We say “Embeer Buffalo!” quite a lot around here. Even just amongst ourselves! It’s a silly phrase that reflects our silly (well, cheeky) personalities.

But what does it actually mean? Since we created it it’s really up to us to define it.

Here’s the thing about us: we’re brewers, yeah. We make beer and sell it for a living. But we’re also beer drinkers. We wouldn’t be here otherwise: nearly all of us started as homebrewers, and Ethan and I wrote for a beer blog for years. As such, when we say “We want to encourage the starting of breweries in Buffalo and Western New York” that isn’t some weird marketing code for “expanding our market share”: what we’re saying is that we love beer, and we love Buffalo, and we want the two to kiss and get married and have lots of beautiful children.

It might be a little hard to believe me when I say “No really, our slogan isn’t a marketing thing! It’s what we really feel!” Stick with me for a bit, though. Embeering features prominently in pretty much every interview we get, every article written about us. I came up with the idea for this post after consuming two such pieces this week, and you can judge for yourself whether we’re really good at staying on message or, instead, too lazy for underhandedness and instead are simply very genuine.

The first: Julia Burke wrote a great article in Buffalo Spree about the litany of new breweries in the area. It starts with a speech Ethan gave at our Blue Monk Brewmaster’s Dinner in May:

“I hope to have fifteen new breweries in Buffalo in the next five years. That is three breweries a year. I think that’s doable,” he said, to a round of applause. A look at the number of new breweries on the horizon indicates that he may be right.

It’s an exciting time to be involved in Buffalo’s beer scene, and we’re honored to be at the forefront of the brewery explosion.

Then: I met Joe Fisher on HomebrewTalk, back in my homebrewing days. He backed our Kickstarter campaign and said not to bother shipping his stuff: he’d drive up and take a look around. He does a beer podcast called Final Gravity, and so Rudy and Ethan sat down with Joe and his wife Liz to talk about CBW and our journey from homebrewers to commercial brewery. Near the end I join them at Blue Monk where we talk more about beer, our personal brewing habits and other fun stuff. It was a blast to record and we thank them for coming out! Here’s the episode (which autoplays, so be warned).

There’s no denying that more beer and breweries in Buffalo is a good thing. That it’s happening is even better! Hopefully this time next year at least one of the breweries from Julia’s article is active alongside us.