New York – Page 16 – A Good Beer Blog

CNY Roadtrip To Stock The Stash

Back. I made it back. I hit four beer stores over around 500 km and nine and a half hours. Now, whereas Pretty Things was just a one time bottle that I passed in the night, now I have seven bottles representing three of their brews and any number of batches. Those canny little cap labels are mighty handy. Plenty of other good stuff, too.

I hit a Wegmans in Cicero, Party Source on Erie Blvd., Galeville Grocery in Liverpool and then headed north via C’s Farm Market in Owsego. What did I learn? I had a good old chat with the guy who runs Party Source and finally met Bernie, the owner of Galeville Grocery. As is usually the case, talk is about other stuff as much as beer when they find out that I am from north of the border – health care and lucky Canada they say, taxes and unlucky Canada they say. The shops were all giving each other a run for the money with Party Source showing off its new siding less neon blue and green siding (as so poorly illustrated) as well as growler pours including a Rooster Fish. The other three were as packed with new and interesting beer as I have ever seen them.

Prices? I noticed that The LCBO sells Orval for about 60% of what it costs in Syracuse and that Rogue Yellow Snow is about a buck more there than here. Great deals… if you can find those beers on shelves in Ontario. Funny thing about a monopoly. But the real difference is selection. Over 90% of the beers are unavailable up here and are at prices that make a Canadian beer lover weep. Wegans grocery store wanted just $15.99 for a Great Lakes variety 12 pack and $9.49 for Brooklyn 1. Wegmans even had 750 ml bottles of Saison Dupont for 9.19 and St. Bernie Abt. for $10. 95. At the grocery. Made me think of Mel in Braveheartshouting “Freedom!”. Then it didn’t. Then I paid my duties and taxes at the border. Then I went home.

New York: Pumking, Southern Tier, Lakewood

I hoard Christmas ales. Buying more than I open every year, building a surplus of aging 10% Yuletide bombs that I dip into after time does its job. Halloween beer? Not so much. There is something about Halloween that is less wistfully recalled, less of a build up and gone when it is done. Who plans for the pumpkin time?

The beer pours an orange amber with a whips of white froth and rim. On the nose there is a hearkening of clean barn from the malt and pumpkin flesh, the smell of carving the great damn gourd outside. It’s quite overwhelming of graham cracker, nutmeg, allspice and booze. In the mouth, there is more of that thick with cream. Rich. Rich enough to put you off but then it doesn’t cloy, its works its way in and then you wonder how it would age.

Plenty of BAer love.

Big Easlakia Base Ball News Circa 1874

While I was over hobnobbing with the shaken and moved of the southern part of our Easlakian neighbo(u)rhood, I have actual stuff to do. Base ball stuff as I wanted to research the Watertown tournament of 1874 given that there were references to it in the Kingston papers of the time. I had thought that they went to play but in fact it appears that they went to watch as they are not listed as a team in the schedule.

Kingston’s rivals of the day, the Guelph Maple Leaf, win the event held in late June and early July over eight days before pop up here after for a game on 7 July 1874. But there are other notes that make it very curious:

There is a first and second class tournaments being played side by side making for a total of 14 teams. I do not know why you would have seven teams per class but there you have it.
Being or rather not being “daunted” meant something in the mid-1870s as there is a second class team called “The Undaunted” of La Fargeville, NY and another second class team called “The Dauntless of Watertown, NY. Careful readers will know that there was also a team called Dauntless of Ogdensburg, NY which the Kingston St. Lawrence played on Friday 8 August 1874 in Ogdensburg as well as the Dauntless Club of Toronto that Kingston played in 1872 and 1873 .
One team in the first class group was the Ku-Klux of Oneida, NY described as “the acknowledged champion club of Northern and Central New York” in the 29 June issue of the The Daily Times of Watertown. You will be comforted to know that the Maples Leaf of Guelph thumped them 13-4 and that the team was slagged in the paper as “the negro haters” who scored a “usual whitewash,” a “goose egg, ” a “cipher” and “skunked” in various innings.
Certain players of the Nassaus of Brooklyn, NY and some Eastons of Easton, Pennsylvania were reported in the 6 July issue as having taken a wagon to Sackets Harbor on Sunday 4 July and returning in quite a state: “It would have been proper if the whole crowd could have been unloaded at the jail.” They apparently were driven through Public Square as they sand “Mulligan Guards” and kindred songs.

Thrilling stuff. Need to do a little cross referencing but it looks like the Eastons of the 1870s may have been a rival to the Philadelphia Athletics which are now the Oakland A’s.

If “Vermonster” Is Confusing – Isn’t “Monster” Worse?

