Take heed dear glutton there is even but a refuge for thee amongst the beige bulging bastions of the western suburbs!

My wife and I took the brave venture into the western suburbs this weekend to knock some glasses with my folks. Determined to find a dining experience that didn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out with baby toys, I decided to use this here internets to aide in my acquiring a high-fat, high-calorie, high-delicious meal that would be served with a decent selection of carbonated beverages.

I turned to the trusty BeerAdvocate BarFly directory and looked for a well reviewed beer bar in the area. After reading several mediocre reviews that all mentioned the Bavarian Lodge as a preferred alternative, I looked it up.

My christ, I have seen the face of god and it smells like Schweins Hax’n!!!

Located unassumingly on Ogden Avenue just north of Yackley in Lisle, IL the Bavarian Lodge is a tudor-style house with room for probably 150 to 200 guests. It’s split evenly in half, the west side is a sit down dining area and the east side is a bar with plenty of tables to belly up to and dine as well. The walls are appropriately decorated in murals, mounts and glass cases full of beer steins and glassware.

They serve authentic german cuisine and serve it very ceremoniously well. Cabage rolls, potato pancakes, schnitzel out the wazoo, rouladen, saurbraten, schpaetzel, thuringer and, my favorite, which I’m not sure I’ll be able to go another full week without ordering again, the Schweins Hax’n properly crisped.

From their menu:

A two-pound boiled pork shank, served skin-on… the best Eisbein this side of Munich!

What’s more is that their beer selection would hold it’s own amongst the finer beer bars in Chicago, and is, hands down the best beer selection you will find anywhere in Illinois west of the city. On the night we were there I was able to sample the following on draught: Duchess de Bourgogne, Surly Smoke (amazing!), Founders Backwoods Bastard, and Dogfish Raison D’etre. And this was only a fraction of the options of their 29 pulls. Their belgian bottled section lists near 100.

Now I’m a guy who will speak with a certain amount of hyperbole perhaps a little too often, but believe me that I am not speaking with even an ounce of hyperbole right now when I say this was the best dining experience I’ve had in possibly my entire life. How about that? And I’ve eaten at the Publican, the Bristol, Aqua in SF, Sabatino’s on Irving and everything in between pretentious haute bullshit and low rent greasy spoons in the best cities around this planet. The Bavarian Lodge was authentic, delicious, warm, unpretentious and totally fucking educated about their food and beer. The setting was inviting and home-like, the staff was attentive and friendly and the bill was surprisingly low.

I’m all itchy and bug-eyed and I’m afraid I may try and start a religion or something. I’m prepared to offer my first born just to see how the chefs might prepare it.

And, if you haven’t already been tossed into a tongue rolling revelry of culinary and zythological ecstasy than how about a set of house rules that ban children and hollering dipshits from the bar area?

I now understand how movements are started and empires are built. I now comprehend how the mind can be enslaved to a world of senses for ever and, more than certainly likely, for the betterment of all.

Amen.

My wife and I went over to Bluebird last night for a few beers to celebrate – I’m not sure – the ever grinding wheels of time as they continue to where down on the thinning teeth of our souls’ cogs, forcing us to move slow and want to move even slower? Yes, that’s probably a good approximation of what we were celebrating.

We started with a bottle of Saison D’Epeautre that was served at the perfect temperature. This was a tasty, dry, mildly-spicy beer with just the right amount of a fleeting sweetness to keep it interesting.

But where the evening really came into it’s own was with the ordering of a 750ml bottle of Jolly Pumpkin’s “La Roja”. Brewed in the “flemish style” this beer hit every note presently getting my fairly large panties in a bunch. Funky with a little sour and fruit on the nose the beer drinks creamy, full, and with the perfect balance of sour and spice on the tongue. My eyes grew wide with amazement every taste I took of this well-crafted brew. I bowed in reverence and saw, perhaps, just a shimmer of light from the future radiating back onto my present self, beckoning me down a road of better living and finer brews cobble-paved by a deeper exploration of the flemish reds.

I was pleasently surprised to find that the unfortunately named Jolly Pumpkin brewery is not far from home, just over a couple borders in Dexter, Michigan. I will definitely be paying them a visit this summer. Too bad the motorcycle riding between here and there is pretty crummy.

