Buffalo Pils Scores a Touchdown

Anyone from Buffalo, N.Y., will tell you that snow, beer, and football are core to the city’s identity. In 1985, one of Buffalo’s most memorable snowstorms of the last 40 years earned the nickname of “the six-pack blizzard” when the city’s mayor advised residents to ride out the storm in the safety of their own homes, with a six-pack of beer and the Buffalo Bills football game on TV.

For most of my life, growing up in Buffalo and going back to visit as an adult, the Rust Belt city’s football-watching, wing-eating beer of choice was Labatt Blue, the mild, affordable, mass-produced Pilsner made across the Canadian border in Toronto (the U.S. branch of Labatt now brews in Rochester, N.Y.). But walk into any Western New York Wegmans this fall, and you’re likely to find a whole tower of local craft beers that are specifically designed to be consumed while watching a Bills game. Among the sea of red-and-blue cans, there’s Pills Mafia from Thin Man Brewery, Let’s Go Pils from Community Beer Works, No Punts Intended! IPA by Big Ditch Brewing Company, and Buffalo Fan Zone IPA from Ellicottville Brewing Co.

While local beer is not new for Buffalo (there were 29 breweries in the city when Prohibition came around), it’s been enjoying a new golden era that has coincidentally aligned with a new golden era for the Bills. According to Visit Buffalo Niagara, the brewery count in the greater Buffalo area today is close to 50. Two years after Thin Man Brewery opened up shop in Buffalo in 2016, the Bills made it to the playoffs for the first time in 17 years. Josh Allen joined the team as quarterback and quickly became a national celebrity, starring in commercials for Pepsi and Paramount + and making it into the occasional tabloid.

“He just awakened something in the community, and everybody wanted a piece of the Bills,” says Yvon Pasquarello, Thin Man’s director of sales and marketing.

“There was just a huge energy shift,” confirmed Chris Groves, director of operations for Community Beer Works, which recently acquired Thin Man. “We just kind of all felt something change around then in the beer scene in Buffalo.”

See also: Buffalo Beercation: Come for Niagara Falls, Stay for the Beer

The end of the Bills’ playoff drought signaled the opening of the levee for a new rush of local beers. In 2018 alone, Community Beer Works launched its Let’s Go Pils, Thin Man Brewery debuted Pills Mafia, and Big Ditch Brewing Company started canning Make Me Wanna Stout (a coffee stout they originally introduced in 2016, named after a pun on the Bills’ fight song, “Shout”).

“As the excitement grew, more and more breweries sort of latched onto this until you could walk into the store and see these huge displays filled with 20, 30 different breweries that all have these Bills-themed beers,” says Matt Kahn, president and co-founder of Big Ditch. In the following years, every Bills-related beer pun under the sun has been printed on a can, carefully dodging any actual mention of the Bills or any other NFL intellectual property (the NFL is notoriously litigious about brands encroaching on their team names and graphics without official licensing). By the time Pressure Drop Brewing unveiled its own on-theme lager in 2022, they went with, simply, Not a Football Beer.

Although there’s plenty of space for this variety in local bars and in the tailgating lots outside of Bills games, these craft breweries have had a tougher time making their way into Highmark Stadium, where the Bills play. Pasquarello says it took some work getting Pills Mafia into the venue. “They were reticent for a while, and then last season they decided, all right, let’s do it. Let’s try it out. And it did really well.”

“It’s hard to play with those big guys. Budweiser owns all the rights at that stadium, so you see a bunch of Goose Island, a bunch of Bud products and stuff like that,” says Dan Minner of Ellicottville Brewing Company. “But there’s definitely tons of it in the parking lots.”

The tailgating lots (where fans ceremonially jump through folding tables, swing around whole prosciutto legs, and get covered from head to toe in mustard) were at front of mind for both Thin Man Brewery and Community Beer Works when they introduced their Bills-themed Pilsners..

“All you really want to do in a cold November parking lot for the Bills is drink a very crisp, easy-drinking Pilsner,” says Pasquarello, who also points out that even before the craft beer boom in Buffalo, Pilsners were always the nostalgic beer of choice for watching football. And, he adds, “A Pilsner is going to put you through a table way quicker than anything else.” (Pasquarello estimates that he’s jumped through about 30 tables over the course of his career as a Bills fan).

“Tailgating before home Bills games is definitely a big thing around here,” says Kahn, who initially thought of Make Me Wanna Stout as a perfect pregame caffeine boost. “Our business is like a half an hour away from the stadium, but we feel the impact of those games.”

Andrew Zach, director of brewery operations at Resurgence Brewing, said that when Resurgence released its Circle the Wagons four-pack, they wanted to add to the party. “Circle the Wagons is a mixed pack of two Pilsners and two IPAs,” he says. “We thought it was the perfect four-pack to pick up for tailgating.” Part of the beauty of all of this friendly local competition is that during any game or tailgating party, you can try a variety of cans, based on your mood or the time of day.

“Thirty different beers based on a fan base is a unique thing,” says Minner. “We’re one of the smaller cities in the league and in the country, really. And for our fan base to be able to support that is pretty cool.”

“I’ve always said that Buffalo isn’t competitive. It’s collaborative. We’ve always been working together as sort of underdogs against big guys,” says Kahn. The sentiment is true about both the big-guy breweries with national distribution, and the larger market football teams in the league. “That’s been the Bills’ thing too for the most of the time that I’ve known ’em.”

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