By now, you’ve likely already heard of W.J. Morrissey’s, the latest addition to what can only be described as a burgeoning Cobblestone District. Owner Dennis Brinkworth is already well-respected in Buffalo’s craft-beer scene for stocking better-than-usual offerings at Brinks on Chippewa and Colter Bay on Delaware- even the divey Union Bar on Pearl St. has a bottle selection to appease discerning beer-drinkers. You might be tempted to think, however, given W.J. Morrissey’s Irish theme, that the only beers on tap will be the standard Guinness/Smithwicks/Harp selection, perhaps rounded out with classic stouts such as Murphy’s and Beamish.

Not so! As with Brinkworth’s other establishments, J.W. Morrisseys has a comprehensive selection, drawing from both imports and domestic craft beers. In addition to the beers mentioned above, (sans Beamish), their current lineup consists of: Fuller’s London Pride; Stella Artois; O’Hara’s Irish Red (from Ireland, yes); Tetley’s; Sam Adams’ Boston lager and their seasonal, currently Summer Ale; Coors’ craft-brewed wit Blue Moon; Ithaca Apricot Wheat; Long Trail Blackberry Wheat; Flying Bison’s flagship Aviator Red and, this being Buffalo, Labatt Blue.

So, stop on down sometime, try the food (I hear it’s great) and have a pint to go with. You won’t be railroaded into the standard Irish pub selections, though of course, nothing goes as well with a Guinness stew than, well… Guinness.

Bobby has sent out the program for this month’s gathering, and as usual, the lineup is supurb. This month, two breweries will be represented. From Sly Fox in PA, we’ll be checking out a variety of canned (& bottled) selections, one of which I recently reviewed. Their Pikeland Pils will be on offer alongside their Royal Weisse, Saison Vos (Vos is Dutch for ‘fox’), Phoenix Pale Ale, Rt. 113 IPA and Odyssey Imperial IPA.

The second brewery featured will be Blue Point of Long Island, NY. Their Toasted Lager is a favorite of mine, and will be available as will the Hoptical Illusion IPA, Summer Ale, Blueberry Ale and No Apologies IPA.

The food–always scrumptious–will consist of a shrimp & sausage jambalaya, and a sweet potato cheesecake with a pecan-gingersnap crust. Wow!

Tix are $15 ahead of time, $20 day-of, and the whole thing goes down at 7:30 PM. Call Bobby at 430-1169 or email mstrgdbr@aol.com for more info.

Saturday was AHA Mead Day, so BOV decided to do the right thing and—you guessed it—make a mead. Though I have been home brewing beer for years, this was only my second batch of mead, but it is so incredibly simple to make I figured there was no reason not to go ahead and document it for you, my loyal readers. “Mead?”, you say- let me provide a wee background on the subject, since it seems so many are unfamiliar with this honey-wine, which at one time was held in the highest esteem but has since fallen into relative obscurity. Heck, even the lady I bought the honey from thought I was making ‘meat’ until I clarified.

Beverage historians disagree on what humankind’s first fermented beverage was. There is some evidence to support both beer & wine, but mead is certainly a good candidate. In his book, The Compleat Mead Maker, author Ken Schramm makes the case for mead, and it is compelling. For example, archæological evidence for honey-gathering certainly predates the domestication of barley or grapes. All one really needs, in truth, is some watered-down honey and a container- if left alone, it will probably start to ferment. Mr. Schramm posits the Magic Bag Theory in support of this argument, imagining a hunting party starting out, possibly robbing a hive along the way for extra sustenance, and returning with the meat & the mead. As compared with the accidental discovery of beer (which requires accidental malting) this seems much easier by far. Mead is clearly present in Classical Egyptian & Hellenic society, and by the midiæval period, monasteries are most certainly at the forefront of apiculture (or bee-keeping), using the honey for both mead and of course the beeswax for candles. Unlike grapes and barley, however, scaling-up honey production to commercial levels is difficult, which partly explains why wine and beer eventually eclipsed mead-making. Today, small meaderies are popping up all over again, but in the interval, only slavic and african cultures have continuously prepared fermented honey beverages.

