Cooperstown Brewing Company, Milford, New York

Cooperstown, New York is a baseball town; the home of The Baseball Hall of Fame. It is also home to the Cooperstown Brewing Company, which has capitalized, in a brilliant way, on the baseball craze in Cooperstown. Beer names like Old Slugger Pale Ale, Benchwarmer Porter, and The Bambino Amber top their list in their baseball themed beers. Everything about this little brewery is infused with baseball tradition. If you like baseball, and you like beer, you need to stop by and give this little brewery a try, just don’t expect any ball park franks because they don’t serve any food.

Cheers:	Jeers:
Brilliant marketing with tons of baseball themed beer, merchandise, and fun. A decent selection of beers with a wide range of styles and tastes.	Pricing of bottles, six packs, and cases is a bit too high.

The Cooperstown Brewing Company is a member of the Cooperstown Beverage Trail. Typically this would be your first (or possibly your last) stop depending on the direction you are traveling the trail. The Cooperstown Brewing Company is a bit hard to find so make sure you have your GPS handy. As you pull into the driveway you will see tall hops vines growing on the right-hand side as you travel towards a small industrial looking building. There is ample parking for their usual crowd along the front side of the building (around to the left). They have done a nice job sprucing up this spot with an attractive green awning adorned with their logo over their glass filled green front door. On either side of the door you will find several picnic tables for the warmer months.

Upon entering the building you will find the brewing room to your left. What struck us was how unique this brewing space is. Unlike the typical expanse of stainless steel, you find every vessel they use looks entirely different than the others. There is a large round spaceship looking vessel just inside the door, a brew kettle faced with brick, and a mash ton made from wood. This mixture of different appearances makes for one of the most striking brewing rooms we have seen in our travels to date.

To the right as you come through the entrance you will find a room filled with merchandise. We do encourage you to look because there are some fun baseball themed gifts in here. You will find many different shirts and hats including one shirt that we really loved which had the slogan “Cooperstown is a drinking town with a baseball problem”. Overall the merchandising room is very well laid out, very well stocked, and a nice asset to their business. Outside this room you will find beer by the bottle, six pack, or case for sale. At three dollars per 12 ounce bottle, $12 per six pack, and $40 per case we found their pricing to be a bit high.

Directly in front of the door as you enter is the bar where you can sample their brew. The bar itself is about 12 feet wide and would easily accommodate six to eight people. On the day we visited they had seven different beers on tap including a specialty beer called the Bambino Amber which is an amber ale developed with the Babe Ruth family. Sticking with the baseball theme, you can order an “opener” which is four samples for five dollars and add “extra innings”, or two more samples, for an additional two dollars. They also offer growler fills for $13 for a refill or $20 if you want a new logo growler. By the glass you can expect to pay either three or five dollars depending on the size. While we found the pricing of the prepackaged 12 ounce beers to be high, the pricing at the bar seems more in line with other breweries in the area. The full list of beers is in the table below.

9 Man Golden Ale	Golden Ale	4.9% ABV
Old Slugger Pale Ale	English Pale Ale	5.4% ABV	35 IBU
Backyard IPA	English IPA	6.0% ABV	48 IBU
Benchwarmer Porter	Porter	6.3% ABV	45 IBU
Pride of Milford	English Strong Ale	7.1% ABV
2015 Induction Ale	Rye Beer	4.8% ABV
Bambino Amber	American Amber Ale	5.5% ABV

In the Binghamton, New York area, the Binghamton Mets offer several of the Cooperstown Brewing Company beers for sale at their stadium so we have had them previously. During this visit we got to sample other labels we had not had previously had at a baseball game. Overall we felt. that the beers were good and received above average marks on our Untapped scores. The highlights for us were the Benchwarmer Porter and the Bambino Amber. We always look for a wide variety of distinct flavors in a tasting and we found that here.

The service was as good as it could be on that day. Unfortunately for the poor woman behind the bar, she had come down with a miserable cold in the previous days and was having a tough go of it that day. So, giving her the benefit of the doubt, I would say that she did a nice job considering how she felt on the inside. The service was efficient, informative and responsive to all of our questions.

It’s a Wrap

If you are headed out on the Cooperstown Beverage Trail, you owe it to yourself to stop and see the fun way they bring together beer and baseball. Do make sure that you check out the shirts and hats they have for sale; some of them are absolute winners. We also really enjoyed seeing the brewing equipment for its uniqueness, you will never find another brewing room that looks like this anywhere else.