Good Southern Living on Tap at The Owl

Owl Tap Room
75 Commerce St.
Apalachicola, FL



Just a few short years ago finding good craft beer in a small Southern town was about as difficult as finding a virgin along Florida State’s sorority row.

Yuengling was about as exotic as it got.

My how things have changed.

For the better.

The Owl Tap Room in the oyster capital of the world, Apalachicola, Florida, is a perfect example.

The beer list spelled out on a big chalk board declares, “Welcome to beer heaven!”

Heaven indeed.

Recently opened as the younger, hipper sister to the frumpy white tablecloth Owl Café next door, the Owl Tap Room sports 15 rotating taps of top notch regional and national craft beers.

And I do mean top notch.

Somebody who knows their beer does the ordering for this place.

Obscure high quality beers from America’s greatest breweries like Ommegang, Bell’s and Southern Tier pour from the taps.

The best beers from Florida and the Southeast are also well represented such as Cigar City in Tampa, Intuition in Jacksonville and Highland in Asheville.

The selection is continually changing as evidenced by the multitude of colorful tap handles hanging from the rafters.

Florida was one of the last states in America to develop a taste for good beer, so finding creative breweries in the Sunshine State can be a challenge.

One of the best is Cigar City. So I was excited to try their High Seas IPA, a flavor I’d never tried before.

Cigar City is famous for its delicious Jai Alai IPA, but this was something different.

Brewed in Ponce, Puerto Rico and then dry hopped with Simcoe hops on its journey back to Tampa in a refrigerated vessel, High Seas IPA has a spicy, fruity snap you’d expect from a top notch IPA.

My Highland Gaelic Ale was a poor choice to follow such a kick-ass brew. There is no way the much more subtle flavors of this ale could match up against a hoppy IPA. But it grew on me as I approached the bottom of the glass.

Next up I had to try Hop House Pale Ale from Ommegang.

Ommegang is a tiny brewery in Cooperstown, New York (home of the Baseball Hall of Fame) that has earned a world renowned reputation. Literally.

Legendary Belgian brewery Duvel was so smitten by the Belgian-style beers being produced by this little Yankee brewery that they bought the damn place.

That’s like Formula One inviting me to race my Toyota Solara in the Monaco Grand Prix.

The Hop House Pale Ale is a hoppy version of a fruity Belgian ale. The Belgian yeast reminds you of the style while the spicy hop finish puts a smile on your face.

Next up I wanted to try the Thomas Creek Porter out of South Carolina but the guy sitting next to me got the last one before the keg blew.

Luckily for me, they replaced it with something even better, Southern Tier 2X IPA, one of my favorite double IPAs from one of my favorite breweries in America. Southern Tier never disappoints.

While my brain could still comprehend what I was drinking, I finished up with pint of Bell’s Smitten Rye, a hoppy pale ale brewed with rye grains, which adds a nice spicy kick.

While clearly beer is the most important item on the menu in the Tap Room, you can also order food.

Good thing too considering all the hops and alcohol flowing through my blood stream.

Of course the reason everyone comes to the tiny town of 3,500 people on the “Forgotten Coast” of Florida is to slurp down fresh Apalachicola oysters.

At the Owl, they proudly serve “13 Mile Brand” oysters.

Most oyster eaters on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts aren’t pretentious enough to fret over oyster brands.

To most southerners, an oyster is an oyster is an oyster.

At most, you might hear them comment about the oyster being “salty” or “fresh”, which varies based on the wind direction and the resulting salinity of the water from which it was plucked.

On the West Coast or at the Grand Central Station Oyster Bar in New York City, you pay four bucks a piece for oysters from specific estuaries and then must commence to pretentiously waxing poetic about the subtle differences.

Here in Apalachicola, if your oyster carries a brand, it will probably be “13 Mile”, which is the only brand sold by The Owl.

13 Mile is the name given to an oyster dock owned for four generations by the Ward family located along Apalachicola Bay which is…you guessed it…

…13 miles from town.

Most days you can catch one of their 13 Mile Brand shrimp boats tied up to the dock downtown.

Maybe I need to become a more pretentious oyster eater because my half dozen raw 13 Mile oysters were some of the biggest, plumpest, most delicious oysters I had in Apalachicola.

Clean, salty and sweet, each slurp was a succulent taste of Apalachicola Bay.

My 13 Mile Brand oysters were like a mini vacation on the half shell.

