Does that beer tap look (too) familiar?
Speaking of building a better beer culture . . .
Stephen Beaumont rails against “Me, too” beer lists.
Close your eyes and think of the bar at your local faux Irish pub and I bet you’ll see the same beers: Guinness, Harp, Kilkenny, Alexander Keith’s, Carlsberg, Stella… (Here I refer to the standard Canadian selection. In other countries, the names may differ, but to my experience, at least, the “me, too-ism†survives.) Sadly, on the rare occasion that I step into one of these places, I find the taps to be such carbon copies of one another that it takes only seconds to scan for a beer I want to drink, so quickly can my eyes edit out the usual suspects.
Isn’t the first thing you look at when you walk into a restaurant the chalk board with the nightly specials? The items that are different? Particularly in a place you frequent.
A while back we had lunch in Silverton, Colo. It’s a tourist town, packed with folks riding the train from Durango to Silverton and back. The place had four taps, three pouring beers brewed in Durango and one for New Belgium Blue Paddle Pilsner.
Must a pub operator be suicidal to sell beer in a Colorado tourist town and not offer New Belgium Fat Tire on tap?
So I asked. “You don’t have Fat Tire?”
“We have another beer from New Belgium. They make very good beer. When this keg is gone we’ll have a different New Belgium beer.”
Guess where the locals drink.
(And, before you ask, the image at the top doesn’t have much to do with the post – other than the thought the “chick” is delivering draft beer. But this is the week to use it, so why not now?)
Posted: April 2nd, 2007 under Beer culture.
April 3rd, 2007 at 5:26 am
“Must a pub operator be suicidal to sell beer in a Colorado tourist town and not offer New Belgium Fat Tire on tap?”
GASP! :-/
My local beer bar has a chalk board menu of the offerings. Too bad it takes a home equity loan to pay for a few beers. At least at the tavern with the “me too” usuals I can get out with 2 Guinness and a burger for the same price as 3 beers (and not always pints) at the other joint.
S.
April 3rd, 2007 at 6:38 am
Steve – Somebody has to pay for all that chalk ;>)
It shouldn’t be that much work for a place to offer variety and fair prices. Your Guinness example is particularly interesting because Guinness kegs are more expensive than most, indicating somebody has room for maneuvering when it comes to pricing.
It sure seems like the “me too” pub should be able to rotate a tap or two and put in a beer beyond a small brewer’s flagship. Even in Chicago.
April 3rd, 2007 at 7:43 am
Stan, don’t forget the wunnerful distributors in the Chicago area. I’ve talked to the owner at the local pub, it’s difficult dealing back and forth with them for better stuff. To his credit, he keeps Guinness, Hacker-Pschorr Weizen, and a rotating Sam Adams seasonal on tap.
My attention turns to the beer bar instead in this case. Hearing that there’s “room to maneuver” in the pricing makes me think all the more that I’m being gouged for the sake of trendiness and exclusivity. Yes, they are the only place in the area to get some of the best imports and micros – cask conditioned offerings too. But as an example, I can get a .5 liter or H-P at the local pub for $4.50 – at the beer bar it’s closer to $6.00 (just a guess).
I’m probably getting sour in my old age, but I also feel like my money isn’t going as far as it used to — in many cases other than beer, but the beer hurts!
S.
April 3rd, 2007 at 10:34 am
I’m used to only getting the Blue Point Toasted Lager at any given pub on Long Island. There’s usually anywhere between three to five taps in these places. You can guess what’s on the other taps (everywhere). Even when I hit the beer bars with 10+ taps you can almost predict what’s going to be on them. We have a few places around here (counting Manhattan) with extensive bottle and tap lists and even in a place with 70 taps you can be sure that 65 of the taps are filled with the usual (okay, that’s “the usual” for a beer geek, but the resulting drop in excitement when the discovery is made is very real).