammer – The Seer
I don’t usually cover things outside of the DC area but I’ll make an exception for the Decibel Metal & Beer Fest held at the Fillmore Philadelphia on April 22nd and 23rd. Metal and beer are two of my favorite things and Decibel did a great job of bringing together some excellent bands along with some quality breweries with heavy metal ties for a weekend that was pretty damn fun overall. I’ve been a rather sick since the fest so I’m behind on getting this post up, but there was some cool stuff going on at this fest that I wanted to make sure got covered here even if it is going up a bit late.
I’d never been to the Fillmore in Philadelphia before but I quickly realized that it is much larger than our Fillmore in Silver Spring, maybe about double the size. The doors opened at 5pm each day and bands were still setting up their merch booths as the doors opened. Things were a little disorganized, but considering this was the first fest of its kind it wasn’t that bad. One of Mikkeller‘s beers didn’t show up until the second day and the venue ran out of the small plastic beer sampling glasses rather quickly on the first day which lead to most people getting cups from the bar. Overall those weren’t major issues though and it was a lot of fun talking to the people that work for the various breweries about their beer and metal bands they are into.
Atlas Brew Works representing DC
There were 17 breweries at the festival and each had a booth with at least two beers being poured. The booths were mostly on the ground floor lining the walls in the main concert room, however there were 4 upstairs and 3 in the main entry room, including the massive Unibroue booth. Along with the band merch and beer booths there were a few other merch vendors in the main entry room. Despite being in Philly, between all my beer friends and metal friends I felt like I kept running into someone whichever way I turned all weekend.
Dave Mustaine pouring the A Tout Le Monde beer
The festival did a really good job of actually blending a metal fest with a beer fest. This wasn’t just a metal show with some beer vendors, or a beer fest with some metal bands playing. Decibel managed to bring together metal bands with ties to craft beer with breweries with ties to heavy metal. Burnt Hickory had a beer tap that looked like an Orange amp rig. Trve Brewing and Hammerheart Brewing both had brewers in bands that performed at the fest (Khemmis and Panopticon, respectively). Dave Mustaine was there on Saturday to pour samples of the Megadeth beer A Tout Le Monde at the Unibroue booth, he was certainly getting A-list celebrity treatment. I found Dan Lilker (of Anthrax, Nuclear Assault, and a ton of other bands over the years) pouring beer at the Mikkeller booth and taking photos with any fans that wanted one. I talked to him a bit and it turns out he’s really into craft beer and even knows some of the guys at the Danish brewery Mikkeller, which is how he ended up manning their booth. At one point I saw Municipal Waste drummer and craft beer connoisseur Dave Witte at the Cigar City Brewing booth, where the Municipal Waste beer Divine Blasphemer was being poured. And Richard Christy (of Death, Iced Earth and also the Howard Stern Show) was seen sipping the Charred Walls Of The Damned beer from Burnt Hickory.
Dan Lilker at the Mikkeller booth
And let’s not forget about the awesome bands! There was a wide range of metal in the line up. Grindcore, stoner, thrash, death metal, black metal, doom, the focus was certainly on the more underground sub genres. On the first day of the festival I was most excited to see Panopticon. Austin Lunn is the mastermind behind Panopticon and also a brewer at Hammerheart Brewing in Minnesota. Despite forming about 10 years ago, the band has only recently starting performing live. Their first live show ever was last summer at Migration Fest. This is because Panopticon is a one man band in studio and Austin gets other people to fill out the band for live shows. Panopticon is known for mixing black metal with Appalachian folk to create a truly unique sound, sometimes called “blackgrass” as a hybrid between bluegrass and black metal. Unfortunately they didn’t use a banjo live, and their mix wasn’t always great, but it was still pretty awesome getting to see Panopticon live as they have some very powerful and moving songs. I also found Austin’s Hammerheart brewery to be one of my favorites at the fest. They specialize in smoked beer (which is a personal favorite style of mine) and their rauchbier was my favorite beer of the entire fest. Apparently Austin apprenticed at a brewery in Norway for a while and upon returning to the US he moved from Kentucky to Minnesota to start Hammerheart Brewing. The brewery’s name is no coincidence, it is in fact named after the 1993 Bathory album.
