Run, Relax, Refresh: Full Boar Craft Brewery

You had me at “brewery”

Time for another installment of Run, Relax, Refresh, where our intrepid blogger combines a post-workday run with a stop at one of Syracuse’s fine local craft brewing establishments.

The Run:

This day’s journey took me along route 11 in North Syracuse, New York, to some residential side streets, and then spat me back out along the narrow shoulder of Taft Road, plus a couple of detours tacked on to get me to the 30 minute mark (my normal weekday exercise goal).

The route 11 portion of this run wasn’t bad, thanks to there being a sidewalk available set safely away from the road.  I was able to run past some of the town’s more quirky local businesses, such as Earthbound Metaphysical. I was hoping that this was a “Ray’s Occult Books” style shop of necromancy and paranormal resources, though it turns out they just sell fancy coffees and tees.

When I realized my route as originally designed was going to clock in at around 2.75 miles, I decided to tack on a couple of small detours.  One was to run down the access road at Hinerwadels, a famous local clambake joint that has sadly closed their doors this year (luckily, their gravel driveway remained accessible).  I also detoured over to the local junior high school and added a quarter mile by running a lap on their local track. These both had the added benefit of getting me off of Taft Road, where the shoulder is about as wide as Kate Moss’ torso.

The intermediate roads on this route, through residential North Syracuse neighborhoods, did have a nice display of foliage out for enjoyment.

A good workout, overall, not the most scenic path I ever traversed, but it conveniently started and ended at the Full Boar Brewery and Tap Room.

The Relax:

On to the Full Boar!

This awesome little joint opened in 2016 in a local shopping plaza — always a plus, ensuring that there’s plenty of parking and that it’s not too conspicuous to leave my vehicle in front for 30 minutes without shopping, while I get my run in.

This place has a lot to offer, first off — each table has a caddy of individual sized snacks, chips and pretzels.

I’ll have these

I personally went with the Dipsy Doodles, which are like Sun Chips’ sexy naked cousin in the snack world.

Lots of comfortable seating abound as well as snappy decorations, as you can see.

Oh good I was just thinking of trying beer for the first time

But now, let’s remember, this isn’t an HGTV decorating show. I’m not here to comment on the feng shui, I’m here to partake.

They have a great selection of brews, of all colors and flavors. Not to mention these tricked out growlers converted into hanging lights (OK WE GET IT DECORATOR-BOY).

SOOOO many choices

I sampled the peanut butter and jelly flavored blonde, which was just a bit too odd, and then had a sour mango, which was a refreshing enough beer (though I prefer my sour mango beers to be sourer and mangoier).

The real star of this “triple R” was the chocolate peanut butter stout.

The Refresh:

Look at this damned thing. LOOK AT IT!

It seems all too appropriate to enjoy one of these beers on the week of Halloween. After a couple of days spent “borrowing” from my kids’ trick or treating haul, this stout was scratching me right where I itched (not in the sweaty runner crotch kind of itch, more of the emotional yearning sort of way).  It’s basically a Reese’s peanut butter cup, only in beer form (which is candy for the liver).

As per the menu, this beer is a 6.6% ABV choice and ITBMCBB*, it’s “smooth and sweet with a deep roast flavor. Nice peanut butter nose balances well with the dark Chocolate.” At $5 for a 16 oz portion, it hits my wallet’s sweet tooth as well.

As for the flavor, well, it’s sweet without being “cloyingly sweet.” (Note: that phrase is borrowed from every single episode of the show Chopped ever to air on the Food Fatty network). And it’s a stout, with delicious roasted flavor. I enjoy many stouts and this one ranks very high on my list.  Shout out to the great pint glasses that the Full Boar uses, too.  That groove at the top is perfectly contoured to my fat beer loving lower lip.

The Prose-inator loved it too! No surprise there. How would you describe it, Prose-inator?

“This beer tastes like what it would taste like if a

made love to a

in the middle of a

while listening to the Greatest Hits Album of the world’s greatest band, ever, that being of course

and then together raised a baby with their shared feelings of

and, finally, that baby cried

tears of

into a frosty pint glass.”

Run, Relax, Refresh: The Preserve

Rose: Why do men chase women?

Johnny: Well, there's a Bible story... God... God took a rib from Adam and made Eve. Now maybe men chase women to get the rib back. When God took the rib, he left a big hole there, where there used to be something. And the women have that. Now maybe, just maybe, a man isn't complete as a man without a woman.

Rose: [frustrated] But why would a man need more than one woman?

Johnny: I don't know. Maybe because he fears death.