Meads come in many different styles, just like beer, and the best part is that they all have cool names. For example, a strong mead is called sack mead, while a mead that incorporates any amount of malted barley (and/or hops) is called a braggot. Spiced meads are known as metheglins, and different kinds of fruits lead to cysers (apples), pyments (grapes) or, as I made, melomels (other fruits, in this case, raspberries). See- now you’re hooked, aren’t you? Imagine showing up at your friend’s house for dinner with a bottle of home-made capsicumel, mead with hot peppers: you’ve got an immediate topic for conversation.

So, let’s dive in. To begin with, you’ll need some high-quality honey. If it comes in a plastic bear, it’s not what you’re looking for- you really want raw, unpasturized (but filtered) honey, as one might buy at a farmer’s market. I hit the one on Bidwell, and after perusing the selections, decided on Erdle Farms, who were offering some nice variatals (based on what plants the bees are collecting honey from). For a three-gallon batch, I decided 8 pounds would do the trick. Besides honey, you’ll need some of the equipment pictured below:

On the left is my stainless steel kettle, 5 gal capacity. In front of the honey, you’ll find some the the other necessary ingredients. I chose Lalvin FC-1118 yeast, which is good for producing sweeter meads. You can also see two types of yeast adjuncts, one a yeast energizer and the other yeast nutrients- useful because unlike unfermented beer (wort), unfermented mead (must, the same term is used in winemaking) doesn’t provide some of the amino acids, vitamins and nitrogen that makes yeast happy. In the back, that funky-looking thing is a refractometer, used to measure the sugar content of a liquid. Finally, you’ll need a good thermometer, a big spoon, and unpictured, chemicals for cleaning and sanitizing all your equipment- like the big plastic fermentation bucket on the right. There is also a packet of pectic enzyme there, which comes into play as a result of using fruit.

The first and most important step is to clean everything that the mead with come into contact with, and to sanitize the fermentation bucket. For cleaning, I typically use PBW, but any non-detergent cleanser will do. For sanitizing, a bleach solution works, but I typically use No-Rinse sanitizer. I put 1.5 gallons of filtered tapwater into the boiling kettle, and the rest into the fermenter. Next, I brought the water up to a boil, cut the heat, and began adding honey. If you don’t stir right away, you can (carefully) ladle hot water into the honey jars, the better to get all that sugar out. Once all eight pounds of honey were added, I stirred and checked the temp. The idea here is to basically pasteurize the honey, so holding it at around 160 for 20 min or so is all you need. Towards the end, I added the yeast nutrients and energizer. Then, I carefully poured the hot honey water into the cold fermenter water, which brought the temp down closer to a proper yeast pitching temperature. In order to bring it the rest of the way down, to about 70, I stuck it into my homemade fermentation chiller, but you can also just wait, or use your wort chiller if you have one. The critical thing to remember is, again, keeping things highly sanitized- once the temp falls below about 130, there are all sorts of things that would love to grow in that very sweet must- you want to keep them out.

(This is my homemade fermentation chiller- it’s all open right now)

When the temp fell, after another few hours, I simply re-hydrated the yeast according to the instructions on the packet, tossed it in, sealed the lid, and added the fermentation lock, filled with a little vodka to inhibit any bacterial growth there. My refractometer reading was 19.6 Brix, or 1.078, meaning a potential alcohol level of around 10% if it finishes dry- I’m hoping for some residual sweetness, so I expect a little lower. Fermentation activity began in about 24 hours- below is a shot of it resting in my basement, alongside the Mutant Beer which I posted on some time ago (that’s another saga for me to tackle here at some point.)

So, what about the raspberries? I’ve been harvesting them from the canes alongside my house since the summer began, and freezing them- I have about 5 pounds by now. After the primary fermentation has ceased, I’ll transfer the mead over to a glass carboy, and add the raspberries and the pectin enzyme, to reduce haze. I’ll let those commingle for 2-3 months, and then bottle it. Once bottled, the mead should repose for another 3 months or so, at minimum- longer is even better. Voila, raspberry mead: I’m calling this batch WNYMead. Ha ha. Look for the follow-up post on that, oh, sometime next year.

So, as you see, mead is fantastically easy to make- though in contrast to beer, not ready to drink any near as soon. This is what makes it sort of a nice thing to interleave with beer batches- some short-term rewards and some long-term investments as well. I urge you to give it a shot!

