Buffalo Beer Week 2012... A visit with Tim Herzog of Flying Bison Brewing Company

Tim Herzog, Founder and General Manager, Flying Bison Brewing Company It’s the final weekend of Buffalo Beer Week 2012. Recently I had the privilege to visit Buffalo and one of the stops I made was to the Flying Bison Brewing Company, home to Flying Bison Beer.  Located on Ontario Street in central Buffalo, Flying Bison is the only brewer that calls Buffalo home. As we approached, I was surprised at how small the place looked.  You grow up in Southern California and you get used to breweries looking huge.  Think Budweiser in Van Nuys, or Miller in Azusa.  What I experienced in Buffalo was in fact a small business, run by a guy, Tim Herzog, who loves beer and just wants to produce a great product and make enough money to keep doing it. As I talked with Tim, he took me through all the particulars of beer brewing.  Beer is the third most popular drink in the world, behind only water and tea.  Four ingredients make up the base for every good beer.  Water, a starch in this case barley, hops, and yeast. Perhaps the most important is water.  Tim showed me how they filter and refilter their water to remove all outside tastes and impurities, and listening, I was reminded how important good water is to good coffee and it all started to make sense.  Clearly the old commercial from Olympia Brewing Company in Washington was accurate.  In beer, it’s the water, and a lot more. That a lot more, is where Tim comes in. Flying Bison uses roasted barley as their starch.   Here’s a good rule of thumb for you…. dark roast equals dark beer with the deepest roasts going into the dark stout beers you see on the shelves these days. Next up are the hops and this is where your beer gets its taste and that nice head of foam.  Hops come from two main regions in the world, Germany and the Pacific Northwest of the United States.   The last ingredient, yeast is what turns the fermenting starch into alcohol.  Quite simply, no yeast, no beer. But those are just the physical ingredients. Struggling to make it as a small brewer, I listened as Tim graciously answered every question I had, whether it was about his brewing capacity [about 4000 barrels a year, compared to Miller at 40 million a year] or the origin of the growler [a grumpy old man’s empty wooden lunch pail], a popular method to buy tap beer in Buffalo. An early day growler, used to buy your favorite draft beer to go. I learned about prohibition and how on the day it was repealed, the Anheuser-Busch Company, brewers of Budweiser, somehow were able to deliver a case of beer to the White House.  Since Busch was brewing in what at that time was the frontier of America, in sparsely populated St. Louis, he attracted much less attention from the authorities than did the eastern brewers in places like Buffalo.  Maybe that explains how Busch was able to get his beer brewed, fermented and delivered in one day.  Clearly Tim, founder of the New York State Craft Beer Association knows his beer as evidenced by his many years in the profession and his recognition as a certified national beer tasting judge. But what struck me most was the love Tim has for beer.  As I walked and talked with him I realized I was talking to a guy uncommonly committed to a good quality brew in a city that loves beer. I learned that first hand that when he opened a line from a keg and gave me a taste of something special.  He’s brewing an Altbier in the German tradition for Buffalo Beer Week 2012.   Smooth and crisp, this beer was special, unlike anything I’ve ever had.  And perhaps that’s because there are few brewers here in the US trying this.  Tim was so excited about sharing this beer… it was clearly the water for chocolate moment where you realized that his beer was being made with not just blood, sweat, and tears, but love by this gracious man from Buffalo. Anyone can put together the big four... water, barley, hops and yeast and make beer.  It takes a craftsman to blend them together and make something great.  It takes a craftsman to handle that "a lot more" part of beer brewing, and Tim is clearly up to the task. As I sampled a few of his other beers, and a wonderful orange cream soda on tap, I had one last question.  How did Tim feel about home brewers.  He smiled, and told me to look around because I was looking at the results of home brewing. Flying Bison Beer was home brewed before it moved into its 10,000 square foot brewery.  All the recipes they used, were Tim’s when he was home brewing.  Not only was he the general manager of Flying Bison Brewing, he was the founder. As Buffalo closes out Beer Week 2012, Buffalonians would be well advised to find somewhere to try a pint, or fill a growler, of some Rusty Chain, Aviator Red, or that new Altbier from Tim Herzog and the crew of Flying Bison Brewing Company.

Looking for a good cup o' joe? Try these places out on your next road trip...

