Firehouse Brewing (Rapid City, SD)

7/15/12

As one of the only brewpubs in South Dakota, I've had Firehouse Brewing on my list for a long time.  I love the concept of a place built in an old firehouse, but the love affair ended there.  BA reviews are lukewarm at best and it seems like beer isn't necessarily the primary focus when looking online. With a fair amount of experience researching breweries, I've started to get a pretty accurate feel for a place ahead of time.  Plus, the guys at Monks in Sioux Falls said that I could find better places in Rapid City.  While part of the fun is being surprised, my beer-sense was spot on for this trip.  

As a walked into Firehouse at 8 pm on a  Sunday night, it was full to the brim and had a waiting list.  I hawked a seat at the bar after 15 minutes of lurking about and ordered a sampler of all of their beers.  Inside is clearly an old firehouse and a great brick building with a stamped tin ceiling in spite of the TGI Friday's decor.

The four ounce samples in low ball glasses were generous, but I didn't finish many of them.  Smoke Jumper Stout lead the pack with a drinkable smoked stout, and Smokin' Betty, another smoked beer but an amber this time, was a close second. But the rest dropped off precipitously.

    The bartender was friendly and helpful, but the sampler had no order or place mat to keep track of the beer.  I wrote down the beer names from the white board on the wall behind me and re-ordered them with the bartender's help to match my notes.  

Firehouse is a classic tourist trap brewpub in the vein of others I've been lured into before. In heavy touristy areas, my theory is that the beer suffers because there are no/few locals to serve and the quality falls as a result. Oblivious tourists will eat and drink there no matter what, so no reason to improve--just keep serving it up. We experienced this at Oak Creek Brewing in Sedona, Arizona a few years ago on a trip to see our niece Regan. And, I repeated the optimistic error at Estes Park Brewing outside of Rocky Mountain National Park, another pub where the traffic is to the detriment of the beer, just a few days before my stop at Firehouse. 

At Firehouse, the menu boasts the best food and brew in the Black Hills; I don't know about the food, but head to Spearfish and Crow Peak for the best beer in the area. 

5000

This week there was an odd confluence in my pursuit of beer.  I hit two 5000 milestones: total commercial beers sampled and total all time page views.

I knew I was going to hit beer 5000 some time this summer, but thought it would be in Belgium.  Evidently, the Denver road trip was more productive than predicted.  My beer notes started in 2000, so it took a bit over a decade with fifty plus festivals and over two hundred brewery visits.  Because I didn't try to count down to the exact beer, I'm unsure which beer was the magic number; however, I think I was at Firehouse Brewing in Rapid City, SD.  Unfortunately, it was one of the worst brewpub stops--ever.  My guess is that beer 5000 was Chukkar Pale Ale, which also happened to receive my lowest rating: 1, undrinkable.  Oh well--they can't all be world class brews.

On a bike tour in South Dakota with my nephew Ben a few years ago, we did a century ride (turned an 88 mi day into 100+ on our own) on the wrong day because the weather was too rough on the actual day of the official century ride.  We asked if we could still have a century patch (and if it counted) and the volunteer responded "Your money, your rules" and handed us each a patch. I decided it counts and I've adopted this experience as a  mantra to reduce some of my more overly uptight attitudes in life.  So, in Brussels next week, I'm making whatever great beer I'm drinking number 5000.

For the page views, I'm surprised that 5000 came so quickly.  I started in November and the page views have been steadily climbing except for a dip in February during speech season.  Posting on a regular basis seems to contribute, but recently page views accumulate in spite of a low posting rate while on vacation.  Approaching 200 posts, the amount of information on the blog is building and making it easier for people to find.

I'm still trying to transfer over three hundred beer reviews and a hundred plus onsite brewpub visits that I've written on BeerAdvocate over the years.  In process but hope to post them this fall on a semi-regular basis in between this summer's visits.  For the BA transfers, I'm back dating all of them to when they were originally written so that a reader can put the information into proper time context.  As a result my blog will eventually appear to be far older than it is: my money, my rules, so I'm not going to worry about it.  :).

Reflecting on the milestones, I've really enjoyed this journey into beer geekdom and glad to have readers to join the ride through what I hope is still the beginning.  I'm having a great time and plan to continue to be an overenthusiastic drinker and writer for the foreseeable future.