Nothing more than a friendly reminder that the Brewfest is a’ comin’ and that you should buy your tix ahead of time if you really want to be there. For more details, including where to buy your tickets, you can read my original post on it, or go to their website (or, look carefully at the graphic above, for that matter). Tickets are also available online. Good news- they’ve upped the number of tokens (= samples) to 20- so no complaining. If you’re determined to be a slacker and buy your ticket at the door, well… better get on line pretty early- doors open at 1:00, taps at 2:00. Stop on by the Beer-O-Vision table, and say hi!

Canned beer is nothing new, of course, and in fact, canning technology was one of the things that underlay the consolidation of the industry in the 1950’s-1970’s. Pre-prohibition, all beer was bottled (or sold in growlers). When canning became a viable alternative, (thank you, American Can Company) the larger companies were able to implement it more rapidly- and because of the many advantages of canning over bottling (more on which below,) the macro-brewers were able to get their beer into ever more markets at prices that undersold the local competition, paving the way for the flurry of brewery closings that characterized the era.

But Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme change, and one of the trends in the craft brewing industry today is certainly the return of the can. Why cans? The best reason has to do with preserving an inherently unstable, perishable product. As it happens, cans are superior to bottles in this regard because for one thing, they are opaque. Light is one of beer’s greatest enemies– this is why you are also more likely to get a skunked beer in a green, or especially clear bottle (Newcastle, I’m talking to you) than in a darker brown one. Obviously, the can admits no light at all, and so the risk of skunking is nearly zero. In a similar vein, cans are also a better barrier than bottle-caps when it comes to air–more specifically, oxygen–which again is hazardous to your beer’s health. Oxidation, while actually critical for some styles of beer, is more often a flaw leading to beer that has cardboard-like flavors. As all modern cans are lined, you need not worry about the beer reacting with the metal, either.

The other advantages of canning have more to do with the economic and environmental side of the beer-making industry. As they are lighter, canning reduces shipping costs and as well, associated energy consumption associated with transporting the product. They are more stackable and so take less space, and they cost less to recycle as well. And being shatter-proof (though not entirely impervious to damage), cans are welcome in places where bottles are not- baseball stadiums come to mind, as does the pool and the beach. In weather like we’ve been having, that should easy to relate to. Where else do cans show up? Well, on boats. So, the other day when I was invited to crew on a sailboat, I picked up a few of the offerings from the craft brew world in cans. Here I’ll review but two of the new wave of canned micros.

The first comes from the Sly Fox brewery in PA. One of their beers was featured recently at the Goodbar Goodbeer club, so I went for a different style, their Pikeland Pilsner. Popping the top, every can in the six pack immediately began to fizz over- not typically a good sign, but the beer was certainly not spoiled. Against my instincts (and due to the lack of glass-, or even plastic-ware) I drank it out of the can, so I was unable to fully assess the appearance, but I did pour one out later and found this beer to be bright golden with a very healthy head. Sticking my nose into the can for an aroma evaluation yielded a very faint aroma, driven by hops: a bit of citrus, a bit of hay, overall I’m guessing Saaz but I admit I don’t always nail hop variatals. The flavor of this beer is pilsner through-and-through, starting off with a pleasing hop bitterness which evolves to honey-malt sweetness in the middle and resolves to a light blast of hops at the end, finishing dry and clean. Classic pilsner stuff, solid if sort-of no-frills. I would think this to be a great canned beer to bring to an otherwise Labatt-dominated party: I think you could win a few converts with this one. Indeed, one co-taster–We’ll call her Mrs. Beer-O-Vision–suggested this was little more dry-hopped Budweiser. You can get yours, as I did, for $8.45/six at Consumers- or pay a dollar more at Premier.

