agoodwinsmith | Barley Station Brew Pub, Salmon Arm BC, Trans Canada Highway

This is to recommend the Barley Station Brew Pub in Salmon Arm. It is on the Trans Canada Highway (Hwy #1), so if you are travelling from Calgary to Vancouver (or oppositely) by vehicle, you will drive right past it, so you might as well stop and have a good meal with great beer. Actually, the meal was great, too, but the beer is excellent. It doesn't have its own website yet, which is a pity because I will misremember the names of the beers, but the pub is listed here with a phone number: http://www.dipsophilia.com/bc_craft_breweries.htm .

The deal, see, is that they offer a five-glass set of taster-sized (4 oz) glasses of their five standard home-brewed beers. Then, they give you two more of whatever they have recently brewed. So, my mom and I had that with our food. The five standards were: Barley Station Blonde, an excellent Wheat Ale with "Dog" somewhere in the name, a beautiful lager, a fine Pilsner, and a Pale Ale. The two specials were a stout and a Brown Ale called Winter Fest. I don't actually like pilsners or lagers, but they were good. The wheat ale was exceptional, and my favourite was their stout.

They have excellent pub food - I had the dry garlic ribs - yum. Mom had the calamari - not a rubbery ring in the bunch. Dad had their house Barley Soup, which deserves the capital letters, with beer bread. Yum all the way around.

We went for lunch, but I bet it would be a great place to go for an evening of more in-depth beer sampling.