We should thank Kaldi. He’s the Ethiopian goat herder who noticed that when his goats nibbled on the bright red berries of a certain bush they became more energetic (jumping goats).  After trying the beans himself, he was exhilarated and took the berries to an Islamic holy man in a nearby monastery. But the holy man disapproved of their use and threw them into a fire, from which an enticing aroma billowed. The roasted beans were quickly raked from the embers, ground up, and dissolved in hot water, yielding the world's first cup of coffee. We should also thank the Brits, who through their attempts to tax tea, unwittingly helped make America a nation of coffee drinkers. When I travel, one of the ways I stay grounded is by connecting with a local town or population at their local coffee bars.  Some choose a different type of watering hole, but for me, the preference is coffee. This last week I had the opportunity to visit a few coffee houses unlike what we usually see in the cookie cutter strip mall infused Southwest. First up was Palenque Coffee and Doomsday Donuts in Ripon, Wisconsin... With a faux log cabin look on the outside and a stereotypical Mayan logo, I’ll admit, I was skeptical.  Was I ever surprised.  Once I entered the doors, I was welcomed into what can only be described as coffee heaven.  Rugged and minimal on the inside, this place is off the charts! I had a cup of Indian Monsoon coffee.  Light, medium roasted, this coffee was exceptionally smooth and had absolutely no bitter after taste.  100% stunning. But coffee is not their only gift.  These guys also sell the most ambitious donuts I have ever come across.  Imagine a s’mores donut.  That’s right... a plain cake topped with chocolate, small graham crackers and tiny marshmallows.  Or maybe you’d like a cream puff sandwich filled with raspberry filling or an old fashioned maple bar... topped with a strip of crispy bacon. They call them one of a kind donuts and the selection changes everyday.  Believe me, they are worth every penny of the $1.00 - $2.00 price, and they look great as Cesar demonstrates here. I’ll be honest, I have no idea how a place like this will stay afloat in a small town like Ripon.  I hope it does... because it is the only place in town where a young man from Puerto Rico can work in a Mayan themed coffee house selling fresh roasted java from around the world paired with a great American classic, the donut, updated to a new standard. Next up are a couple of places, Spots Coffee and Cafe Aroma, both located in the Elmwood District of Buffalo, New York. Spots Coffee has a few locations around town but since I was in the Elmwood area, that’s the one I visited.  Here’s what you get. A large interior with a distinctly rugged urban feel.  Brick walls surround the coffee bar and kitchen area while the exterior of this corner building is framed in large glass windows, making you feel like you are right in the middle of the action. With local art and fantastic coffee, this place oozes coffee house charm. We took up a seat in an old church pew that had been repurposed and became a nice local addition to the interior design.  Surveying the crowd, there was definitely a mixture of the local population.  Moms with kids, students from nearby Buffalo State studying and businessmen in suits were all sharing space in the large dining area. But as nice as the facility was, the coffee was why we were there and we were not disappointed.  I had a wonderful cafe breve, my friends had a caramel machiatto and a double espresso.  My breve came with great art on top and the machiatto was also well displayed, a Spots tradition.   Spots is a big place.  Think tables everywhere and lots of small groups populating the place.  If I lived nearby, I’d be there often.  It’s spacious, has free wifi and a great menu for lunch and dinner.  In the end, we were all very satisfied and not wishing at all that we had gone to Starbucks, just a block away.  My final stop before heading to the airport and the flight back to Las Vegas was Caffe Aroma.   This place is other worldly if you have been raised out west.  Small, with not a lot of tables, dark wood and granite, it was old school, complete with local microbrews and beer on tap. My espresso was strong and not bitter at all and my friends Americano, hot and smooth, as it should be.   What separated Caffe Aroma from nearby Spots or Starbucks was the atmosphere.  Small and intimate... if you are here, you are part of the village.  My friends called it the neighborhood coffee house and it was.  Think of it as the bar where everybody knows your name.  If you were a regular, my guess is that they would even know your drink.   If you want to understand the ethos of the people of this area, spend a day here.  I had a great conversation with a guy just talking politics.  Other groups were discussing the baseball playoffs.  This is where President Obama or Governor Romney ought to be if they want to know what is important to Buffalo. So there you have it.  If you are in Ripon, Wisconsin, get a great cup of coffee and a fantastic donut at Palenque.  If you are in Buffalo, don’t miss a chance to check in at one of the Spots locations around town... And if you want to know what makes Buffalonians tick while enjoying some great java or even a glass of Southern Tier Pumking Ale, make sure to visit Caffe Aroma in the Elmwood District.