Albany

Empire State Plaza | Albany, NY

Empire State Plaza | Fuj On Tap

I’ve been waiting for the perfect amount of cloud coverage on blue skies to take this photo for a while now. This is obviously not without its flaws, but likely the best I’ll do without a tripod. Check out the 360 degree interactive Photo Sphere view here, if you’re on a desktop or have the Google+ app installed on your mobile device.

Raw Bar at The City Beer Hall | Albany, NY

Dimitrios Menagias at The City Beer Hall

Quick post today. Catch Chef Dimitrios shucking some clams and oysters Friday nights this summer at the new raw bar on the patio of The City Beer Hall. The menu will be rotating to keep things fresh, with two different types of oysters, scrimp cocktail, clams and a little something else at the chef’s whim, from crudo to soft shell crabs to whatever else he can get his hands on. I stopped by with some friends last Friday for a quick bite:

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Artisanal Beer Dinner at The City Beer Hall | Albany, NY

Artisanal Beer Dinner at The City Beer Hall

On Monday night a whole slew of friends braved the impending “storm” to head out to The City Beer Hall’s Artisanal Beer Dinner (you can check out fellow blogger Kim’s post on dinner here). The storm that night ended up being a dud, but thankfully Chef Dimitrios and his crew, pictured above, put together a dinner and pairings that were anything but.

It’s been a while since my last beer dinner at The City Beer Hall and unlike most of the Wild Game Nights that center around the lineup from a specific brewery, this was open to the full range of offerings from local distributor Remarkable Liquids. It was nice that some limited releases were brought in just for the event and were poured for the first time or not available elsewhere in the state. Let’s take a look at the pairings of the night: Continue reading →

Checking in with the new World of Beer Albany

World of Beer Albany

Sunday night I had the chance to check out a little sneak preview and VIP event for the new World of Beer in Crossgates Mall. I’ve been to a couple of World of Beers while visiting family in FL and have had some fairly good experiences. It’s tough not to when you have great breweries like Cigar City to partner up with like they have down there. Here, the brewery situation is much more bleak (extremely evident on Sunday night’s tap list) which means reliance on the distributors for selection of beers and having knowledgeable staff able to curate a tap list from the beers available in the area will be crucial. We’ll get more into that when we talk about beer later.

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Founders Wild Game Night at The City Beer Hall

Founders Wild Game Dinner at The City Beer Hall

Still catching up on some of the events that happened before we headed Vermont for vacation, today I wanted to share some pictures and thoughts on May’s Wild Game Night at The City Beer Hall, this time featuring the beers of a wildly popular brewery out of Grand Rapids, Founders Brewing Company.

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Cheese 101 at The Cheese Traveler

Cheese 101 at The Cheese Traveler

Time to catch up on a couple of posts from before we went on our Vermont vacation. I’ll get to the Founders Wild Game Dinner later on this week, but first I want to talk about The Cheese Traveler.

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Empire State Plaza Sunrise

Empire State Plaza Sunrise

OK, I’m might be on a little of a sunrise kick lately. (It doesn’t hurt that, ya know, I’m actually awake when the sun rises in the winter!) This one comes from the back ledge of the Empire State Plaza with my trusty 50mm, like usual.

Camera: NEX-6 | Focal Length: 50mm | Exposure: 1/320 | F Number: f/11 | ISO: 100