More impressive was the flagship Atlantic Amber from Connecticut’s New England Brewing Company. Here again, I had previously checked out one of their other offerings, the Sea Hag IPA, and found it to be delightful. Atlantic Amber, billed as an award-winning (in 1993, no less- I bet they weren’t canning back then!) alt-style beer, is eminently tasty. The color of this beer is a beautiful amber-tinged shade of light brown, and it tops off (had a glass handy by this time) with a full three-fingers of foam that reduced in short order but left substantial lacing down the glass. In terms of aroma, the predominant smell is that of sweet Munich malt, only touched by hops. Appropriately, the flavor is largely malt as well- the front is thin but the middle builds to a slightly nutty malt tone and it finishes sweet and slightly bitter, just enough to balance. A wee bit of yeast-derived esters can be detected, owing to the fact that this is indeed an lager, but brewed “steam style,” that is, at ale temperatures and with a strain of ale yeast that can handle the higher fermentation temps without getting all Belgian on ya. I really liked this multi-dimensional beer, and while the ABV is not given, it drinks like something in the 4.5-5 range, making it a great session choice.

So, there’s a pair of canned (or “tinned”, if you’re British) beers for you, both worth exploring. Other companies canning their beer include NYS’s own Butternuts and Brooklyn’s Brooklyn Lager, and from Colorado, Oskar Blues’ Old Chub and Dale’s Pale Ale. For further reading, excellent synopses of the advent of canning can be found here and here

[this post brought to you by 311’s classic self-titled album, and the newest from uber-hip Austinites Spoon, and their inanely titled new release ‘Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga’ (the music is 1000x better than the title, I assure you!]

It’s happened to me, it’s happened to you: You have a perfectly good bottle of Franziskaner, perhaps a classic like Schneider Weisse, or even a good domestic example like, oh, let’s say Circus Boy. You take it out of the fridge ahead of time, to let it come a little closer to the correct serving temperature (for a weisse, I’d shoot for the low 40’s). You pop the top, and it immediately starts to foam over- but you have a glass handy, because you know beer is better from a glass than a bottle (You do know that, right? Sure you do!) So, you pour… a glass filled with foam. and wait. and pour. and wait. and pour, and finally just glug the last from the bottle while you wait for the beer in the glass to settle.

It doesn’t have to be like that. Beer-O-Vision is proud to present a quick guide to pouring a heffeweizen. I present two techniques- the first of which is really only a matter of common sense, but the second is very stylish (well, when you do it right anyway; I’m not claiming to be a pro myself) and will impress your friends and neighbors. Or neighbours, if you live across the Niagara river. Of course, for the ultimate pour, you can always build and then program your very own robotic arm, assuming you’ve got the mad skillz!

Simple as that!

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!

In the comments to another post, a reader asked about Beer-O-Vision’s choices for summer beery goodness. I made a quick recommendation (Anchor’s Summer Wheat), but I was already secretly plotting to write this post, so I didn’t mention a particular style of beer that I think is a great choice for the summer: Berliner Weisse, or Weiße, if you prefer. If you’ve been reading me since the days I posted on Buffalo Rising, you’ll already know of my fondness for this style from this post and from this one. The former post discusses a classic example of the style, Berliner Kindl Weisse, while the latter post is about a regional take on the style from Custom Brewcrafters of Rochester. Today, even though the local weather is somewhat less-than-summery-sun-and-heat, I’m going to discuss two other examples of the style.

First up is a German sample of the style, but take note of what the label says: Beyerisch Bahnhof doesn’t claim to make Berliner Weisse, but rather, Berliner style Weisse. Why is this? Because Bahnhof is in Leipzig and ‘Berliner Weisse’, like Kölsch and for that matter Trappist Ales, is as much an appellation as a style definition. Simply put, if you ain’t in Berlin, you ain’t brewing Berliner Weisse, nor can you market it as such- not in the EU, anyway. In the same way, real Kölsch has to come from Köln, and beers that are similar to Trappist ales but not brewed by monks are termed Abbey Ales. At the end of the day, this has more to do with marketing than anything else, but it is worth noting. The truth is that any American brewer (home- or otherwise) with skill and the right ingredients can make a credible version of a Berliner Weisse. I thought Custom Brewcrafters wasn’t bad at all, and Three Floyds in Munster, IN, does a good version of it, from what I hear; I’m still waiting to get my hands on their take.

