Vibe Check: Night at the Brewseum
At the Saratoga Springs Lions Club fundraiser—or was it a LARP?—SLAH finds out what three out of four dentists agree on, what's worse than having an AOL email, and why a Norway brewery has good IPAs.
If anyone ever needs me on the third Friday of April for the rest of time, I’ll be at the Saratoga Springs Lions Club’s Night at the Brewseum fundraiser. Last year, the annual event was summed up perfectly by attendee John Koch, who, disappointingly, didn’t return for more beer, booze and food sampling in 2023: “The revelry,” he said, for those of you who didn’t read our 2022 Vibe Check story, “was infectious.” This year, in John’s absence, I’m taking it upon myself to describe the scene in which my friend Molly and I found ourselves this past Friday evening, and will do so in true Gen Z fashion: The vibes—after all, this is Vibe Check—were immaculate.
The night began where many of my nights begin: surveying the scene with Max Oswald of Northway Brewing, who on this particular evening was pouring samples of four Northway beers and considering unfollowing the people on Instagram who only post videos of themselves working out at Metabolic. After causing a ruckus by smashing a block of ice repeatedly to fit into his cooler, he asked someone calmly, “What can I get you?”
“He’s obviously had some of that cask-strength ale,” the man said to me, impressed by the display, before turning back to Max. “I’ll have what you’re having.”
As Molly and I ventured out into the Canfield Casino, where 25 breweries, four wineries and meaderies, 12 distilleries and seven restaurants were serving up samples, we met quite the cast of characters. (I’m not lying—this event draws out some of Saratoga’s best.) When I asked one group if I could take their photo for Saratoga Living (keep reading to see all the photos from the evening), one man said, “Is that a hoity-toity magazine? You probably don’t want me in it.” After snapping the photo and walking away, I overheard him continue: “Great, I called out of work today, and now they’re going to see that in the magazine.”
Next, we ran into four self-proclaimed beer enthusiasts, two of whom were in town from Rochester, which they call a brewery mecca. “This area is really catching up,” the husband, Bill, said of the Capital Region’s craft beer scene. Some members of the group had been to the northernmost brewery in the US in Alaska as well as the southernmost in Key West. Meanwhile, Bill and his wife had been to what was, at the time, the only brewery in Cuba (they served only one type of beer) as well as Norway’s Aegir Brewing, which they later learned was started by a Rochester native (“That’s why they had good IPAs—he’s an American guy!”) Bill told me he has a whole drawer of T-shirts at home, all but two of which are from different breweries, and, on an unrelated note, that his son had just gotten married in a NYC courthouse amid the chaos of the Trump indictment.
Other memorable Brewseum-goers included Michael DeLorenzo, who showed us how to do hip circles to “lubricate the legs” and asked, upon seeing my notebook, if I was keeping a beer diary or writing an advice column. “This,” he said, referring to his current state, “is actually a cautionary tale column.” Then there was David Lundgren, who still has never had a sip of coffee, and is unashamed that he uses a nycap.rr.com email. “My grandma uses Nycap,” Molly said. “That’s worse than AOL.” And I’d be remiss not to mention the woman in the bathroom—which, if you haven’t been, is outfitted with a pair of velvet chairs and a couch perfect for mid-party girlfriend gossip sessions—who told us simply, “Don’t get married. If I knew then what I know now…”
As for the samples themselves, I heard good things about Mean Max Brew Works’ All Fluffed Up (a peanut butter and fluff porter), Springbrook Hollow Distillery’s Cowboy Coffee (vodka infused with Kru cold brew) and, of course, the Druthers mac and cheese. (“I’m on break,” I overheard someone say. “I’ll get the mac and cheese.”) The biggest hits of the evening, though, were the viking drinking horns for sale at the Helderberg Meadworks table. “This is a LARP,” one proud owner of both a horn and a horn holster informed me. (If you don’t know what LARPing is, you probably don’t deserve to own a beer horn.) “Three out of four dentists agree:” someone else chimed in, “If you buy the horn, you should buy the holster.”
Other attendees, like me, were just enjoying the event as a whole. “It’s my second year, and I’m loving it more and more,” one man told me. “The whiskey, the bourbon, the beer…”
“This sounds a lot like a country song,” his friend chimed in. A song about Night at the Brewseum? Yeah, I’d listen to that.
—Natalie
More photos from the Lions Club fundraiser here:
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