In a couple of hours (11:30 am) I’ll be heading over to Swan Market to join my friends for our traditional Saturday, uh, sausagefest. Naturally, this event is lubricated with fine German beer.
It’s funny. You tell an American that you’ll be drinking beer before the hour of noon and they start planning your intervention, whereas in Europe, responsible consumption of what is essentially a foodstuff is part of the routine and joy of daily life. The traditional Bavarian meal of Weisswurst and Hefeweizen is consumed before noon as a matter of course and pride, born of a time when the highly perishable sausage needed to be served quickly.
Some traditions are worth attending to. Zwei Weiss, bitte, und Ein Fransiskaner vom Fass!
Second thought
I dunno, I kinda feel like I overly harshed the High Falls Brewery in my last post over what basically amounts to an ad. They do a lot for the community and I choose their beer over any other American light lager. Like many regional breweries, the company has had a rough go of it over the past 30 years or so, and it’s not fair to fault them for positioning themselves to remain viable.
I guess it just seems, sometimes, that our hometown brewery has kind of abandoned us as small fry, and the brewery-consumer relationship is so different than in other cities where regional breweries are headquartered. For example, go to southern PA and see how passionate people are about Yuengling. The beer is everywhere and residents are proud of it, even though in composition it’s not wildly different from Genny. In Rochester, we don’t have that same sort of pride in our big brewer. High Falls doesn’t culturally dominate that part of our dining table.
Maybe this ad is the first step in a broader campaign to reach out to the town that built the company through the purchase of its beers. If so, I’ll happily drink my words. Well see.
-Mark
On February 27th at 7pm,