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Brewing Up Business in Buffalo

The number of craft breweries has doubled in just 4 years and Visit Buffalo Niagara says it is paying dividends when it comes to tourism.

BUFFALO, NY - This month, we have been looking at the history of brewing in Buffalo on Unknown Stories, in this story we focus on its present and future. In five years, the number of breweries in Western New York and the state has doubled to over 400, with about 30 of them here.

When it comes to the Buffalo brewery frontier, Tim Herzog should probably be wearing a coonskin cap. He is the pioneer in the Queen City beer game. "Yeah, I get that one. I get Godfather, I'm ready to go out and get a pinstripe suit."

Herzog reclaimed Buffalo history when he opened the doors of Flying Bison Brewery in 2000, the first brewery in the city of Buffalo since the William Simon Brewery shut down in 1972. In 2014, they moved from their original location in Riverside, to a new build on Seneca Street in Larkinville.

As the city has seen a resurgence, so has Buffalo's brewing scene. That is the reason for them name of Jeff Ware's Resurgence Brewing. "My wife and I were living in New York City and we were going to all these new breweries opening up and really cool beer venues and we thought, why can't we have this in Buffalo?"

He and his wife both worked in the industry, on the marketing side. They read the tide and returned home and were able to launch just ahead of this new wave of excitement in the Queen city's craft brew market. "People come and talk to us and say well you are really one of the vets in the industry... I say well, we're three and a half years old, I don't know if that makes us vets."

Around the corner from Resurgence, Community Beer Works president and co-founder Ethan Cox was a D'Youville College professor with a PHD in cognitive Psychology when he decided to give his passion a go, opening up in 2014. Cox, Ware and Herzog all agree that changes in Albany have helped pave the way for rapid growth of the industry.

Herzog explains, "A piece of legislation got passed called the craft brew act and that's what has the farm brewer license, some of the elbow room for cideries to have sampling rooms as well, and it allowed every brewery in NYS that wants one, to have a sampling room. That is now part of your license."

Visit Buffalo Niagara President Patrick Kaler says that growth has resulted in a boom in tourism.

"Over 10 million people specifically travel for the craft brew experience and that plays right into what we are trying to do her. " Kaler says it is too new an industry for them to measure an exact economic impact on the area, but through visitor profile studies they have found that there is a significant tourist market coming to WNY. "Back in 2015 it came up in that study that 17 percent of our visitors are looking for the craft beer experience."

Kaler expects the percentage of craft beer visitors to climb significantly when they conduct their next study seeing as the number of breweries in the region has more than doubled since 2015.

They have put together several targeted marketing pieces and brochures to try and capitalize on the trend.

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