Ambler Beverage Exchange

arthurfartowski

Pennsylvania

4.7/5  rDev +19.9%
vibe: 5 | quality: 4.5 | service: 5 | selection: 4.5 | $$

New owners, not a drive through anymore. It's been remodeled and they have a better selection of craft brews, along with a big selection of chilled beers. What's cool is they have 2 or 3 taps going with some samples up to 5 oz. I'm supposed to have at least 250 characters so I'm hoping this last sentence does it.

01-25-2013 17:24:37 | More by arthurfartowski

DarkerTheBetter

Pennsylvania

3.15/5  rDev -19.6%
quality: 3 | service: 4 | selection: 2.5 | $$

This store is located right on Butler Pike in Ambler. The funny thing is though, this place is a Drive Thru! It’s an old converted mechanic’s garage of sorts and to get your beer, you pull off Butler Pike and head right into the open garage door (as per the picture). Neat!

As I said, this is an old converted garage. I parked my car out back and strolled in to see what was up. I was grinning a lot as I walked in as I was so amused with the whole Drive Thru notion. Not drive up or along side, but through! There are two large garage doors on either side of the building, one right on the pike and another in the back where I walked in. Although I was pretty amused, I was still disappointed by the general dirtiness of the place, but I figure that’s really to be expected. “You’re trying to tell me that they couldn’t scrub decades worth of oil stains and exhaust off of the walls, floor and ceiling?” I won’t hold that against them because the beer was all up off the floors on either palates or steel shelving.

A quick walk through their isles revealed a pretty good selection… of BMC and other malternatives. There was also a good selection… of Yuengling there as well. I searched and searched for the craft beer, only to find a few cases of Victory and a few cases of DFH. There were also a few other local, low end PA beers there with only a handful of Germans and Mexicans. Over all, I don’t think this place should have been entered into BeerFly as craft beer was nowhere near the 50% requisite cut off. (Someone else entered it, I just got to it first!) However, I did talk to one of the employees. After a quick series of questions about their craft brews, he just handed me a copy of their beer list. I thumbed through it quickly and it looks like they <can> get some pretty tasty beers, but none of the really interesting ones were on their shelves.

I tell you what, the drive through nature of this beer store really makes it stand out in my mind regardless of the selection.

05-24-2006 13:42:16 | More by DarkerTheBetter