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

[agoodwinsmith]

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.