Much is being made of a legal claim being brought against Rock Art, a small Vermont brewer, who makes “Vermonster” beer by a premium soda pop maker whose brands include “Monster” energy pop for confusing the brand – especially since the claim is being made in the name of the soda company’s plans to enter into the beer market. But not so much is being made on this point noted by one Green Mountain State publication:

Rock Art isn’t the only Vermonster out there. Ben & Jerry’s has long used the name for a massive tub of ice cream available at its shops. A spokeswoman for the company said she was not aware of any trademark issues with the name. “Vermonster” is also the name of a series of truck rallies in Bradford. Brooklyn Brewing Co. makes a barley wine called “Monster Ale.” A representative to the company declined to discuss whether Hansen had challenged its use of the name.

OK, that is a few points but you see my point, right. Good old Brooklyn Beer has had a beer called “Monster” on the shelf for quite a number of years. I have one in my stash right now. Simmering in its own wickedness, no doubt. There are others, too. Will they all get sued? The Bee-to-the-Ay lists 34 monstrous craft beers on the market already. What if all craft brewers shared in the idea and put out their own Monster and “-onster” branded beers, too?

We are only at the stage of the legal letter sent, we are told, by the specialist intellectual property law firm Knobb, Martens, Olsen & Bear. Which is good. There is still time to think of the big picture. It may well be that the negative reaction to the note may well lead the Hansen Beverage Company to reconsider their strategy. They look like they want to get along and have a happy name in the marketplace. Who doesn’t? Hard to overcome bad press.

In The International Monday Morning Papers…

Finally, I made it to the life of if not a jet setter, then, maybe a border hopper as this morning’s Watertown Daily News proves:

While heckling from the “cranks,” or fans, was not an official requirement of the game, there was certainly plenty directed toward all four teams. Mr. Drinkwater himself engaged in a fair amount of good-natured bantering as umpire and later as a player on the Rochesters, who won their first game against Kingston 9-2 but lost 12-4 in the championship round against the Ontarios… For Alan C. McLeod, organizer of the Kingston team, it was international collaboration that brought his players to the vintage games in the first place. “Obviously there’s a lot of camaraderie. Sackets Harbor got us interested in this two years ago,” Mr. McLeod said. According to the organizer, teams from Canada used to cross over into the States to play baseball with Americans as early as 1870.

Getting whupped 9-2 by the Rochester best nine is not exactly bad when you consider it was the fourth game for the Kingston St. Lawrence Brown Stockings and Rochester has run a weekly program for years. We got tagged for five in the sixth, too. We were down by just one before that. Have I made enough excuses? Need a lighter bat as well. And a bit more work on the fielding. And I shouldn’t have tried for second that one time but they did say that a ball that went into the bush was a double when they meant that a ball that went into the bush and stays in there was a double. I should have done a Billy Martin on those Rochestarians but I was way too out of breath.

BBQ Shack: Tail O’ The Pup, Ray Brook, New York

I had BBQ and specifically pulled pork three times on the road. State Street BBQ in Watertown, NY. Beale Street BBQ in South Portland, Maine. Tail O’ The Pup, Ray Brook, New York. I hate to rank good BBQ pulled pork but the Tail O’ The Pup’s sauced take was so soft you could have spread it into a paste with a butter knife. Beale Street’s was hearty and smoky while State Street’s was subtler, like a slow cooked Sunday pork roast. All good.

Tail o’ the Pup was also one of those places municipal planning standards would never accept in Canada to our great cultural loss. Part 1930’s roadside cottages. Part beer tent with its own band. Part diner set in the great outdoors.

Nathan’s Famous hot dogs, too. Who rents the cottages? Are there gangs of bikers out there who want that sort of thing? They must be people I would like to know.

Gas Station Saison, Utica Club And Fireworks

Apparently wherever I go I pack an extra 5 kilopascals or whatever atmospheric pressure is measured in. The weather has cracked from a month of wet to sunny and dry. Ran into a pal on a CNY backroad gas station three hours from either of our homes and was inspired to grab a 7 puck twelve pack of Utica Club, the local value brew. Then I got a few from Ommegang including their wonderful Hennepin at the corner store near Friday’s hotel. Another local brew. A huge downpour pushed us off the I-95 right at Well, as if Thor demanded I stop in at Tully‘s to see how things were with Dawn’s shop. Bursting at the seams with downeast ales and lagers. The week ahead? I’ll be hunting out Allagash and other Maine brews on tap at the neighbourhood pubs of Portland. It is a tough old life and, as with the scale of the fireworks at the harbour last night, a reminder of what a bigger freer land America can seem sometimes for those from the Great White North.

My Week In Beer… Or “I Travelled For No Beer”

Well, at least I did have a beer today – a Sacket’s Harbor IPA at the brewpub with lunch. I was at a thinking session so I won’t get into it but suffice it to say that Sackets Harbor Brewing Co. on a warm spring day is one of the nicest spots to have a beer I have ever come across. But the weird thing was that I came back across the border with not one bottle in the van. Mad? No, I am just planning to spend Victoria Day Monday in New York State’s 48th senatorial district inspecting the Crown’s former territories and I expect to hit Oswego’s C’s Farm Market with gusto. I did stare at a six pack of Sierra Nevada IPA for $9.49 at the gas station just before I crossed back across the border but I really have a lot of beer from the recent trip to Quebec as well as kind travelers to Michigan and Wisconsin. Do I need more?