On our way home the wifey-poo ducked into Hot Chocolate and picked up a baker’s dozen of Mindy’s cookies. All the cookies were insanely delicious though the molasses seemed to actually defy certain laws of physics.

Snowboarding is not a cheap hobby, especially for an aspiring degenerate living in the flatlands of Illinois. For that and a myriad of other equally limp excuses I managed a 15 year hiatus between our daily hill bombings after school at 4 Lakes in Lisle and when my wife finally inspired me enough to get back into boarding in 2005. A lot changes happen in a guy’s body between the ages of 16 and 31 – especially in the areas above the balls and below the neck – but what didn’t change in that time was the resounding pitch my neurons hit as I shuttle down a mountainside with a piece of plied fiberglass bound around my hooves.

Getting back into riding at an age just on the ripe side of young I wanted a board that was competant without getting ahead of me, reasonably priced, but well built and had some grounding in my roots as a rider having learned what passed as my skill on an 1988 Burton Air. After some research and demos I picked up a 2005 Burton Triumph.

Burton’s answer to an all mountain board fit the bill, but also came with some of the drawbacks lower priced Burton’s are known for: it was a bit stiff, a little too heavy, and didn’t have a whole lot of pop to it. This was fine for the first season or two as I was getting my sea legs back, but by last year my skills had progressed well beyond where I left them in the early ’90s and I was longing for a board that had better action and response, something that felt like an extension of me and not simply an addition.

After some research I settled on the 2009 Ride Prophet 164. I wasn’t doing any park riding and prefer mostly nice long runs hitting walls and kickers so I wanted something a little bit longer than the 160 I was riding on the Burton. I also wanted something that was going to edge a bit better as I was getting more comfortable at higher speeds. The Prophet and most of Ride’s boards are known for their great edging due to the high angle steeps on the edge as well as the material used – the same as is used in skateboard wheels – that help dampen vibrations on rougher, tighter snow. This has proved pretty beneficial in this year’s pretty underwhelming snow accumulation. What further put the Ride Prophet as my top contender was that it’s lines were a bit more severe than the very conservative Burton Triumph with a more spooned out nose and thinner mid-body, this combination would help it perform better in powder as well as packed stuff on groomers.

I picked the deck up for dirt cheap from The House Board Shop last spring when they had a 50% off sale. At $250 there was literally no better board that could come even close to suiting my specific needs for the mountain and then when you add in the wicked, magic dork graphics that bespeckled the board with wizardy sigils and all-seeing eyes laid in a gorgeous multi-layer transparency with a minimal color scheme, you had a snowboard cocktail that wooed all my little buttons into a seriously focused spending frenzy.

So she looked pretty and was hyped appropriately, but how did she ride?

Pretty good, I must say. I’ve tried her on the crummy packed shit at Devil’s Head, the crummy packed shit at the Canyons, the fluffier shit at the Canyons, some pretty decent stuff in Reno, Tahoe and also at Solitude and in every condition the response has been fantastic; the action is super live, the edging has been like a race car, and the weight distributes very well across the board making the board seem almost invisible or at least not in need of any conscious negotiating.

The one downside I’ve come up against so far is that it doesn’t seem to take a beating quite as well as the admittedly more brutish Burton Triumph. I’ve had my Prophet out for about 8 outtings this season and I’ve already pierced through every layer of my base and have begun chipping down through multiple layers on the top of my board. I do have a tendancey to go harder on my stuff than most, though I still can’t figure out how the hell I tore up the bottom the way I did as I haven’t been doing too much crazy stuff on rocks that I can remember. But the damages aren only disconcerting in relation to the time spent on the board, they are nothing some epoxy and TLC won’t fix.

All in all the Ride Prophet 164 is head and shoulders above the also very competant though clumsier 2005 Burton Triumph. It was the perfect progression for me with more aggressive handling and more taught action, the Ride Prophet certainly stands up as one of the more enjoyable all mountain boards available.

Anat Baron’s “Beer Wars” is finally available to stream on Netflix.

“Beer Wars” attempts to give the general consumer an insider’s look into the politics and pitfalls of the beer industry. With a couple of case studies, the most interesting being Sam Calagione and Dogfish Head, Baron shows the sysophisian struggle of the passionate craft brew industry against the monolithic big 3.