Immolation also played an intense set on Saturday, as they are typically known for. They may not do a lot on stage besides stand there and play their instruments but they do get people going with those crazy riffs. I thought I would see a lot more crowd surfers during Municipal Waste’s set. They were fun as always but I guess the fans were holding back because they went nuts for the night’s headliner. Agoraphobic Nosebleed headlined the first day with a great set. I wish Jay Randall had been there to perform with them, but the band still put on a great show and even played one of their sludgy songs from the Arc EP, “Not A Daughter.” As usual the Chicken Man was there leading the moshing and even got a shout out from ANb.
On the second day my favorite performance was probably Khemmis. The Denver based doom metal band put out one hell of an album in Hunted last year and I had yet to see them perform live. Their drummer, Zach Coleman, is also a brewer at the black metal themed Trve Brewing in Denver so their inclusion on the fest’s line up seemed like a no brainer. I had actually met Zach a few weeks before at my own metal show at Atlas Brew Works, and as fate would have it Trve’s booth was next to Atlas’s booth. Trve is best known for making excellent sour beers, though they only brought one sour to the fest, along with their Sleep inspired Nazareth IPA. Trve’s beers are very hard to come by on the East Coast, so this was a great opportunity to get your hands on some.
Zach Coleman at the Trve Brewing booth
Sleep headlined the final day of the Metal & Beer Fest and they put on a great show as always. Time seems to have no meaning when Sleep is playing live and although they didn’t play any parts of the song “Dopesmoker” like they usually do, they did play some rarities like “The Clarity” single they released on Adult Swim a few years back and “Sonic Titan,” the other song on the original release of Dopesmoker. Pig Destroyer was another highlight of Sunday’s line up. Their lighting was low and there was a lot of fog, less than optimal conditions for photography, but don’t let that make you think their set was anything but intense. They even brought out Dag Nasty vocalist Shawn Brown to perform with them when they covered the Void song, “Who Are You.”
In all the weekend was pretty great! Almost all the best metal related breweries were there, like Burial, Three Floyds, Trve, Holy Mountain and DC’s own Atlas. The only breweries I felt really should have been there but weren’t were Jester King from Austin and Oliver Ales from Baltimore. While Hammerheart’s Weltenwanderer rauschbier was my favorite beer of the weekend, there were other standouts as well such as Wigsplitter coffee stout from 3 Floyds, Ritualknife black braggot from Burial (a collab with Trve), Charred Walls Of The Damned Belgian quad cinnamon apple pie variant from Burnt Hickory, Twisted Doom New England style IPA from 18th Street and Cursed sour pale ale from Trve. I think the best brewery of the event has to go to Burnt Hickory from Kennesaw, Georgia. They were totally in the spirit with their Orange amp rig beer tap as well as bringing by far the most beers of any brewery to the event, including several rare variants of Charred Walls Of The Damned. I hope Decibel does this event again next year and I really hope more breweries get as into it as Burnt Hickory did!
Burnt Hickory Brewery’s Orange beer tap
Thanks for reading to the end of my post. I had some help covering things in Philly from Metal Nick so be sure to check out more of his videos from this fest (and many, many other concerts) on his YouTube page here and more of his photos on his Flickr page here. Maryland Deathfest XV is just around the corner so stay tuned for our coverage leading up to our favorite local metal festival!
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but lately the worlds of craft beer and heavy metal have really been colliding, even more than they usually do. Last week the Craft Brewers Conference (CBC) was held in DC. It’s a multi-day conference that is held in a different city each year and this year DC hosted it at the convention center. Craft brewers from around the country attend to take seminars and learn about new techniques and equipment they can brew with, as well as learn about how to better market their beer and other things like that. That’s great if you’re a brewer but for the rest of us CBC coming to town means a ton of side-events at bars and breweries in the area as our city hosts all these out of town brewers. Many breweries brought beers that normally aren’t distributed in our area but thanks to DC’s awesome beer distribution laws they can be sold in DC during the festival. That’s why so many bars had tap take overs from out of area breweries last week and so many of the specialty beer stores had beers from breweries that we never usually see around here.
