In the heart of the West Side’s liveliest commercial district, the Grant/Ferry area, you will find one of Buffalo’s quality beer sellers- Frontier Discount Liquor & Beverage. No doubt you are familiar with their signature white horse which has for so long stood vigil before the entrance, but perhaps you assumed that the inside held no secrets. Well, I don’t know about and so won’t speak to their selection of wine and liquor (as per NYS’s archaic laws, the wine & liquor store is technically separate from the beer & soda), but I can assure my readers that so far as buying craft beers in the city goes, they do an excellent job.

I stopped in and chatted with owner Bill Mackiewicz today, and he talked to me a bit about their future strategy for stocking quality beers. He told me that in the coming weeks, they were planning on focussing their selection, particularly with respect to NYS craft beers. Bill stressed that he felt his clientele, and city-dwellers more broadly, needed to have a wider choice when it came to the ultimate adult beverage. Even better, Bill seemed to know one of the really important points regarding stocking beers, and that is freshness. Beer is perishable, and it doesn’t tolerate a lot of light (that’s how beers get skunked) or too many cycles of temperature change– and high temps in particular will oxidize a beer rather quickly. So, when it comes to managing stock, the key is stocking only what you can sell quickly. It’s no good having 100’s and 100’s of beers if they’re not moving. Bill’s aim, consequently, is to keep the orders small, and to keep careful track of which brands are selling and how fast. A sound strategy in a market where the customers tastes are becoming ever more discerning.

[ASIDE: There is a store in Rochester (I will not name them, but a little research will get you there) that is sometimes known as The Beer Museum because although the selection is vast, they just aren’t moving what they have before it goes bad. A word of advice- if you go to a beer store and there is dust on the bottles, move on along.]

Back to Frontier- what do that have? Admittedly, you’re not going to find the rarest and most expensive of beers here, but nonetheless, they go well beyond the basic Bud/Miller/Coors/Labatts (Tier I) selection you’ll find anywhere. Frontier is a good place to go if you’re looking for what I consider the Tier II selections. For domestic beers, that means of course your Sam Adams, but also plenty of regionals like: Flying Bison; Southern Tier; Ithaca; Ellicottville; High Falls (Genny, yes, but also J.W. Dundees and Steinlager); Saranac and Middle Ages from Syracuse. From slightly further afield, they stock Vermont’s Magic Hat & Long Trail, Great Lakes from Cleveland and the ol’ grandad of the micro scene, Sierra Nevada. I also noticed they had selections from Victory in Pennsylvania and Harpoon (Boston’s other craft brewery. As for imports, it was laudable to find beers from Sam Smiths (England) and Duval (from Belgium) and nestled among the cervezas and inevitable Heineken, St. Pauli and Becks.

Overall, I was really impressed and happy to stop & shop at Frontier. Indeed, I’m still going to have to hit Consumer and Premier for some things, of course. But if I’m just looking for a quality micro, and especially a NYS beer, I really don’t need to roll any further than Grant & Ferry for it. Moreover, the prices are good. If you live in the city, especially the west side, I urge you to check Frontier out!