While not always successful “Beer Wars” does manage to illustrate many of the economic sleeper holds multi-national corporations have on America’s present interpretation of capitalism using the craft beer underdogs to help define and defend the more satisfying role in this battle of good versus evil. The film is at it’s best while exploring the passionate craft beer enthusiasts drafting them as the high-minded Robespierre’s pursuing great beer as both the finest weapon and the ultimate prize of this heated and holy war.

Baron has taken some annoyingly unsurprising criticism from beer geeks posturing as arm chair film critics, though typically these critics can’t seem to get beyond editorializing on the beer and brewers as people and recipes and miss the forest for the ultimately, in the context of what the film is exploring, not-very-important trees. In that way, “Beer Wars” works also as a successful mirror for craft beer enthusiasts to stare at themselves, smug and contemptuous, for a little while longer.

So we bottled what may be our best (3rd) batch of an IPA yesterday. The whole process went incredibly smooth from sparge to bottling. We were so happy with ourselves that we felt a celebratory beer was in order. We put the beer in the back of Matt’s car and headed over to the Small Bar.

They had some great pulls yesterday: Surly Furious, Bockor Cuvee Sour Ale, Victory Prima Pils, Half Acre’s Baume, Tyranena’s Dirty Ol’ Man. It was a fine, fine celebration indeed, well armed and strategically executed. We even tried some of Rogue’s Whiskey, which, like Stranahan’s Flying Dog, they make from left over mash from their Dead Guy Ale. Rogue’s Whiskey was remarkably smooth with a touch of sweetness and a salty back end that is probably from them aging it in oak barrels by the Ocean. Though they only age the stuff for a week, so it’s also possible that salty flavor is from their talented marketing department as well.

But I digress. It was a monumental celebration. And goddamn, the Victory Pils and Dirty Ol’ Man were fantastic. Of course, all the beers were great, especially the sour from Bockor, a pitch-perfect modestly bodied sour that makes instantly weak any devotee of the flemish sours. But I hadn’t had the Victory Prima Pils until yesterday, so it really stood out for me.

Victory refers to it’s Prima Pils as a German Pilsner and though it may come off sounding initially a bit derisive, I would call Victory’s Prima Pils an American Pilsner, or maybe a New American Pilsner as I feel this is the first beer that actually deserves it’s name. It’s hop heaviness serves as a refreshing compliment to the crispness of the beer, the stuff practically snaps off and crunches in your mouth. There is some discussion amongst the beer geeks as to whether Victory is stretching the truth claiming they only use German malts in the Prima Pils. Some brewers are convinced the slight sour apple taste – the often undesirable acetyldehyde – on the front end is derived from wheat. There’s also some discussion as to whether this is an all Saaz brew or if there is some Northern Brewer at the bittering point. Wherever the flavors are coming from they are well proportioned. This beer is crisp, bright and hoppy enough to keep my filthy fingers digging back in for more. And I will.

This may be one of only, oh, three or four times I will say this in my life, but… that Dirty Ol’ Man, he was very good to me last night. Strong chocolate notes in a creamy body with just enough roasted character and hopiness to keep the stout from going past it’s surprisingly sessionable self.

And, as always, the food at the Small Bar was great, too. The pork nachos are incredible, the poutine is fucking trascendental, but yesterday we started with their Buffalo Chicken Spring Rolls:

chopped chicken sautéed in our house buffalo
sauce then wrapped with crumbled blue cheese
and fried in a traditional spring roll. served
with carrots, celery, green onion and blue
cheese for dippin

They’ve somehow managed to achieve the impossible and improve upon buffalo wings, making them easier to eat, and crunchier with a deep fried shell to safely transfer them from plate to face.

And as always the staff at Small Bar are some of my favorite people in the world, they always take good care of us.

But, OH SHIT! I forgot! The whole reason we came into the Small Bar to celebrate in the first was because of our beer. That we left in the car. In 20* weather. For now almost 24 hours.

Shit.

I woke up this morning, and while sharing a lovely breakfast with my equally lovely wife she off-handedly reminded me of my orphaned babies in the truck. This is, perhaps, as good as any argument for why I shouldn’t father children as well. It would be a shame to go out and properly celebrate my kid’s learning to ride a bike, or learning to read, or using the toilet only to come to the stark realization the next day that I would up leaving him in the car for 24 hours while I proudly drank in his honor.

