For the past few months I have been hearing about this "Beer Store" in Cleveland, across the street from West Side Market (a foodie paradise nestled incongruously Ohio City), and yesterday, when I was in the area with some friends I finally decided to go check it out. And it was a good thing that I did.
Embarrassingly, the first time I walked into
Bier Markt, I left and wasn't planning on coming back. The reason was that as soon as you walked in, you are not greeted with shelves of beer, or even a store at all; the foyer instead opens into a cute little restaurant/cafe with little curtained off booths (presumedly for a more intimate dining experience). Needless to say, having thought that I was going to a beer grocery store, I took the concierges' blank and awkward stares as a sign that I was in the wrong place. Fortunately, one of my friends was determined to figure out where we had gone wrong in our directions and so, ignoring our protests, went back in to inquire about the actual whereabouts of this purported beer selling establishment.
It turns out that our directions were correct after all, the place we had stumbled into was a cafe/restaurant, but it also had a make your own six pack deal of the beers available for to-go purchase. So armed with this new information, we walked through the curtain booths, and awkwardly gawking employees, to a what looked like a small bar at the back. It quickly appeared that this assumption, like our first one, was also flat out wrong.
The bar at the back was easily as big, if not bigger than the opening room, it also demonstrated succinctly why the place deserved the moniker "Bier Markt." As you walked into the back room, you were greeted by a massively long bar counter and a veritable army of taps (23 beers at any given time). There were small refrigerators behind the bar stocking and incredible amount of bottled beer, and what looked like a high-end champagne cooler meets gun-case storing especially rare brews. The walls were lined with empty bottles, and the decorated with vintage beer paraphernalia. Even though it was barely one on a Saturday, almost all of the bar stools were already taken. However even more impressive than all that was the wall behind the bar. Normally reserved for your liquors, especially top shelf brands, it was instead full of empty glassware
My suspicions were confirmed when inquired one of the bartenders about this particularity; "We like to serve each beer in their specific glasses," she informed me. Now, for those who don't know, often times beer companies have branded glass were, ranging from your boring
pint glass to the
elaborate glasses for drinking Kwak. Many of glasses are pricey and hard find, for starters, and so to any place, even a bar catering to beer drinkers to make that kind of investment, is something truly awesome indeed.
Unfortunately, we were on a schedule and so didn't have time sit down for a pint, but we did pick up menu to check out what we could buy for our do-it-yourself six pack. To our delight, In their bottled beers, they didn't skimp out either. Though they did have shitty beers (my opinion) like coors light, bud light, and pabst blue ribbon, their entire selection was mostly imported and currently rounded out at 76 bottles! Also, if you bought them to go, you got $1.50 off the retail price of each bottle. I was flat out speechless. I just now looked up the restaurant to double check by beer count and it was apparently rated in the Top Bars in America by
Draft Magazine in 2009 AND 2011. Seriously, I have no idea how I never been to this place until now, if I lived closer to Cleveland I would basically live out of this place!!
Anyway, after much deliberation and talking we eventually decided to just pick up a single six pack, because though the beers were awesome, their imported and uncommon nature made them a bit more on the expensive side. The beers we choose were:
- La Trappe Quadruple
- Unibroue la fin du monde
- Unibroue don de deu
- Ommegang Three Philosophers
- Kasteel Rouge (x2)
I am really excited about all of these beers and they will definitely be showing up on this blog soon But that is for the future. In the mean time, if you find yourself in Cleveland (or the great lakes area in general) and are looking for a great place to have a pint or get some beer to go, you have to check out the Bier Markt!
(for directions click
here)
