Rochester, NY: One of the world’s Top 10 beer destinations?

By Don Cazentre

ROCHESTER, NY -- Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, New Orleans and Austin, Texas made the cut.

So did Rochester.

All are ranked among the world’s Top 10 beer destinations in an annual survey at Vinepair.com, a site devoted to beer, wine and spirits.

For the 2019 list, Vinepair writer Cat Wolinski tried to find cities that are “less obvious destinations” and “beyond the usual suspects.” That means she didn’t list Portland Ore. or Portland, Maine, or any place in Colorado or Belgium. Not even Munich.

Still, Wolinski found a list of cities in the U.S. and across the globe that are building reputations for quality beers with plenty of brewery tap rooms and bars worth visiting. “Adding to their appeal are a series of new nonstop flights, just-opened restaurants, and once-in-a-lifetime cultural attractions,” she wrote of these cities.

She begins her discussion of Rochester, which ranked No. 7, by noting last year’s decision by the celebrated Other Half Brewing Co. of Brooklyn to open a second location called Other Half Rochester. That location is expected to open this winter, and has already hosted several special releases of limited edition canned at the site on Routes 5 and 20 in East Bloomfield, just west of Canandaigua. (One could, of course, quibble with the definition of this Finger Lakes location in Ontario County as “Rochester.")

Among the located-in-Rochester breweries cited in the piece are Fifth Frame Brewing, Swiftwater Brewing and Three Heads Brewing, along with Genesee Brewery, the state’s oldest.