Randall, the Enamel Animal!

Last year our very own Mike Scheel made a trip, or maybe "pilgrimage" is a better word, out to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware to visit the Dogfish Head Brewery. Mike is very old friends with one of the brewers there and after a tour and tasting, Dogfish Head made us a gift of a very special device: "Randall, the Enamel Animal."

Thursday night is when Randall comes out to play

Dogfish Head Brewery is noted for its aggressive attitude towards hopping its beers. They offer several different iterations of their India Pale Ale ("IPA") and consistently win prizes for the high quality and intense flavor of their products. Dogfish Head has shown that they are not content to stop the hopping of beer at their factory: to push hoppiness to the next level Dogfish Head invented "Randall the Enamel Animal."

What is "Randall the Enamel Animal"? "Randall" is an "organoleptic hop transducer module." Huh? Look, it's a three-foot-tall plexi-glasss cylinder-filter unit packed with a half a pound of whole leaf hops. Randall is hooked up to the beer line leaving a keg. When a bartender pulls the tap on a keg equipped with Randall, the beer is forced through the hops, stripping out fresh hops flavor and producing the most intense hop experience known to man.

Randall, hooked up and ready to go!

The result, something Mike like to call "bastardized brew," is never predictable, but always delicious. That's because the combinations of hops and beer are nearly infinite. Each week, on Thursday night, our bar matches a different beer with a different kind of hops and lets Randall work his strange magic.

The lovely Marinda prepares a bastardized brew

If you are ever in Dallas, Texas visit us at 831 Exposition Avenue in Dallas, Texas. The Amsterdam Bar is located in Exposition Park, adjacent to the Texas State Fairgrounds.