And at less than a buck a piece, an absolute bargain. After all, if you only have to transport them 13 miles in the back of a refrigerated truck, it dramatically cuts down the transportation costs.

And dramatically ups the freshness.

The fried 13 Mile oysters were excellent too, perfectly prepared to a nice golden crisp. The horseradish dipping sauce was good but unnecessary.

While the menu in the tap room is a bit more modest than in the more formal Owl Café next door, there was a nice selection of options to soak up all that good beer.

I went with the alligator sausage sandwich.

There’s just something fun about eating an animal more dangerous than me.

In the swamp in my backyard I might be at a disadvantage, but here at the Owl Tap Room it was Suit757 at the top of the food chain as I admired the black grill marks on my perfectly charred tube of mashed up gator parts.

The sautéed onions and sauerkraut gave the gator a nice sweet and tangy accent.

Full of beer, oysters and gator, I stumbled out onto Commerce Street a happy man.

I mean I’m always happy after a good meal.

But what put me in an especially good mood was knowing that the craft beer revolution has spread even to this tiny nook of the American South -- one of my favorite destinations of the wide Suit757 map.

A trip to Apalach no longer means a weekend of washing down my oysters with a steady stream of Miller Lite and Yuengling.

In fact, as I crossed the street, I peered into the empty storefront that soon will be “Oyster City Brewing Company”. The folks at the Owl are building their own brew pub!

How cool is that?

Life in the Confederacy just keeps getting better.

Rating: Bought the Shirt!

Fighting Command and Control Capitalism in Kalamazoo

Kalamazoo Beer Exchange
211 E. Water St.
Kalamazoo, MI





“There really is a Kalamazoo.”

If you need an emergency souvenir at the Kalamazoo Airport, a t-shirt emblazoned with that saying is your only option.

That should give you some insight into the self-esteem issues this frigid West Michigan city must grapple with.

But like most small college towns, Kalamazoo has nothing to be ashamed of, hitting far above its weight with a vibrant downtown full of fun bars, brew pubs and thirsty college girls.

That’s a hell of a lot more than Detroit can claim.

Hitting up a few of those beer halls was at the top of my agenda.

But I had no idea my evening of beer drinking was going to turn into an economics lesson.

First on the list was Bell’s Brewery -- probably the best known brewery in all of Michigan.

Bell’s is most famous nationally for its Oberon wheat beer and Two Hearted IPA. As always, I was more excited to try some of the other two dozen brews on tap that I can’t find at my local Total Wine.

My fellow Suit and I each ordered up a flight of a half dozen beers, handwriting our selections on a preprinted list which I submitted to the bartender -- after standing in a long, loooong line.

Clearly efficiency is not a goal at Bell’s.

Every customer in the crowded brewpub has to stand in the same line every time they want a new beer.

Shouldn’t an important economic lesson be that if you have a crowd of people who want to hand you their cash, you make it quicker and easier for them to do so?

Indecisive out-of-towners like me ordering a dozen samplers probably don’t help to speed things up.

But a flight is the only way to go.

It increases the odds that I might reach that pinnacle of beer drinking -- finding that one life-altering brew so exquisite, so unique that it will go down as one of the greatest beers to ever grace Suit757’s liver.


That search is what forces me out of bed every morning.

Well, that and the fact that I have a job that requires me to get on a plane at 6am and fly to Kalamazoo.

I mean, I have to find a way to pay for all this life-altering beer after all.

And at $36 for a dozen five ounce samplers, we clearly weren’t getting any hometown discount from Bell’s.

My selection leaned toward the darker, heavier, more potent offerings, including an unassuming 9.5% alcohol barleywine named “Bull in a China Shop”, a toasty and hoppy “Experimental” black IPA and powerful black imperial “Expedition Stout”.

The “Third Coast Beer” was a crisp ale that served as a nice reprieve from the powerful dark brews.

Of course I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try Bell’s ultimate imperial IPA on draft -- Hopslam -- which lived up to its name.

But the whole point of this exercise is to learn something new. Discover a previously unknown brew that will help fulfill the meaning of my beer drinking life.

I take this stuff seriously.

So I can’t just sample some beers and enjoy the evening.

No. This is science. This is journalism. This is research.

All rolled into one sudsy experiment.

I had to declare a winner.

That honor went to Bell’s “Smoked Stout”, a malty manly beer with just the right amount of smokiness.

Wow. This would go great with some of Bell’s meat smoked on premises.

How about the brisket sandwich?

In all this excitement and science and stuff, I hadn’t paid much attention to the food menu.

Or the time.

