4 Hands Brewing Company — Restaurant in St. Louis

Okay, I get it now. Takes a few visits to get into a new brewery experience and enjoy the brews.

4 Hands Brewing Company has effectively taken the crown of leading craft brewer in the St. Louis region from Schafly.

Schafly will re-use recipes and methods for several offerings. The ingredients vary. Such as the Grapefruit IPA, the Coffee Stout, the TIPA. You can tell when you take in a Schafly brew by draught or bottle.

IMHO, certainly.

4 Hands Brewing Company uses vary unique recipes across the spectrum of offered brews. Each recipe is unique. The carbonation method, or experience, when canned, and drinking from the can, may be the hint you have 4 Hands Brewing Company beverage.

I love that Four Hands Brewery uses cans, & not bottles, to distribute. Modern canning is the way to go, & less expensive to package for distribution, & certainly costs less to distribute & store on the shelf than glass bottles. Oh, yes, we like recycling. The global biosphere is going to hell in a hand-basket, but I'd much rather recycle aluminum cans got from the store full of delicious, nourishing, & refreshing Four Hand Brewing offerings in cans than, say, Schafly in bottles. Using bottles is way too old school. (Not cool like ol skool.)

The tasting room at the brewery is greatly improved with both tap tasting rooms. I prefer the upstairs tap tasting room better. The space is bright and light and well appointed while preserving the St. Louis industrial decaying quality.

Most importantly, the upstairs tap tasting room long bar uses a non-reactive (food or medical grade) stainless steel surface on which the most excellent hosts (and I cannot rave about the 4 Hands Brewing Company folks enough) serve you beverages.

In contrast, visit the Schafly Bottleworks or the Urban Chestnut location along Manchester Road. Both these locations use a long bar top made of a high-carbon steel sheet that can does rust. Schafly Bottleworks location long bar top rusts more s. The odor from the high-carbon steel sheet interferes with the flavor of what you want to drink and eat. Also, the rusting sheet steel forms bacteria and makes for a generally unsanitary surface from whence to consume ale and food.

You can enjoy the long bar, enjoy some arcade machine that include skeeball and games that include Punch-Out!! (starting with Glass Joe) and others.

The upstairs room, so far as I can tell, is very good acoustically, and may serve well should the 4 Hands Brewing Company host live music and other entertainment upstairs.

The best of the large craft brewers, yet WA-state and the PacNW brew ales massively superior to what St. Louis offers. (Not merely my own opinion.) I hope the St. Louis craft brewers reconsider what is good or what makes good flavors. See Kulshan, Boundary Bay, Chuckanut, Aslan in Bellingham, WA. Slate Creek Brew in Coeur d'Alene, ID. Black Raven Brew in Redmond,...

This is the most unwelcoming establishment I've ever been to in my life. The condensed version of our experience: We walked in and were standing at the door trying to figure out if we were to seat ourselves or not. After several minutes a fellow patron informed us there was more seating available upstairs, so we took that to mean we were to seat ourselves and headed upstairs. We found a seat and waited, trying to figure out how we ordered food. Was there a server or did we go to the bar? We decided the downstairs looked more food oriented so we walked back down in search of a menu and a server. By this point, we'd been there a full 10 minutes and not a single employee had said a word to us. We finally figured out we were to wait on ourselves and go to a window to order food, so off I go while my friends went to the bar for drinks. I stood there for 5 minutes while bar employees not more than 2 feet away continued to walk back and forth and do nothing but look at me. Finally I went back to my table and someone then went to the order window and turned out the lights. I guess the kitchen was closed? I wouldn't know because still not a single word from an employee. So we quickly drank our beers and left and were fortunate to find a terrific place down the street. I will definitely not waste my time or money on anything related to 4...

Absence of Light Peanut Butter Chocolate Milk Stout: 4 Hands Brewing was founded in 2011 and is located in St Louis, Missouri. They are the largest craft brewery in the city and have given back over $300,000 to local non-profits. The brewery describes their stout as "The perfect mash-up of cacao nibs and peanut butter supported by caramel, chocolate and roasted malts, Absence of Light opens with huge aromas reminiscent of creamy peanut butter cups and transitions into a silky milk stout with rich chocolate and coffee notes tapering to a slightly sweet finish provided by an addition of milk sugar." It has an ABV of 7.1% and is only available August-February. I'm by no means a teetotaler, but I'm much less of a beer enthusiast than I was in my college days. This was the third stout I tried this past winter and while drinking it I had the epiphany that even though I really want to like stouts, I don't. That being said, I think most stout fans will enjoy this beer. Peanut butter did stand out to me as it was prominent in the aftertaste, but the beer was too bitter for my preference. Absence of Light comes in one of the coolest looking cans I've encountered. It depicts some type of peanut putter monster/demon sitting on what might be a spoon. Kudos to the artist. Overall, for me this one was just...