Bahnhof’s offering comes in at 3% abv, a little stronger than Kindl which is 2.5% abv. Now, right off the bat some may scoff at these low alcohol levels, but I tell you- in the summer, you don’t want drunkenness to interfere with refreshment. Obviously, at these levels, you can nearly drink these like soda, and that’s exactly the point. Sure, if you’re very thirsty, you’ll eventually catch a buzz, but unlike, say, some kind of imperial pale ale or india pale ale, you can have more than a few of these and still drive home. In a time when ‘extreme’ beers, many extremely strong as well, are popping up all over the place, the Berliner Weisse style is a reminder that there really is more to being a beer nut then getting wasted all the time. (A hazard of the occupation, it’s true.) Session beers are definitely worth giving some time to.

As with any Berliner Weisse, Bahnhof pours out cloudy and pale; the haze (as with any weisse/weizen or wit) comes from the twin forces of proteins in the wheat and yeast sediment. It yields a good head which falls fairly quickly into the thin one seen in the photo, this persists well throughout the beer. The aroma here hints at the sourness in the flavor, but also contains a distinctive wheaty dimension and as well a fine layer of yeast-induced banana. The flavor reveals a substantial tartness married to a background of very very light malt- the sour drowns out much appreciation of the yeast flavors. Hops? What hops? The mouthfeel is soft, and carbonation is on the low side, making this very quaffable. On the whole, though, I find the sourness in this one is not quite as delicate as in Kindl, a more balanced example of the style. This one is worth knocking off your list, but when you factor in the price and the distance traveled (= freshness and likelihood of going bad), not one I’d run for. Still, I wouldn’t turn it down, either.

The next beer, though… oh my! Picture, please…

If you are into beer at all, you’d heard of and likely also drunk Dogfish Head’s beers. What an extraordinary brewery- none of their beers are boring, and very few of them miss their mark. The only ones I would describe as “interesting” (you know, in that snarky way that means “I’m not really into this, sorry”) are the Midas Touch (saffronand Aprihop (I just don’t like apricot beers). Their Festina Lente, a soured, oak-aged peach lambic, was well-praised across the boards, and this year they’ve followed up with a peach-infused Berliner-style weisse called Festina Pèche. It’s been getting some good press as well, and I think it’s certainly justified.

As with Bahnhof, Festina Pèche (jacked-up to 4.5% abv, by the way) pours out pale, though slightly darker, no doubt owing to the real peach juice used in it. A chunky white head also formed but again didn’t last, soon reduced to leaving slight lace on the glass. The nose of this beer is replete with peach, and this fruit odor blends perfectly with lactic tartness/citrus, and a muted wheat tone. It explodes on the palate with sourness on the tip and blade of the tongue, resolves to a balanced yet unmistakable peach flavor and detectable malt sweetness, and finishes up with a final whack of sour, accompanied by more peach as you swallow and aroma travels via the retro-nasal route. All throughout, the mouthfeel remains quite thin, and the carbonation just buzzes your tongue, prickling it with the sour flavors. In Berlin, Berliner Weisse is typically taken with a shot of woodruff or raspberry syrup (Schuss) to offset the sourness- this beer harkens to that custom, and succeeds marvelously at blending a peach-Schuss right in.

So there you go, two beers for summer. I got mine both at Premier, I’d be surprised if you found the German one anywhere else, but Consumers might sell you the DFH- I know I’ve seen other DFH selections there. Cheers, and enjoy! Maybe my next review should be “beers for rainy summer days!”

(This post brought to you mainly by Shellac’s new one, “Excellent Italian Greyhound,” and Battles debut LP, “Mirrors”)

Or, “where to buy beer in the city.” This is the first in a small series of posts tacking where to get all that yummy craft beer we’re always talking about on Beer-O-Vision around town. Sure, avid beer-o-philes are familiar with Premier (and it’s high prices but impressive selection) and the many locations of Consumers (lately selling growlers, if you hadn’t heard), but neither of these stores (or their many locations, to be precise) fall within the city limits proper. It’s really sort of hard to talk about buying good beer in WNY without mentioning them, but I have noticed a few less-well-known stores where I can always count on getting something I like to drink, and, well… sharing is caring, I hear!

