Tucker, GA — Now that we’ve all emerged from several years underground like the cicadas, it’s time to drink beer and eat fried food in public like God intended. I moseyed over to Tucker Brewing Company Wednesday to see what they had to offer.

Harry Potter themed Trivia Night, it turns out. It seems like half of Tucker showed up to attempt to answer fiendishly difficult questions about the minutiae of Hogwarts’ unreliable architecture and the Quidditch World Cup.

My son, who is now 26, preferred Lemony Snicket, so I didn’t even try. I focused on the food and beer.

I will say right off the bat that everything I tried was good.  Some of it was a bit weird.  For example: Crispy Sauerkraut Bites.  They’re batter fried balls of sauerkraut and ham, with horseradish cream to dip them in. I thought, “That has no business being good, but I am intrigued” and ordered some. They were awesome, so much so that I had a hard time carrying out my original plan of bartering them to my companions for a taste of what they were eating. Nevertheless, I had research to conduct, so I persevered.

Fish and chips are a kind of litmus test of tavern food:  they are deceptively simple but easy to screw up. The Tucker Lager battered fish was cooked through but still light and tender. The fries were tasty on their own merits as well.

Spinach spaetzle is another entry in the weird but good category. I would have eaten more of it but the person who ordered it wanted it back.

The baked goat cheese and jam tasted fine but was a little too runny to spread on the bread easily, which meant that you didn’t get nearly as much of the cheese and jam in proportion to the bread as you wanted. We scarfed it down anyway, but it presented a bit of a logistical challenge.

The spring Caesar salad has asparagus, sugar snap peas, and green beans in it, along with croutons. This got mixed reactions from the table; one of my dinner companions loved it and ate every last bit of their salad, while another one who had also ordered it…didn’t. The peas, beans and asparagus were all tender and tasted exactly as they should; however there were more of the vegetables than lettuce, so if you order it expecting a Caesar salad as you have known and loved it elsewhere, you are in for a mild surprise.

Speaking of surprises, I ordered a flight of four beers and received three of the beers I had ordered. For the fourth, I received a Barrel Aged Goseanna instead of the Bourbon Barrel Doppelbock I had requested. My waiter said by way of explanation that “we don’t do the Doppelbocks in the flights” which struck me as peculiar and not written on the menu, but he said if I didn’t like it he’d bring me something else. (Spoiler:  He did).

I mean…normally I am a person who rolls with whatever life throws at me. I am one of eight children and have five older brothers. What I am saying is that I am not picky about food. But I had avoided ordering either of the Goseannas on the menu because I don’t like sour beer. You can guess where this is going.

I tasted it though, because science! It was tart, you bet, and almost but not really sweet. If you want a drink that tastes like it tried to go to cider school and flunked out, you will love this beer.

Roberto, my replacement beer, was tasty but also very, very, very hoppy.

AM ∕ FM is a dark lager that promises coffee and chocolate notes and very much delivers, especially on the coffee.  The Irishman is a stout that is a plain and honest and a straightforward stout, nutty but not messing around.

My favorite among the five of them was Southern Heaven Hefeweizen. I normally love stouts above all other beers and the fruitiness of wheat beers doesn’t always work for me, but this one reminded me that I like to try all the different kinds of beer for a reason. You never know when you’ll be surprised by something good.

Tucker Brewing Company is located at 2003 South Bibb Drive in Tucker. In addition to trivia on Wednesdays, they have Cornhole on Thursdays and live music every Friday and Saturday.

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