But, in my defense, children and yeast are pretty resilient. After moping for a few minutes I hit the Beer Advocate forum and queried the geeks. And in under ten minutes I had 2 responses that put my mind at ease. Essentially, all I needed to do was give the beers a god swirl or two, put them back in the crate and expect full carbonation as if nothing had happened. My fear was, leaving the beer at around 35* for about 10 hours (20 hours in the car in 15-25* weather) that the yeast had gone dormant and wouldn’t get back up anytime soon to eat. But apparently, I have more than one thing in common with yeast, not the least of which is the will to perservere through a decent night’s rest with more than a little bit of snacking.

So, our team of crackhead brewers here at OA have found a new and interesting way to try and ruin our beer. Fortunately, this attempt was a bit easier to recover from than some mistakes of the past have been. I now wait patiently for the next manner in which we can subjugate ourselves on the road to delicious and plentiful beers.

I’m just learning this brewing process and it’s about one of the most enjoyable problem solving exercises I’ve tackled in my life and I’ve tried a few.

This morning on the bus I was trying to walk my amateur self through the process of how I would modulate my beer’s alcohol level either higher or lower. My mind slowly, and stickily dragged it’s wheels back to information on Enzymes and how they effect the starches in the beer. I then remembered that, of course, more sugars in your wort equals more alcohol in your beer and vice versa. I then wanted to remember how specifically I could create more or less sugars in my wort.

When I got to work I googled this quandry and came across the on-line version of John Palmer’s “How To Brew”. It was exactly what I needed. From what I can tell just about every question a budding brewer might have is answered clearly, specifically and thoroughly.

The short answer to my question of how to control the sugar content in my homebrew was found on page 5 of Chapter 14:

A lower mash temperature, less than or equal to 150°F, yields a thinner bodied, drier beer. A higher mash temperature, greater than or equal to 156°F, yields a less fermentable, sweeter beer. This is where a brewer can really fine tune a wort to best produce a particular style of beer.

I’ve been going out to Salt Lake City pretty consistently for the past 5 years, at least once a season, to indulge in what could arguably be the best snow in the world. Over that time I’ve learned a couple things that are worth sharing.

1. It’s cheap to fly there.  Real cheap.  Typically it’s about $200 round trip from Chicago to SLC depending on who you fly with.  Add in taxes and the cost of shipping your board both ways and it will realistically cost you around $250.  Compare that to $450 to Reno or $600 to Aspen or Vail and there’s just no question.  Check expedia.com and try not to travel on heavy days like Fridays and Mondays and you should find some great deals.
2. They have the largest variety of resorts within less than 1 hour of the airport.  Sure Reno has Mt. Rose and Aspen has the Highlands, Snowmass and Buttermilk, but SLC has an incredible variety of resorts like The Canyons, Park City, Brighton, Solitude, Alta, Snowbird and more all within 30-45 minutes of the airport.
3. Buy discount tickets.  Utah Ski & Golf has a great selection of discounted tickets for sale right downtown SLC.  You can ride most resorts all day, any day for just over $50.  In some cases that can save you up to $40 in a single day.
4. The Park City area is nice because it has plenty of infrastructure to house and distract you while not on the mountain, but Park City gets the least amount of snow of all the resorts.  Check SkiUtah.com for an honest daily listing of snow reports.  Just this past Sunday the Canyons got 1″ of new snow, whileThe Wasatch Mountains get crazy dumped on consistently that last week of March every year.  Last year I was out there for 7 days and they got at least 1 foot of snow 5 of those 7 days and that storm kept up the week after I left.  Now, granted, this is an el nino year and snow has been pretty scarce everywhere, but if I were a gambling man I would still put all in that the last week of March is the perfect time to hit your favorite resort or two in the Wasatch Mountains.
5. For the past few years the Canyons has been running a great deal during that last week of March and first week of April.  $200 gets you lodging, 2 lift tickets and 2 breakfasts every day.  So far I have not seen them advertising this deal for this year though, the closest being the Ski Free & Breakfast, but you only get that deal if you rent one of their suites that start at $350.  Not as good of a deal.  I’m going to keep my eyes open and I’ll shout if I see that deal come up.  It’s kind of a bummer because then you’re stuck riding the Canyons the whole time you are there, but the price and convenience is just real hard to beat.  Plus, if you’re staying at the base of the mountain, no storm, even the one as epic as last season’s that shut down 80 up to Kimball Junction, can keep you off the mountain.