Aside from exotic beers at Churchkey, Meridian Pint, Jack Rose and other places with CBC related events, there were a couple of metal shows during CBC week as well. DC Brau’s 6th anniversary happened to be during CBC week so they put together a one off show with Baroness at the 9:30 Club on Wednesday, April 12th. The band put on a great performance and played many old songs since 2017 is the 10th anniversary of their first album. I had a photo pass and got to take a few shots right up front and you can see them below. Click here to see the full set on Flickr. I even made a couple into animated gifs!
The following night, Thursday the 13th of April, I put on another metal night with my partner in crime Brewer Will over at Atlas Brew Works. We had live metal bands, concert ticket give aways, a lot of great beer and a ton of fellow metal heads in attendance. The Denver based black metal themed brewery Trve had three guest beers on tap and Atlas had some of their most “metal” brews pouring as well including The Emprosator, a doppelbock named for a Russian Circles album, HaSaWoDo, a saison named after the Bongripper album Hail Satan Worship Doom, and their collaboration with Champion Brewing made for Decibel Magazine, the Decibeer DIPA. Lots of brewers from outside the area (in town for CBC of course) stopped by including the gang from Metal Monkey Brewing in Chicago and Jester King in Austin. Lord, Cavern and headliner King Giant all put on excellent performances and you can catch a bit of each of their sets, and hear the guys in Lord and King Giant talk about their gear and rigs, in the below video that Guitar Guru Network posted on YouTube, shot entirely at the event. If you just want to see to the parts of the video with the bands performing live then skip to when Lord starts at 16:20, Cavern at 24:11 and King Giant at 46:25.
When CBC ended the beer and metal collision continued! On Monday, April 17th, another metal show came to Atlas Brew Works. Canadian black metal band Thantifaxath headlined the venue with local support by Myopic and Sickdeer. After talking to one of the mysterious and anonymous members of the band, I came to find out that he was also a beer brewer by trade! It was a really good turn out for a Monday night and Thantifaxath put on a hell of a show too. Below is a short clip I shot of them at the show.
However the biggest beer and metal event ever held is going to be in Philadelphia this weekend when Decibel Magazine holds their first ever Metal & Beer Fest! This isn’t just a fest with some metal bands and some random breweries, Decibel has done a really good job of finding metal bands with ties to beer and breweries with ties to metal for this festival. For instance you’ll notice Khemmis is on the bill. Their drummer, Zach Coleman, is a brewer at Trve, which also happens to be a brewery pouring at the fest. Then there’s Panopticon on the bill, a band that masterfully blends black metal with bluegrass and has only ever played live once before. The band’s sole member, Austin Lunn, is also a brewer at Hammerheart Brewing in Minnesota, which is named after the classic 1990 album by Bathory. Municipal Waste is also on the bill and their drummer, Dave Witte, while not a brewer does find employment at the Ardent Craft Ales brewery in Richmond. Cigar City Brewing will be at the fest pouring their beer Divine Blasphemer, a smoked porter named after a Municipal Waste song.
There will be plenty of other beers with tie ins to metal at this festival as well. DC’s own Atlas is bringing HaSaWoDo, the aforementioned Bongripper tied in beer. Three Floyds, a brewery that has made official beers for many metal bands including Amon Amarth, Municipal Waste, Cannibal Corpse and Obituary, will be bringing their Permanent Funeral pale ale, named for a song by Pig Destroyer. Burnt Hickory Brewery will have their beer Charred Walls Of The Damned with them, named after the metal super group of the same name. Mikkeller, a brewery from Denmark, will have their Mother Puncher beer with them, named after a song by Mastodon. Trve is bringing their Nazareth IPA, named after the lyric from the Sleep song “Jerusalem.” Dave Mustaine of Megadeth will be at the fest on Saturday pouring his A Tout Le Monde beer from Unibroue (specifically from 5pm to 6:30 and 8:45 to 10). As you’ll notice some of these bands, like Sleep, Municipal Waste and Pig Destroyer, are actually playing the fest! Along with the bands like Khemmis and Panopticon that actually have brewers in them, this fest really is something special. It’s not a metal fest with lots of beer. It’s not a craft beer fest with some bands playing. It truly is a beer AND metal fest. To say I’m excited is an understatement, this is a festival for my two favorite things! I’ll be attending the fest with a press pass so check back for my coverage after I recover from what I can only imagine will be the bangover of a lifetime. This is all thanks to Adem Tepedelen, the guy who writes the excellent column Brewtal Truth in Decibel that covers the intersection of beer and metal. He is one of the first to focus on the relationship between beer and heavy metal music and without him this fest would probably never have been conceived in the first place.