So my fellow suit went to stand at the end of the long line with clear instructions -- food and a full pint of smoked porter.

Fifteen minutes later he finally reappeared with a couple beers -- and some bad news.

The
kitchen was closed.

WHAT???

What packed brewery in a college town shuts down the smoker at 9pm? Haven’t these people ever heard of beer munchies?

First rule of economics -- if you have a crowd of hungry beer drinkers on premises, sell them food!

Now I was irritated. And hungry.

My mood didn’t improve when I learned that before I could wander the streets of downtown Kalamazoo in search of sustenance, I had to go back and stand in that damn line again just to pay my $50 beer tab.

Now what?

After a series of texts to three different Suits who all spent their college years drinking beer in Kalamazoo, there was a consensus -- Kalamazoo Beer Exchange. Serving food until 11pm.

That works for me.

Housed in a cool looking old downtown warehouse, Kalamazoo Beer Exchange sported a nice selection of local and national craft beers.

Most interesting of all, the prices for the draft beers fluctuate every fifteen minutes based on supply and demand.

Suit757’s inner economist (Austrian school, of course) suddenly got very excited about this concept.

When the demand for a particular beer increases, the price goes up. When nobody is ordering it, the price goes down.

All of this is tracked on a big stock exchange electronic score board above the bar that I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off of.

Did I tell you I was an econ major in college?

Yeah. Pretty exciting stuff.

Even cooler still, our waitress informed us that occasionally there will be a “Market Crash” when all the beer prices tumble to bargain levels. Despite my eager anticipation, that never happened the entire two hours we were there.

Supply and demand is the most foundational of all economic principles. Virtually all of economics branches off from this basic concept.

Being the shrewd economist I am, I quickly strategized that rather than ordering a local brew like Bell’s, perhaps I could maximize the return on my investment by going for a more obscure beer that might be in less demand.

Sure enough, Green Flash Double Stout out of San Diego seemed to be priced well at just $5.25 per pint. A strong 8.8% sweet malty brew like this was a virtual steal for five bucks.

Sure enough, after I ordered it, the price jumped up to $5.50.

Then fifteen minutes later it dropped back down to $5.25.

And stayed there the rest of the night.

Huh? Shouldn’t there be a bit more volatility in this beer market?

My Milton Friedman deep inside me grew suspicious that maybe this “free market” might not be so free after all.

After ordering a Penny Dreadful, a dark 6.8% beer from Brewery Terra Firma out of Traverse City, I soon realized that all the beers were trading in a very narrow range of about 25 to 50 cents.

This is no free market after all!

It’s like Chinese command and control capitalism. What the ChiComs call a “Socialist Market Economy.”

It has the façade of a free market but the prices are actually set by the central government and never trade outside a narrow band.

Just like the interest rates set by the Federal Reserve.

Or the Yuan that the Chinese hope will replace the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency after the Fed finishes its mission to destroy the buck.

I was soooo disappointed.

Kalamazoo Beer Exchange is a neat concept, but like our supposedly American capitalist system, it would only work properly if the central authorities let it operate freely.

Otherwise the fluctuating prices of the beer are just an irritation.

Unfortunately, the food did nothing to cheer me up.

The steak nachos with their crispy baked tortilla chips and pile of sautéed onions and peppers, tomatoes, sour cream and guacamole weren’t too bad -- except for one very serious problem.

There was virtually no steak on my steak nachos.

Dude. First rule of Econ 101: Do not cheat Suit757 out of his meat if you expect a good review!

The “Blue Plate Special” was a sausage and peppers pizza for ten bucks.

It sounded like a good deal, but ended up just as further real life evidence of yet another important economic principle: You get what you pay for.

Forget eating this pizza with my hands -- the way God intended pizza to be consumed.

In fact, it was so soggy, a knife and fork wasn’t enough.

A straw would have been a more appropriate utensil to eat this damn thing.

The more of it I attempted to slurp down, the more irritated I got.

And the marginal pleasure I derived from each additional beer I consumed seemed to lessen with every sip.

Could this be the “Law of Diminishing Returns” setting in?

Considering how much high potency beer I had consumed and the approaching midnight hour, I don’t think there was any question.

It was time to go back to the Best Western.

I was learning yet another important economic lesson.

Kalamazoo Beer Exchange and Bell’s Brewery could learn some lessons too.

You can’t fight the basic laws of economics. Sometimes you just have to obey them.

Rating: Wouldn’t Wear Shirt if They Paid Me.