I know this isn’t normally our bailiwick here at OA but I have recently been spending every minute I can spare watching Werner Herzog documentaries, largely for the sheer hilarity of the voice overs. My favorite so far is My Best Fiend, an exploration of his relationship with Klaus Kinski. The man is, I think, as funny as any comedian living today.  If you’re not a fan, become one.  If you are a fan here is a great mock voice over done Herzog style to the Curious George creation story.

ps. The new Curious George art sucks.

I knew when we saw the married couple of hasidic midgets at the airport that magic was in the air, real and ancient magic, the kind of magic that builds nations, changes lives and alters the course of human history. Those little buggers in their devotional doll clothes had clearly been sent by central casting as harbingers of The Great Plenty, though there was little indication as to what form the Plenty wold come. But, after locking paths with those likable little jewish folk, it was clear that grand mysteries were destined to be revealed.

Naturally, since we were about to leave on a snowboarding trip I had assumed that magic would come in the form of fluffy white pillows of dry western snow, sheared rock faces and fresh mountain air. And it did in spades. But, on this fateful trip into that picturesque crease that splits down the center of the lushly decadent acreage of the fiercely individuated Nevada and the ceremoniously broke and broken California, there would be more.

Our plan was to fly into Reno, grab a half day at Mt. Rose then head into Tahoe for a couple days on Heavenly. But as we talked to people at Mt. Rose it become very apparent that, forced to choose, we’d be fools to skip Kirkwood.

30 minutes from the Reno airport, Mt. Rose offers something rare, the ability to leave Chicago in the morning and still have a half day’s worth of riding waiting for you upon landing. Mt. Rose is home to an impressive collection of pretty dramatic chutes and decent off trail runs that were challenging, though a bit rockier than they betrayed on first glance.

On the east side of Mt. Rose there’s the Winter’s Creek Lodge, as fine as any place you might find at a resort to stick your face into beer and it has an all glass wall providing one of the more staggering views of the Sierras we would get all weekend.

After a few good hours of riding and some carbonated medication we set off for our accommodations.

We picked up what seemed like a deal for our room on Craig’s List; $250 for 3 nights at the Diamond Resort, a time share community that was part day care center and part nursing home. It wasn’t a terrible price at $40 a night per person, but it was advertised as having a kitchenette. Unfortunately, the kitchenette consisted of a sink, a small fridge and a microwave, definitely not equipped for actually making food of any consumable sort and rendering that $40 a night price tag a bit more expensive by forcing us to eat out. Another bummer was that the pool and hot tub weren’t outside, a strange decision in a mountain town. Oh, and the foyer between our room and our neighbors smelled like an old person urine, that fine senior solution of one part stale, salty, manwater to two parts medicine. Ah, yes, and the maid service never so much as peaked in our door. But so what, I didn’t take this trip for the accomodations, though it is worth noting that when we return we won’t be staying at the Diamond Resort in South Lake Tahoe.

But where the Diamond Resort with it’s geriatric situations failed us Heidi came to our rescue. And our rescue, in all it’s Nordic splendor, came stacked three high and smothered in butter and warm maple syrup. That’s right, I’m speaking of bacon filled pancakes, specifically Heidi’s Pancake Houses Bacon Stack. The Bacon Stack is a delicious, classic repeller cake filled with chunks of bacon cooked right inside of Heidi’s delicious batter. Heidi’s also offers a bacon waffle which, in retrospect, I think might be even better than the bacon pancakes, the light crunchiness of the waffle I’m guessing will provide an even more appropriate throne upon which that sweet salty hog can hide before running flavor ambushes on your jaded palette. Every dish at Heidi’s is served lovingly large with a clementine on the side and our waitress, Jane, was about as sweet and attentive as you’d want your waitress to be without being creepy or phony or following us home.

Our first full day of riding at Kirkwood killed. Natural bowls, rolling tubes, soft snow and a warm afternoon sun. It delivered on every level you would want and then some. I was loving this one run that we did several times picking it up off of Solitude, scooting behind a terrain park and then ducking into some tree lines. It was a long tube filled with rollers and little grade changes and drops. It hadn’t been touched much and nobody was around when we were riding it.

Later, we dug around on Deadwood Spur for a while picking out some nice lines inside the trees. Trevor ultimately grew several extra pairs of balls and took the t-line up to the top of Larry’s Lip. I’m just a nice midwestern boy whose synapses aren’t quite as damaged as his so I kept chipping away on Deadwood Spur while he did that.

