As Octchober is the spookiest month of the nacho year, I have for you here another tale of spooky nacho terror. A nacho scare so real you can almost taste it. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, The Horror at Otter Creek Brewing Company! Spoiler Alert: The nachos were good, that’s not the ghastliness, but you’ll have to read on to find out the pants-soiling fear I am still keeping you in suspense of!
It was the summer time in upstate Vermont and we were on the search for nachos. After visiting the Woodchuck Cidery in Middlebury, we picked up a hot tip that the nearby Otter Creek Brewing Company had some pretty decent nachos, and that a single order was too much for one man to eat at once. You might have well have just called Marty McFly “chicken” for the quality of the dare that was, and justice would not be served until this nacho size statement could be determined to be a truth or a falsehood.
I was glad that a Cidery and a Brewery could recommend clientele back and forth between them without animosity. It gives me hope in this time of polarization and strife, but makes me wonder if they were both breweries or cideries if the recommendation would have been so forthcoming, or where I would have gone for nachos instead… Anyhow, we went to OCBC, and after a short wait in their pub area were seated and found that not only did they have one type of nachos, they in fact had three. THREE!!! If the rumor was correct, eating even one of these would be an issue, two an impossibility, and wanting to try all three would be absurd at best. We settled on two, because there were two of us, and damn the consequences should they be more than one human alone could consume! Even the waiter warned us that these were big nachos, but I straight out laughed in his face with anticipation.
All food tastes better when the menu contains puns.
The nachos arrived, and they were good. Generic round chips, but used real cheese on both instead of the fake cheese so that stepped it up. Chili Nachos are almost a distinctly different thing than regular nachos and get rated based on the chili itself, but their House Made IPA one was pretty good. If you asked me whether I could have told you these were based on their Hophead IPA I definitely wouldn’t have guessed that based on taste alone, but that did not dissuade me from enjoying them. The Ancho Chipotle Chicken ones were in the same boat where I wouldn’t have been able to tell you they were “Ancho Chipotle” flavor, but they were fine too. What was disappointing was that while these certainly weren’t small nachos, they were by no means large enough to warrant all the warnings we had received. Indeed, if I were making a scatter plot graph of the size of all the nachos I had ever eaten, these would probably fall in the lower left hand quadrant of it, because they were a little smaller than average. Maybe that’s just how things are in Vermont, regular portioned for what one human should eat at one sitting, unlike the rest of the US.
“I mean,” you say, “these sound like perfectly reasonable, middle of the road nachos. I don’t get where the horror falls?” And you would be right, as I mentioned before, there was nothing scary about these nachos at all. Truly, it is your lack of remembering things which frightens me! The scary thing was that even though I took a picture of both the chicken and the chili nachos, THE CHILI ONE DID NOT SHOW UP ON FILM!!!! Now, this could have been that for some reason my phone just didn’t take the picture of one, which is scary on it’s own but in a different way, but it could also be that the chili nachos were vampire nachos whose likeness could not be caught on film! I say film, but of course I mean digital because if I had to process actual film for every picture of nachos I took, oh boy, I could not afford for this website to exist.
But perhaps even more horrifying, right now when I went to check the menu at OCBC to verify all the nacho information, NONE OF THE NACHOS I MENTIONED ABOVE EVEN APPEAR ON IT AT ALL!!! Was this entire review for not? Possibly, but I would say that the two I had were good enough that I would give them the overall benefit of the doubt that any nachos they make would be worth trying. Especially worth trying when one of them is something as delicious as Hickory Smoked Pork Nachos. Oh yeah, they make their own beer, being a brewery at all, so if that’s of interest to you, bonus points. Just watch out for the possibility of vampire nachos.
As always, be vigilant for vampire nachos.