[Rose looks up, eyes wide, suspicions confirmed]

Rose: That's it! That's the reason!

Johnny: I don't know!

Rose: No! That's it! Thank you! Thank you for answering my question!

 

What does this fantastic scene from Moonstruck have to do with running?  Or beers?  Or any damn thing?

Let me explain, or, as Inigo Montoya said, “no, there is too much, let me sum up.”

Men run because they fear death.

Maybe.

I should speak for myself here, and not my entire gender.

I don’t fear death.  I recognize that it’s part of the circle of life.  I saw the Lion King.  You have to have someone die before they can hold the new cub up and sing “Nants ingonyama bagithi baba!”  (actual Zulu lyrics, I looked them up) and so on.  I get all that.

What I fear, instead, is a gradual, slow death, incapacitated by inactivity, lifeless, slumped over in a chair or a bed in some assisted living center, awake but not really awake.  Overweight, and achey, and struggling to haul my big old ass up off the couch or up a flight of steps.  I’ve seen too many other old folks go out that way.

I run because it restores a sense of vitality to my life.  I run because it’s a way to remind myself that despite my advancing years, I can stare mortality in the face, let the Reaper know that even though he will eventually catch me, that I’m laced up and ready to make him WORK to catch me.

So, having said that, let’s take a foot tour through one of the many fine neighborhoods in my town.

The Run:

Wednesdays are run club nights – my run club runs a (mostly) closed-to-traffic stretch of trails and city sidewalks marked off and known as the Creekwalk each Wednesday after work.  The full route is 5.5 miles, though some of it was closed for construction.  I modified the route today to shorten it up to a 5k (3.1 mile) route, as I have a marathon in a few days and didn’t want to overextend myself.  This is a nice meandering path around a few different parts of downtown Syracuse, including a loop around our interactive museum, the MOST.

Of the 26 minutes I was running, I had about a ten minute stretch to start where the sky was dry, though gradually “purpling,” and then a 15 minute downpour, followed by (of course) a let up just as my run ended.  Because that’s how these things go.  Likely, my pace picked up due to the heavy rain, as I was inclined to get my miles in and move on to the second portion of my trifecta.

The Relax:

Historically, the run club has started and ended our Wednesday runs at a cafe, chosen primarily due to its proximity to the Creekwalk and ample parking.

While pleasant in a general sense, and containing some outdoor seating, I don’t need coffee at 5:30 PM.  That’s a late hour for caffeine.  I generally have something more refreshing in mind that late in the day, especially after a 30 minute run.

So, wouldn’t we be a happy-as-heck run club to find out that a brand new pub/tavern was opening up right along our route?

Shiny and new and ready for visiting

The Preserve opened its doors officially earlier this month.  Our run club prez made arrangements with the place so they would set aside a table for us.

This place is really very pleasant and upscale.  I ran first and then headed in for a beer, and immediately felt like Rodney Dangerfield’s character from Caddyshack.

Cloth napkins?   Faux fireplaces?  People wearing pants?  I felt like some kind of fancy person.  Come on now.

They had a long, comfortable looking bar — so populated with people that I had to elbow my way in to look at the taps.

I’ll take one of those, please.

The bartender was pleasant in both appearance and disposition and she did that thing that girls do that makes me crazy.  She poured me a beer.  I love her!

The Refresh:

I had two beers today, the first of which was a nice, if not particularly memorable, IPA.  The second beer, however, was a revelation.

This bad boy, right here, the Good Nature Brewing American Brown Ale.

Ignore the branding on this pint glass

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am long partial to the brown ales.  The first post that I wrote for this blog, in fact, was a review of another brown ale.

Today’s beer was brought to me (via the Reserve) from the Good Nature Brewing Company, based out of nearby Hamilton, New York.  Their American Brown Ale (6.2% ABV, IBU 47) is described on the brewer’s web site, ITBMCBB*, as “rich with prominent chocolate & toffee notes. Dark & robust but smooth.”

I couldn’t agree more.

This thing had all kinds of depth of flavor.  I’m partial to most craft beers’ version of a brown ale, but this was hands down the best of all that I have had.  Sweet, and rich, and wonderful.

Perhaps I don’t have a sophisticated palette.  If you challenged me to find the notes, or hints, in this beer, I’d just look at you like you were growing extra heads, or make a joke about your mama’s mouth feel, or some other dumbass snarky wisecrack.

This is where I grow frustrated by my own lack of innate poetic talent.  (Yes, I do understand that prose, by definition, is a style of writing devoid of poetic flair, and that this is barleyprose.com, and, yet, I still strive to be more of a wordsmith here in this space, hence my desire to blog in the first place).