In this post, if the picture doesn’t make it fully obvious, we’ll be discussing the Holly Farms on Allen St. It’s a pretty unassuming store in the heart of Allentown, and like any convenience, stocks all sorts of foods and sundries, lotto tix and cigarettes. However, after walking back to the coolers, the craft-beer enthusiast will find some pretty surprising choices lurking among the malternatives and Big Three pilsners. I stopped in the other day (WNYMedia offices are located nearby) and had a quick chat with Shaq behind the counter, and complemented him on his selections: Let’s have a look…

We’ll start with the case on the right, labeled “10.” The top shelf has a bunch o’ Saranac from Utica- not bad at all. Below that, our first unusual selections appear- Samuel Smiths, from England (insultingly, perhaps, next to Mike’s Hard malternative lemonade and Smirnoff’s malternative whatever-they’re-calling-it). You wouldn’t typically find as fine a beer as Samuel Smiths in just any ol’ convenience store, and wait: they have more, too! On the shelf below, nothing much stands out- Stella and Sam Adams are all over the place- though carrying the seasonal Summer Ale (next case over) is a good call. On the shelf below that, we find a couple of ringers from Southern Tier (did you see the BOV interview?) and finally, below that, Saranac’s root beer (not in fact alcoholic, but hey) and as well, some of Saranac’s growlers.

Case 9 is similarly eclectic- nestled among the standards like Guinness, Heinnekin, and Rolling Rock we find treats such as a couple selections from Cleveland’s Great Lakes brewery and yet more Samuel Smiths on the bottom, and of course, happily, Buffalo’s own Flying Bison- the lager, specifically. By the way, Steinlager… I know, you thought it was from New Zealand, right? nope: RaChaCha; High Falls brewery. That’s ok, that Bass probably wasn’t brewed in England nor the Guinness in Ireland, either.

Admittedly, the next case is a little thin–the top two shelves are both malternative nonsense–but then something strange happens. Sure, more Samuel Smiths, now in 22 oz. bombers, but what’s really unusual is what’s sitting just to the left of them on the same shelf- is that Lindemans lambic? Yes, yes it is. Definitely not something you usually see.

So, there you go, a quick stroll through the selection at Holly Farms on Allen. There are at least a few other good beers hiding in the next case left (No. 7), if I recall, some selections from Southern Tier and Ithaca as well. And while not around right now, I know I’ve seen things like Ommegang and Chimay there over the last year or so, too. So, go on in there and buy some of the good stuff, encourage these guys keep stocking it! In fact, why not make requests? It can only help!

Next post in he series: All Wilson Farms are not created equal, not when it comes to beer anyway!

That’s right, folks… I know the pace has been somewhat glacial, but what better way to start off a weekend than with this lovely twin cinema extravaganza! You were on the verge of being treated to some variant of the ‘Friday Roundup,’ featuring (old) news re. now-local mega-brewer Labatt; How sex sells homebrewing; and the strange tale of how one English brewpub has handled the nation-wide smoking ban by brewing–that’s right—a beer with nicotine in it called Puffing Billy. Oh, see– looks like you get the roundup after all, lucky you!

These last two segments mean we’re only short one to assemble the entirety of Episode Three– very exciting! Astute readers will undoubtedly conclude that some sock-puppetry must soon be afoot, and that is indeed the final piece of the Episode Three puzzle. In the meanwhile, our first feature today is a segment which is really the companion piece to this post from a few weeks back now, about the geeky-as-all-hell Sam Adams pint glasses. You might notice that the still in that prior post seems to be from a different shoot; all I can say is: backups really rock, when you have them. Re-shoots, however, if you get to drink a beer at Colter Bay, don’t suck much at all, so I’m not really complaining. (If you must know, that is an Avery brown ale I’m having) Do I like the new Sam Adams glasses? Yes, I think they’re effective & slick- and, they’re nearly all stolen by now as well at any bar that had ‘em, so you might as well just click on over to the Sam Adams site and buy your own now. (Though rumor has it that a pair were sent to, at least some, AHA members.)

Today’s second segment is a fantastic interview we had with Paul of Southern Tier brewing. We talk a little bit about packaging trends in the industry (especially the now ubiquitous 22 oz. ‘bombers’), the role of ‘introductory’ craft beer styles (such as fruity wheat beers), regionalism, and what’s coming up soon at the brewery, of course. Paul was a natural interviewee after introducing the beers for the club all night and since he now owes me some glassware, we’ll be bringin’ the Beer-O-Vision cameras down to the shores of Lake Chautauqua sometime soon indeed. Enjoy the segment!