Southport Brewing Company - Hamden

No Longer In Business

Should of read the reviews before stopping here on my way home. Seems a much better place was just a few miles down the road.

In any case, there was one person here who seemed to know anything about the beer he was serving, everyone else was the kind of staff you would expect from a TGIFridays. As other people have said, it is really strange to see a brew pub serve so many guest taps, especially guest taps for macros and not just other local micros. The food was decent at about the same quality as one would expect from the mentioned TGIFriday’s comparison, but the beer was seriously lacking, a lot of it coming off rather chemical and artificial (especially the "Farmer’s Daughter" fruit beer).

Update: So it would seem that there is a significant likelihood that the one guy who "knew beer" mentioned above passed off a Blue Moon as one of their own "Belgian White" style beers. Bad news is that’s going to hurt the rating. Worse news is the possible Blue Moon was the best of the bunch.

It looks like it used to be a Bennigans or something. When you enter you see nothing but the hosts stand. (the bar’s to the left. ) they have 5 or 6 things of their own on tap plus 10-12 guest taps including shock top and miller lite. (90% of what you need to know about a place you can tell by the care they put into their taps.) everything I had was boring and bland and seemed aimed at people who think blue moon is really a Belgian beer. The food was ok but certainly not spectacular. They have a couple of casks but they don’t like to tell you whats in them except that’s some type of ale. This place seems like a cynical attempt to exploit the Brewpub/ craft beer trend.

Similar to their other locations. This one doesn’t seem to get their seasonals and has their basics on tap. Food is pricey and average.

Former Bennigan’s. Now serves crappy beer and slow, stale food.

Yet another typical bad brewpub. This one loses on both the food and beer. First we start with the positives: service was very good, atmosphere was fine, and the location was very convenient. But the food was extremely greasy, salty, and generally unhealthy, and tasted like it had MSG in it. The beer was mediocre: some was better than others, but all of it was very thin and watery and left one unsatisfied. None of the beers were even of average quality all were below average and a few were undrinkable. There are a lot of bad brewpubs out there, but this is one of the worse ones I’ve been to. I’d recommend avoiding it.