Roeg's Picks for 2012: Best Bar Bottle Selection

Best Bar for Bottle Selection: A place can excel as a great bar for bottled beer by offering new and hard to find beers, cellaring a lot of rare beers and selling them at a premium as vintage, or providing a great showcase of bottled beers that you can take home with you.  These bottled beers are often expensive, and don’t allow to try to many in an evening.  Here are my favorite bottled beer bars:

Gold: Mahar’s, Albany, NY – My hometown bar recently announced that their building had been sold, and their future is uncertain.  Too bad, since this place had it all by allowing you to take bottles to go, encouraging splitting of big beers (allowing you to try more), and keeping track of the beers you’ve already tried. It may be an overly sentimental pick for me, but I don’t think I’ll truly appreciate how much I’ll miss a spot that has been a second home to me until it’s gone.

Silver: D’s Six Packs and Dogs, Swissvale, PA – The Chicago dogs are delicious at D’s (http://www.ds6pax.com/), the drafts always have something new, but it is the bottle selection that I’d come to really appreciate on my business trips.  Stop by on the first day and you have beers for the evening in the hotel room for the rest of the week.  I love grabbing a draft and perusing the merchandise.

Bronze: Bocktown Beer & Grill, Pittsburgh, PA – While D’s is for the beginning of my business week, Bocktown (http://www.bocktown.com) is my go to place when leaving town.  Close to the airport, I can get great food, good drafts, and enough bottled beer to fill up my suitcase for the trip home.  My most notable bottle from Bocktown this year was Victory’s Dark Intrigue.

Honorable Mention: The House of 1000 Beers (http://www.houseof1000beers.com) in New Kensington, PA is my new Pittsburgh destination, and they may have even more bottles and drafts available than the other Pittsburgh places.  I’ll have to go back again next year before giving them a promotion on the listings. My favorite from the House this year was a 2010 rum barrel aged version of Mikkeller’s Santa’s Little Helper.

"24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence?" - Stephen Wright