...this from today's Democrat & Chronicle, Rochester, NY......... ;D
Brewery museum finds the right home
The Beer Guys
Rick Armon and
Patrick Flanigan
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Potosi?!?! What the $#@&?!
The American Breweriana Association has decided to plop its National Brewery Museum in Potosi — a tiny Wisconsin town with a population hovering around 700 people.
It seemed like a travesty to us. How do you pass over cities oozing brewing history like Milwaukee or St. Louis? Or even Rochester, which has been brewing Genesee Beer since 1878?
And what's with sticking it in the middle of nowheresville? Heck, Potosi is a half-hour outside Dubuque, Iowa. Dubuque, for goodness sakes!
After calming down, we tracked down association President Len Chylack and dang it if he didn't have a logical explanation.
"Potosi kind of represents what we in the hobby are about — the small-town brewery that every town had and supported before Prohibition," he says.
We are big supporters of smaller brewers, so the reasoning makes sense to us. But Potosi also has history and an energetic group on its side.
The nonprofit Potosi Brewery Foundation plans to reopen the Potosi Brewing Co., which closed in 1972, as a microbrewery, restaurant and gift shop — a $3.4 million venture. The group started courting the National Brewery Museum with the promise of 7,000 square feet of exhibit space.
So the association, which had rejected overtures from St. Louis and others in the past, decided on Potosi and put up about $250,000 for the project. The association, which was formed about 25 years ago, has been raising money to create a museum one day and it's finally going to happen.
The museum will feature a reference library and "basically everything that has 'beer' and 'brewery' on it," Chylack says. That includes signs, bottles, cans, trays, bottle caps and historical documents.
Association members — there are 3,000 of them — will display their collections in rotating exhibits.
It will take three to five years to get the museum up and running, Chylack says.
For more details or to help out, go to
www.americanbreweriana.org or
www.potosibrewery.com.
Dean Jones II: Dean Jones, the brewmaster at Brü on State Street has a new job — and an old one. Jones is the new head brewer at Wagner Valley Brewing Co. on Seneca Lake. Jones will keep his old job at Brü, working there nights and weekends while heading brewing operations at Wagner on weekdays.
They say being a brewmaster is a dream job. Jones better hope so, because it sounds like he won't get much time for actual dreaming.
CB fest near: Custom BrewCrafters' sixth annual Fall Festival of Ales will be held Saturday. More than 40 beers made at the Honeoye Falls brewery will be available for tasting.
To accommodate the growing crowds, this year's festival will feature a new layout with more tent space. The festival will be held from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Honeoye Falls Firemen's Field on Monroe Street.
Tickets are $15 in advance and $18 the day of the event. For information on where to buy tickets, log on to
www.custombrewcrafters.com or call (585) 624-4386.
Off to Colorado: Good luck to area breweries who entered this year's Great American Beer Festival in Denver.
Locally, Flour City Brewing Co., High Falls Brewing Co., Rohrbach Brewing Co. and Wagner Valley Brewing Co. have entered the competition, which is Sept. 30 through Oct. 2.
Brewery Ommegang of Cooperstown and Buffalo-based Flying Bison Brewing Co. also are among more than 380 breweries that have submitted more than 2,000 beers.
For more details, go to:
www.beertown.org.
This drink is very popular over here during the cold time of the year. We have a nice inventory already in our rehearsal room. ;D I love to have one or two mugs when I arrive there. And often one or two more when I did not go there by car. It is very warming from the inside (and also makes the fingers flexible, lol) ;D. Brrr, I hate ice cold beer during the winter and on rainy autumn days. 
We have an oven in our well equipped rehearsal room, nearly a full kitchen, hehe... but our bass player complains the rooms were smelling like a distillery. ;D
Talk about going from one extreme to the other... 
