Hey a good friend will be in Florida next week and I think she'll have a car so I wanted to know if there's 1 really good store I can send her to in Ft Lauderdale where I can get a few good beers I can't get up here in the northeast. Here's what I'm looking for. Cigar City: the rarer stuff that doesn't leave florida Sweetwater: anything Funky Buddha: do they even bottle? Other stuff? I don't know much about the southeast craft beer scene. We do get Terrapin up here. NY gets cigar city but just the basics and very limited quantities of the rarer stuff. So just a few suggestions about what to tell her to look for next week and 1 can't miss rock solid lock of a store. I guess a Total Wine? She'll probably be hitting a liquor store for wine for herself anyway so I just wanna be able to send her to 1 store. No clue where in Ft Lauderdale she is. Thanks everyone.
rarer CCB stuff? Like what? As far as I know the rest of FL gets what NYC also gets. Total Wine would be the best option. Funky Buddha...forget about it unless you wanna get in your friends suitcase and come down with her.
Total Wine in Lauderdale will be your best bet. Cigar City isn't sending nearly as much as they used to outside of FL so there very well may be things in there that you have never had. Guava Grove, Cubano Espresso, Jose Marti, Tropical Heatwave and the collabs with the Bruery you may be able to find. Sweetwater isn't distributed in South FL, only I think in the north. Funky Buddha doesn't bottle and currently aren't growlering beer either. There is stuff from Florida Beer Company that you can find such as Swamp Ape DIPA, Florida Lager, Key West Sunset Ale and Key West Southernmost Wheat. I'm not a fan of Swamp Ape but a lot of people down here are. I actually like the Florida Lager and KW Southernmost Wheat. Good, easy drinking FL weather beers. Won't blow your socks off but I find them enjoyable. We also get Red Brick (Atlanta Brewing) down here. They have some good stuff. Laughing Skull is their flagship amber ale and it's so so. But Hoplanta is a solid IPA and the Brick Mason series is one offs that are typically good. If you can still find some Smoked Vanilla Gorilla from that series I couldn't recommend that more. I loved that beer.
Sounds good to me. Guava grove is pretty easy to find up here but none of the others. What are the collabs with bruery? Probably easier if I give her specific names to look for. I like the humidor series stuff but so far only able to ever find the humidor cedar aged jai alai up here.
Dos Costas Oeste Cedar, Lemon or Grapefruit are the collabs from CC and Bruery. There are still some around but not in large quantity. Kalevipoeg their Baltic Porter is around but again not in huge quantities. Tocobaga if you dont get it up that way and possibly Improv.
World of Beer in Coconut Creek or W. Palm Beach. They were my spots when I was on vacation in Lauderdale last year.
MikeM is right Total Wine is your friends best bet..Or unless she is able to trade or buy something from somebody down here? BX Beer Depot she could check out, but thats not close to Ft.L.
Chung at My Coffee District in Delray may have some crazy stuff for sale. But bring a drug dealer $$$$ wade..
Riverside market in ft. Lauderdale huge craft selection and great food, there on Facebook if you want to get an idea of what they have.
Besides the two already mentioned in Ft. Laud. the Crown Liquor on NE15 Ave. just north of Sunrise Blvd also carries a nice selection and sometimes has some surprises. BTW, since Riverside Market is a deli/restaurant, their prices a just a bit on the high side. I pay the extra sometimes, to take home, just for the convenience since I'm there already.
She's at bonaventure country club and doesn't want to go far. Saw some country wine and spirits really close to her. Are those any good? Any better suggestions within like 15 minutes?
That's way out west in Weston, practically in the swamp. She can head over to the Total Wine in Pembroke Pines. Hop on I75 south and get off at Pines Blvd and head west a bit. It will be on the left. May be 15 - 20 minutes from where she is at.
Also try Davie Discount Liquour, its right off 595 and Pine Island and has a nice craft selection including various CCB.
Thanks for the help guys. It's all moot for now though. She doesn't mind going to the store but she said she doesn't want to deal with the hassle of shipping it back. I might go down with her in September though.
If you only have the time to stop at one place, I'd recommend avoiding the Pembroke Pines Total Wine because the CCB selection is not very good. They only had six packs of Jai Alai, Tocobaga and Maduro, and a couple of old bottles of 110k when I was there last week, and have not had a lot more other times I've been there. The Whole Foods in Fort Lauderdale usually has a good selection of CCB stuff, and there's an ABC store in the same plaza that also has a good selection of their stuff. What's interesting is that it's often not the same bottles. The ABC store usually has the harder to find stuff between the two, and together they both have a better selection than any of the local Total Wines.
