Frequentem's Buffalo taproom opens this weekend

Canandaigua brewery is pushing west with its new location in Buffalo's Old First Ward neighborhood

Get excited, Erie County — Frequentem Brewing officially opens its Buffalo taproom Saturday.

The new taproom, the brewery’s second, is located in the city’s Old First Ward neighborhood at 225 Louisiana St. It is part of the bigger, eight-building Barcalo Living & Commerce Center redevelopment at the site of the former Barcalounger facility.

The $40 million complex includes 116 apartments and 33,000 square feet of retail space, 3,500 of which is now occupied by Frequentem. Construction at the site began in May 2021, 60 years after the last Barcalounger chair was made there. The brewery opened its original Canandaigua spot in August 2020 inside a former Byrne Dairy location.

“We just vibe with the people in Buffalo and they’ve been super supportive,” said Meagan D’Allesandro, who opened the brewery with her husband David. “I also just think that Buffalo is an awesome beer community and we’re excited to be part of it.”

In a little over three years, the brewery has developed a reputation for expressive lagers (among the best in this region really), expressive fruited sours, and wonderful hazy India pale ales. Frequentem promises good vibes and it certainly delivers on that promise.

The D’Allesandro sounded tired, relieved, and excited when I spoke to them earlier this week. They were en route to Buffalo from their Farmington home and have become quite familiar with the stretch of the Thruway between Rochester and Buffalo.

“I’ve been driving back and forth every day,” Meagan said, “and it’s really not that far. We like the idea of continuing to brew in one location. It just makes a lot of sense — keep your quality dialed in, all at one place. ”

Talks of a second taproom started nearly two years ago. They started kicking around location ideas, with Meagan frequently checking LoopNet for commercial real estate listings. While driving to Champlain Valley Hops in Vermont, Meagan encountered the Buffalo listing and had to work feverishly to save the information as they were running out of cell service.

“It just felt right and it looked really cool,” Meagan said. “They had some renderings on there and the location looked dope. Buffalo, logistically, made a lot of sense for us as well.”

The new taproom backs up to the Barcalo Contemporary Gallery, a rotating, now enclosed 150-foot-long art gallery in a former alleyway. The complex, which was originally built in phases between 1896 to 1917, is expected to be fully occupied by fall 2024.

In anticipation of this move, Frequentem recently expanded its fermentation capacity in Canandaigua with two additional horizontal lagering tanks and four 20-barrel fermenters. The D’Allesandros are hopeful they’ll have enough beer to supply each taproom.

The Buffalo location will offer corn dogs, cup of noodles, soft pretzels with beer cheese, and popcorn. The D’Allesandros signed the lease for the new space in December 2022 and started renovations in June 2023, little by little.

There are 10 draft lines in Buffalo, eight of which will be filled with beer, David said. The new taproom offers more opportunities for private events or cordoned-off parties. They’re awaiting approvals to add outdoor seating (not that it is a huge concern in February). There’s an overhead garage door at the entrance to connect indoor and outdoor seating.

“It has been a pretty wild ride for us,” Meagan said. “We’re just seeing where everything takes us and paying attention to what we’re doing and having fun.”

As shown in the recent public vote for the 2024 Rochester Real Beer Expo where Frequentem again finished in the top five, the brewery is a vital and valued piece of the WNY scene. There is little doubt Buffalo will embrace Frequentem, too.

Frequentem is the third Rochester-area brewery to open a taproom in Buffalo — K2 Brothers and Mortalis opened secondary taprooms there last year. (Weirdly, we haven’t seen any Erie County breweries push into this area. Update and confession, because I’ve been doing this so long: I totally forgot that Niagara County’s New York Beer Project opened in Victoria in February 2019.)

The area near the Buffalo River is already booming. It already includes the massive Buffalo RiverWorks entertainment complex. Resurgence Brewing, founded in 2014, moved its operations to a palatial spot at 55 Ohio St. And the neighborhood is already home to Pressure Drop Brewing in the nearby Barrel Factory facility, as well as Old First Ward Brewing at Gene McCarthy’s, a beloved neighborhood pub.

BriarBrothers Brewing opened inside the historic Buffalo Malting Corp. silos on Elk Street recently. It’s in the neighboring Valley neighborhood in Buffalo.