If you can’t make the fest don’t worry! There’s still a lot of metal and beer tie ins to come. DC Brau has announced that they’ll be brewing another batch of their Savor The Swill beer, brewed with the guys in local band Darkest Hour (and named after the DH song “Savor The Kill”) that will be re-released this summer, including at the Darkest Hour concert at the Rock & Roll Hotel on July 14th (details here). Also, Thou and Cloud Rat are playing a show at Atlas Brew Works on June 26th (details here). I’m not sure what else is to come but as the worlds of metal and beer become more intertwined you can bet on one thing: metal heads that are craft beer lovers have a lot of good things to look forward to!
If you’ve ever wanted to day drink with Metal Chris of DCHeavyMetal.com (and honestly who the hell hasn’t wanted to?) then this Saturday is your chance! He will be at the Oliver Ales brewery in Baltimore this Saturday, October 15th, from noon to 5pm for their release of the Pagan Science double IPA. As usual Metal Chris will have some metal concert tickets to hand out, including pairs of tickets to see Helmet (on 11/7) and Napalm Death, The Black Dahlia Murder and Pig Destroyer (on 11/13) both at the Baltimore Soundstage! Best of all the event is free to attend and it costs nothing to enter to win the tickets!
So what exactly is this Pagan Science beer you ask? It is an 8.5% DIPA showcasing mosaic hops that is inspired by the sophomore album by the Austin based doom/psych band The Well. The album Pagan Science is released this Friday on Riding Easy Records, then the beer Pagan Science is released at Oliver Ales on Saturday, and to top it all off The Well will be playing the Metro Gallery on Sunday! The event is free to attend so if you’re in the Baltimore area on Saturday stop by Oliver Ales, try the Pagan Science beer and if you’re lucky you’ll end up with a free pair of tickets to an upcoming metal show too!
Be sure to check out the Facebook event page here: http://www.facebook.com/events/168758763570900/
Give Pagan Science a listen right here!
What? Metal Night at Atlas Brew Works
When? 7pm to midnight, Friday, July 15th
Where? 2052 West Virginia Ave NE #102, Washington, DC 20002 (map)
More Info: Facebook Event
My buddy Brewer Will has gained employ at another brewery, now he’s working at Atlas Brew Works in Washington DC! We decided we’d take over Atlas on Friday, July 15th, for our next Metal Night event! Come hang out with other metal heads as we blast metal songs in the brewery all night, drink craft beer and, for one night at least, have a place to hang out with other metal heads outside of concerts.
Local band Borracho will be on hand to debut their new full length album and Will has even brewed a special batch of the Borracho beer, Oculus Smoked Brown Ale, just for the occasion. In addition I’ll be giving away tickets to a ton of upcoming metal shows around the area (see the full list at the end of this post). There’s no cover charge and no purchase necessary, all you have to do to enter to win tickets is show up! The event is open to all ages but of course you must be 21 or over to drink. There will be coffee, soda, and water for non-drinkers and DDs as well. The brewery has plenty of free street parking along West Virginia Avenue and it’s less than two miles from both the NoMa/Gallaudet and Rhode Island Avenue metro stations on the red line. If you’ve got any questions or just want to know more then check out the Facebook event page we have created here.
Feel free to send us some requests of songs you want to hear at Metal Night! It can be an old classic, a new favorite, or even your own band! As long as it is metal we’ll play it (ok maybe not super long songs like Sleep’s Dopesmoker but you get the idea). Send your requests to Will via email at Brewmetalwill@gmail.com
Here’s the list of tickets that I’ll be giving away (in pairs) at this event:
Yep, that's me in some corpse paint. So grim & frostbitten, haha!
DCHeavyMetal.com 