I don’t know what is weirder – coming back from the USA with no beer or what Greg Koch wrote in the comments on Wednesday. But what is weirder is that my post about “Hooray for Everything” rates #5 on Google right now for “American Craft Beer Week” so I suppose some pip squeek like me being less than wholehearted about one’s PR campaign might be the cause of some unhappiness – though others seem to have the same questions. But these things pass – Google rankings, PR campaigns, internet squabbles. Greg makes very good beer and that is the main thing.

I don’t know if I could sustain a “My Week in Beer Series” – I live in such a bubble and don’t get out much. What would it be like to live like Knut who nips south to Rome’s Football Pub, where a bar stool calls for me, when the slightest whim moves him. What would it be like to be Jeff, who runs the other greatest pub in Europe – grabbing a cask, conditioning it brilliantly and making a living from it. Such dreams. Jay still has the news, Stan is still on the trip and Lew has the blues. Such lives.

Me, I have a 3 Monts, a favorite pale ale, and spend Friday night watching Doctor Who with the kids. Beer in the rec room. A great end to the week.

Friday Bullets For My Day Off In The USA

My three hours at the NCPR phone farm starts at noon so I should get my butt out the door about nine thirty. I wonder of they will let me play with the Twitter controls. Things I do in the states: eat jerky (I have a rule – no jerky in the homeland); buy a local weekly newspaper (they still report who was visting from away like a Maritime weekly); look for flags (I still need a NY state flag); and shop at grocery store for cans of butter beans and multi-coloured goldfish crackers. In America the goldfish crackers come in different colours than orange. That is what makes the USA great. When I hear the “USA, USA” chant I think of multi-coloured goldfish crackers.

I watched the last ER and hated it. I hate ER. I used to comment on ER usenet groups when it was a cool show (holy oldie olson internet reference!) but I stopped watching around 1998. Death and death and more death. If they were such good ER doctors, the death parade wouldn’t go on and on. Plus I get that Stamos guy mixed up with the guy from “Joanie Loves Chachi” – but at least one Doctor Who crossover moment so at least that was something.
I do not yet see the world from the perspective of Davros’ toggle switch but I must say that the words “anti-facist demonstrators” do equally warm my heart. The juxtaposition with this and this should be more publicly troubling than it is.
I don’t know what to make of Harper these days but there is plenty of evidence that Canada is doing well economically under his watch.
Today is also an edition of The Session and the topic is smoked beer. Never heard of it? Start with our man in Ireland and follow the links.
Mr. Taylor and I engaged in a very interesting dicussion of social software and the courts this week. Have a look. Maybe we are both wrong.
When was the last time a First Lady said something that you though was simply solid advice: She told the 240 girls about growing up on Chicago’s south side, and urged them to think of education as “cool.” “I never cut class. I liked being smart. I liked getting A’s,” she said. “You have everything you need. Everything you need to succeed you already have right here.” I am going to use that line. I wonder if she is also strong on the use of 1970s British TV Sci-Fi as a tool for teaching about ethics and the importance of blasting things freom outer space?
I was listening last night to WFAN and the discussion of baseball ticket prices. At their new palace, the stinky cheater Yankees, the average gret seat now costs over $500 compared to about $150 at the Mets and Red Sox. Another reason to engage in recreation ritual hate. By the way, I watched the 2004 Red Sox ESPN summary last night. I am now very ready for baseball to begin.

That must be it for today. Where will I go by the end of the day? Maybe to the mall? Woot!

New York: Latvians Are Coming! Latvians Are Coming!

Sorry, not Latvians. Not at all. The story was co-authored by a Mr. Lattman. Misread that entirely. My fault. I blame the head cold. Nevertheless, this is an interesting tidbit in the Wall Street Journal today:

Private-equity firm KPS Capital Partners LP is angling to become a player in the U.S. beer industry. The company is in the final stages of closing a deal to acquire High Falls Brewing Co., the closely held maker of the Genesee and Dundee beer brands, according to people familiar with the matter. It also is among the final bidders for Labatt USA, an arm of the world’s largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev. KPS hopes to combine High Falls and Labatt USA, both based in upstate New York, and explore other transactions in the industry, which is undergoing rapid consolidation.

A player! Does that come with a smoking jacket and a gold cigarette case? It pretty much comes with all corner store and gas station sales from Syracuse to Buffalo and half of the rest of upstate NY. Interesting that the Labatt wing of the deal would make sense as part of the badly named Anheuser-Busch InBev efforts to pay down debt. Reuters reports that Labatt USA should gain ABIB (which I pronounce “ah-BEEEEEEEEEB” in a high piercing voice) about a tidy $100 million. Sadly, the same report indicates that the Rochester-based High Falls Brewery is only worth the assumption of its debt. But it is interesting that these tough times appear to be apt for a merger and consolidation focused on continued expanding brewing in what is otherwise a region which has known tougher times for a while now.