I am on my way to the Grand Rapids area for the weekend. The link through "places" on here is screwed up. Is there any good pubs or beer stores around there?
I only know one BA up that way and he never chimed-in. I have family up there (but when they drink it's strictly 3.2 High Life), but yeah, not much going on there at the moment. Still, you must admit that "Premo" is better than a Busch Light, eh?
My parents have a place on Lake Pokegama. There's a couple of place I always make it to when I go up there. Zorbaz on the lake, Sammy's Pizza and the Saw Mill. I would think Zorbaz probable has the best beer selection, however, I have always just brought craft beer with when traveling up there. If you have a car and want to take a great drive head over to Duluth. You will find some nice local brew over that way. My parents always go to the Eagles Club for drinks, pull tabs and to forget they live in Minneapolis now. Hope some of this rants helps. Cheers!
Not bad, but I just had 1. There is some event up here called Farmers Day, so there were cops all over last night. With the lack of selection, I stepped right up to be the DD!
Almost went to Sammy's last night for dinner, when we got here. Maybe tonight. Last night was a hotel, but the rest is camping and I found a place on the RB site called Jerry's Warehouse Liquors that shows a large selection on their site. For the rest of the weekend, it is just a need for bottles for camping. I am held off on bringing up anything, just in case there is the oddball beer here and there that might be distributed up here and not around the cities. As far as Duluth, I am camping out that way in a couple of weeks and definitely have some places in mind already for that area.
Zorbaz is probably the best craft beer selection of any place once you get into lakes country. The Detroit Lakes location had 6 different Surly beers on tap last month, plus PLENTY of other tremendous options. I'm not sure if all locations have the selection of Detroit Lakes Zorbaz but I would assume it should be somewhat similar
DL Zorbaz is by far the best of the bunch....GR Zorbaz one of the weakest for beer selection but it is still the best in town by a longshot...they do have some Surly usually...and one or two other solid offerings but the rest are the Killians, Honey Weiss, etc type of things..
Sammy's has awesome pizza..very similar to Carbones in the cities....thin slices, with a lot of cheese...
Oh I forgot...watch dates at Warehouse...notorious for old, old beer and they don't give a shit even when you tell them about it. I used to always stop there but not anymore...
Was out of town and just saw this thread....Zorbaz is the best option for beer on tap....for pizza Sammy's and Rafferty's are both top level....I don't mind Zorbaz either but some really do not like it.. Seriously though your best bet for beer would have been to look up Mike Hoops who lives up there and raid his fridge
The selection was probably great for up there, but nothing at all that I don't normally see. They were making a big deal about now getting Surly, but even most of that was sold out. I kept it simple and grabbed a 12 pack of Summit Porter for the weekend and really only got around to drinking 4 of them, because we were bouncing around quite a bit. I am sure that if I lived up there, Jerry's would be the place to hit and probably even does special ordering for people who want something that they normally wouldn't carry.
My family has a cabin up off HW 7 and I've always assumed that if I wanted craft, then I would be bringing it myself. I've gotta say, though, Premo's in Bovey sounds like a great night to me.
BTW, you nailed it on the dates. I didn't think about it at the time, but I just went to open one of those Summit Porters and looked at the date and it had an "enjoy by date of 8/27/13 and I bought it on 8/31. Now I am not saying that a porter went South because it was 4 days past an enjoy by date, but my one purchase from them does confirm what you were saying about their past dates. The other thing that I noticed is that the Summit IPA and the Summit porter were the same in 6 packs and where the twelve packs were, they only had a price tag under the IPA twelve pack, so given that the 6 packs were the same, I presummed that the 12 packs would be, as well. But to my surprise, the 12 pack of porter was $1.50 more that the tag under the twelve pack of IPA. I didn't even bother to point it out to them, because there was no tag under the one that I bought and it would have required the whole logic of comparing the 6 pack pricing.
Yeah that is not good but I have seen some other things much worse than that....year + overdate....you just have to check what you are buying....I understand things happen but their overall reaction to several things I pointed out on several occasions that never got addressed is why I am down on them...personally at that place barely out of date on craft beer is pretty good honestly
I just remembered one other thing about them that bugged me. Before going in, I was searching around on my phone for places and that is where I first found out about them. Then I went to their website and they had a page of specials that were exclusive to people looking at their site. One of them was a 10% coupon. So when I was checking out, I told the guy to hold on for a coupon code for 10% off and suddenly I realized that I couldn't get any 4g in there. The guy said something about how everybody who tries to pull those up, can't because (he was guessing) of all the fluorescent lights. But no matter what the cause, I asked him if he could just enter the code, because he obviously knew what coupon that I was talking about. He said no, that the customers had to pull up these coupons (even though they had no barcode to scan). That kind of felt like a scam, because these guys know that people specifically have an issue pulling up any internet inside of their store, so they put coupons on their site knowing that most people won't be able to pull up their site once inside of their store and then instruct the clerks not to offer the code.