After 4 good hours of riding we bellied up at the Tower to indulge in some of Lake Tahoe Breweries fine devices. The beer was effective enough, perhaps too much so, as before long I found myself on “The Wall” climbing to just over 9,400′ and what I was assuming with increasing certainty would be my complete undoing.

Whinnying like a small, gelded, lamb the only solace I could find was in the continued promises to punch Trevor in the nuts repeatedly as soon as I could find some level ground on which to properly levy my strength. But before too long he was talking me through it and managed to get my brain to more adequately process the information needed to get myself down the mountain.

Once I decided I was actually going to ride the bloody mountain and not slide down as slowly and perpindicular as possible, it was an incredible release. I stopped staring as far below me as my eyes could theorize terrible events and started focusing in the 20′ in front of me that I could actually react and respond to and hope to manage and maintain a desirable fate. I kept my knees bent and soft and popped my hips around as I essentially jumped down the mountain from point to point. I stayed loose, remained focused and fell into a rhythm the eliminated everything in the world from existence but my brain and the contours of this holy mountain.

I got to the bottom, my lungs dialated, my pupils air tight and my whole body running at a resonant hum. I couldn’t get back up the mountain soon enough.

We did a few more runs, hit the Tower for some more libations and cheesy fries, before ultimately loading up our coffees and heading back down the pass to South Lake Tahoe. We still had a day of riding left, but it was clear my peak had passed.

That night we hit the Lakeside Casino for an $8.50 Prime Rib dinner, got a peanut butter smothered ice cream at the Red Hut and passed out watching the X-Games.

Sunday was a gorgeous bluebird day, but my legs were shot to hell. Early on Trevor hiked up to the highest point on the resort at Thimble Peak and rode down the mountain to random spikes of hoots and hollering.

We split the rest of the day between the taps and the trails lighting out of Kirkwood before the musical illiteracy of the spongey-headed native Californians could truly negatively and permanently effect us.

Seriously, I heard a dub remix of Pink Floyd’s “The Lunatic Is In the Grass” not once, but twice in the same day. I’d rather be raped by a board room full of advertising geeks dressed in paisley priest outfits and farting axe body spray from their bleeding pores than have to sit through another downbeat of that tasteless morass of sonic psuedo-goovism ever again.

I don’t know, maybe I had had too much of that cookie from that kind native and it was making me edgy and cranky, but for the love of all that has self-respect and a functional state economy I needed to get home STAT, take myself a music bath and wash this third rate schwag rock hippie horse shit off me for once and for good, “bro”.

We retreated to the nursing home and slowly, cathartically, and with a kind of religious attention to detail cleaned ourselves and shuffled out the door for the casino. It had been an amazing run, Tahoe had been quite good to us and the midgets had pulled their tiny little magical weight. We bellied up for some Black Jack that paid for our dinner and drinks and brought a slow, grounded, mahogauny sensibleness to our weekend’s pursuits.

Sitting at the Harrah’s about to get dealt my 6th of 9 Black Jacks I would win for the evening when the pit boss summed it up better than I ever could, he said:

“This is fucking Nevada, sir, you can smoke in here if you like. Hell, we’ve got gambling, fishing, all kinds of skiing, prostitution, those amazing lakes out there and our bars are open 24 hours a day, every day, no matter what. Could you possibly need anything else?”

Yes, one other thing. Bacon filled pancakes…

“Growlers have been around since Christ was a child,” Mr. Granger said. “We’re not doing anything new.”

In the late 19th century and the early 20th century, both The New York Times and The Brooklyn Eagle regularly published contentious stories about the containers, which then took the form of small galvanized pails. The articles cataloged the complaints of saloon keepers, who thought growlers cut into their profit, and those of temperance groups, who hoped to curb home drinking.

“Rushing the growler,” connoting children hustling pails of beer for adults from bar to table, was a common expression. The curious name is thought to be inspired by the rumbling noise escaping carbon dioxide made as the beer sloshed about in the pail.

In more modern times, growlers could be found at brew pubs like Heartland Brewery, which has served beer to go since opening in 1995. The jugs — which, according to the New York State Liquor Authority, have always been legal at both retail outlets and bars — have proliferated lately, said Heartland’s founder, Jon Bloostein, because there are more interesting beers to go in them.