Support your local brewer!

You may have noticed that Beer O Vision is sporting some new graphical bedazzling on the sidebar. There are a few sites with very cool ideas, and we’re trying to get more involved with and spread the word about. One such site is the Support Your Local Brewery initiative.

I’ve been trying to become more locally oriented, both in the time before I was invited to BOV and since then (more on that some day soon…), and so the idea of becoming more knowledgeable about brewing in Buffalo and the issues affecting it is very appealing.

Until recently, I had no idea how rich Buffalo’s brewing history was. In 1875, there were 38 of them operating. Thirty eight. Unsurprisingly, Prohibition put an end to most of those still operating, but some still held out until the closing of the William Simon Brewery in 1972. After fourteen years of solitude, the Buffalo Brewpub opened and the area has been enjoying locally produced beer ever since. For a more detailed history you should read Rushing the Growler, but I’ve taken the chart on page 83 and entered it into a spreadsheet of the number of breweries in Buffalo. I updated it with data for 2008, and — assuming I remember — I’ll be keeping it up to date, using the breweries open at the start of each year.

So, as of this year, I count three breweries in Buffalo: Flying Bison, the only one that’s shipped outside of its premises; the Pearl St. Grill; and the veteran of the group, the Buffalo Brewpub (to split hairs, the Brewpub is actually outside of the city itself, but we won’t hold that against it).

(’But Dan,’ you say, ‘what about the Buffalo Taproom? Or Duff’s? Or-’ but alas, dear reader, they and many others in the area are supplied by Custom Brewcrafters, which is actually based outside of Rochester)

So it was this past Friday, when before my wife and I went to see The Dark Knight I insisted on celebrating International Brewers Day at the Brewpub. It’s been said that the average American is 10 miles from a brewery; if that’s true, we’re certainly lucky here in Buffalo with three and then some.