I’m going to work on a random beer superlatives phrase generator, that will pull from a few different sets of phrases to auto-magically build me poetic and beautiful descriptions of all the delicious beers I’m enjoying these days.  So, for now, imagine that the blanks are replaced by words and phrases suggested in parentheses.  Use technology to accomplish what my tired weeknight brain can’t do on its own.

“This beer tastes like what it would taste like if a _________ (real life occupation) made love to a _________  (creature from any ancient society’s mythology or folklore) in the middle of a ________ (uncommon vehicle or domicile), and then together raised a baby with their shared feelings of ________ (semi-appropriate emotion), and, finally, that baby cried _________ (positive adjective) tears of __________ (cold liquid) into a pint glass.”

This idea has real potential!

Until that tool is ready, go out and visit the Preserve, if you’re in town, or head out to Hamilton and grab a nut (brown ale!).

Run, Relax, Refresh: WT Brews

This is the first in what I expect to be a series of posts with a common motif.

That theme is to write about two things that are dear to me.  One of them, you might have guessed, is beer.

The other is a pursuit of mine that I feel goes hand in hand with beer, and, in the circles in which I travel, I think I’d be able to find a number of fine, sweaty folks who agree with me (no, the perspiring people I am referring to are not mob trial witnesses).

That second thing that is dear to me?  Running.

However, let’s not jump to any rash conclusions.  Not everyone who runs drinks beers.  Delicious, craft beers, with fruit flavors and subtle hints of things.  And, similarly, not everyone who drinks is a runner.  In fact, I know plenty of thirsty Americans who don’t run farther than their own basement fridges.

But, and here’s the thing, if you Venn diagram’d this sumbitch, well, you’d find quite the nice intersection of runners and beer drinkers.

Why do you think this is?

  1.  Surely, running will build up a thirst in a man.
  2.  The “runner’s high,” for those of us who feel a certain euphoric bliss at the end of a strenuous period of exercise, is strikingly reminiscent of the buzz that two flavorful malts/stouts/IPAs will give a man.
  3.  Running creates a calorie deficit.  If you don’t fill that hole, you could get weak and/or hurt yourself.
  4.  Beer is delicious (this is more of a universal truth)

The concept of this post, and likely subsequent ones, is to lay out a course and cover it at a brisk pace, near a local watering hole, and then follow said run with a cold brewski.  In other words, the “run,” the “relax,” and the “refresh.”  In that order.

Since we ramped up this little slice of bloggery, I’ve been meaning to stop at WT Brews, in Baldwinsville, New York.  Like the previously reviewed Buried Acorn, it’s a tap room, a place brewing a number of local beers that I’ve yet to try.

So prior to driving over there,  plotted out a very nice 3+ mile course that would start and end right at the brewery.  And I ran it.

The Run:

This course actually ran by two different cemeteries, both on Tappan Street.  It set me a wondering — how many people die in this little town?  Perhaps I should have altered the route to go past a third cemetery, on the basis of “good things come in threes” and “deaths come in threes,” either of which would be a suitable pattern to sustain.

It was, in other respects, a delightful, if not a bit warm, typical weekday run for me.  Most nights, after work, I try to get a 30 minute or so workout in at a pace that is comfortable but not taxing, and at the same time work up a good sweat.  This route surely qualified.

The Relax:

The run was followed by a pop in to the aforementioned WT Brews.  Forgive my piss poor photo taking skills here, but I was goofy with sweat and weakness and a lack of hoppy delights.

This tap room boasts both a number of in house products, as well as several guest taps.

Choices aplenty

This is a really enjoyable little place, hitting on a number of details that make it a sweet spot.  Complimentary pretzels, a dart board, and the A/C cranked up on an 80+ degree day, to name a few.

Not to mention chairs with an abundance of assfeel.

The Refresh:

Given my predilection for fruity, tart, not-so-beery tasting beers, I naturally went with the passion fruit gose.

I can’t tell you what their brewmaster might tell you about this beer — it’s so new, it’s not even mentioned on their list of beers on their web site (though they do identify 13 other home cooked products there).

This beer “gose” with pretzels

What I can tell you, though, is that this gose comes in a close second to the Brown’s Brewing Guava Gose written up here as my all time favorite beer of this style.  Tons of tartness and flavor.  It has “hints of yumminess” in it!

I would come back and slurp down more of these, without question.

It ended up being quite the nice capper to a weekday jaunt.  I shall be back, probably to sample their blonde ale and IPA, on subsequent visits.