Tale of Two Cities for a Pint
At first glance, Pint Sized seems like a sliver of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, transported upstate. There are people who look like walking embodiments of the aesthetic zeitgeist hanging around out front, frequently with dogs wearing complicated accoutrements. The entrance in Saratoga Springs is down a small flight of stairs.
Open the door, and a post-punk soundtrack is audible, there’s a corner cozily packed with board games from the previous century, 12 lines of esoteric craft beers live on tap, and a locally produced small menu of quick bites for the slightly buzzed and suddenly ravenous are available.
While a tattoo-free mother of school-age children might be tempted to turn on her sensible heel and revert to her usual cheap mass market suds, the delightful staff welcomes everyone, from the clueless to the crafty, to their judgment-free zone created to celebrate barley, hops and the Capital District. (Which is precisely where Pint Sized’s similarity to watering holes in Williamsburg ends.)
And thank goodness for that, because being inducted into the intricacies of beer geekdom is eminently more enjoyable and delicious then most other pursuits, certainly ones involving Big Box Beer.
Pint Sized was founded (originally as Brew) on July 4, 2014, in a small basement space at 209 Lark Street in Albany. It rebranded as Pint Sized when it opened its Saratoga location at 489 Broadway in May of 2017. This year, Pint Sized outgrew its Albany location and moved down the block to 250 Lark Street.
“Our entire mission is to welcome everyone who is interested in beer here and help them find something they can really connect with,” August Rosa explains, perched at a high table at the Saratoga location while taking a break from doing inventory.
Craft brewing continues to grow (sales increased 5% by volume last year, while overall U.S. beer sales were down 1.2%, according to the Brewers’ Association), and despite or perhaps due to its everincreasing popularity, there is often a sense of clubby elitism at bottle shops and microbreweries that can discourage those of us who love a hazy juice bomb as much as the next gal but have to manage to cram in time for one after shuttling the shorter members of our clan hither, thither, then over yonder and back again.
Thankfully, Pint Sized, while encouraging visitors to sit and drink awhile, also offers coolers for takeout drinks on the fly. And the options cover the gamut from one-off collaborations between gypsy brewers like Mikkeller or Stillwater Artisanal Ales to dependable (relatively) mass-produced cans from major indie brewers like the Newburgh Brewery.
“We try to have a real mix on draft so there’s something for people who are just getting into beer and people who’ve tried almost everything,” August notes. “We feature discounts on certain beers at Happy Hour Monday through Thursday at both stores, and then there is always the hard-to-find beers and the locally made beers that really excite us.”
While the inventories at the stores will never be exact replicas of each other, they mirror each other more than one might expect. The new Albany store is about 850 square feet (up from about 450 square feet in their original space), and the Saratoga shop runs about 750 square feet. Both feature 12 drafts, 100 cans and bottles, tables, a bathroom … and locally made snacks (no formal kitchen exists in either space).
“We wanted a snack that paired well with beer, and we wanted it to be locally produced,” August explains. “The focus of our business will always be the beer, and we don’t want to worry about a commercial kitchen, but a warm pretzel or a corn dog is the perfect snack or mini-meal and it’s easy for us to prepare and serve them without a commercial kitchen.”
At both stores, the vast majority of the business—about 65%—comes from their lines of draft beers. The stores are also pretty neckand-neck in terms of income, with bursts of frenetic activity at unexpected times of the year. The best day in both stores was Black Friday.
In Saratoga, the City Convention Center has been a boon, delivering wild success for Pint Sized during the Chowder Fest and the Dance Flurry, not typically what one would consider big beer events.
“Honestly, everyone talks about how different Albany and Saratoga are, but I’ve lived in both places and I have a business in both places, and they’re more similar than different,” August says. “In both places there are colleges, a big contingent of creative jobs and a lot of tech jobs. There is a lot of energy, curiosity and love for the local community.”
August should know. He and his wife, Amanda, met when they were at college, St. Rose and SUNY Albany, respectively, and after graduating in 2010, the lovebirds hit the road to find a bigger, badder, radder city to settle down in.
“We were on a mission,” he says. “And we had a lot of fun visiting L.A., Chicago, San Francisco. But the places that really inspired us—Boulder, Asheville, Spokane, Madison, Ithaca, Burlington—we realized were just like the Capital Region. There’s this amazing space and energy between Troy, Schenectady, Albany and Saratoga, filled with inspiring people and businesses and surrounded by mountains.”
So they came home.
They took the kinds of jobs progressive recent grads with liberal arts colleges take: August worked in marketing for Mass MOCA, and Amanda worked in the local government. They were content, but they continued to feel a pull toward something just beyond their grasp. Finally, they realized they simply wanted to make a more tangible impact on the cultural life of the community.
“Traveling across the country, we were introduced to all kinds of small-batch regional breweries,” August remembers. “And our interest in craft beer just kept growing the more we learned about it. We wanted to offer the Capital District a place where people could connect with each other while learning about and drinking beer that might not be available anywhere else.”
With August’s marketing background and Amanda’s experience in the local government, they knew they had the knowledge and skills to pull off a small shop. Plus, after going to college in Albany, they were entrenched in the local community of artists and entrepreneurs.
Not that it wasn’t a risk.
“It was a huge gamble,” August admits. “Because of the way approvals work, we had to invest in the space, buy the inventory and then cross our fi ngers that it would all be approved before our opening date. Everything we had went into the fi rst space in Albany. We built it out ourselves with help from our families, especially my dad.”
August credits his father not just for Pint Sized’s finishing touches but also for planting the seeds for it in his childhood.
“I grew up downstate, but we came up every summer to Saratoga for the ballet,” he says. “The space Pint Sized is in now used to be my favorite comic book store when I was a kid. Our summers up here are a big part of the reason I went to college up here, and ultimately, stayed here.”
In addition to their two retail babies, August and Amanda also share two human ones: They welcomed their first daughter when the Albany store was still an infant, and their second arrived this summer, just when the Saratoga store was starting to toddle off on its own.
Pint Sized’s digs are small, but its heart is big and its roots run deep. And happily for the Albany and Saratoga’s thirsty denizens, Pint Sized greets (all of) us with open arms.
Pint Sized | @wearepintsized
Mikkeller | @mikkellerbeer
Stillwater Artisanal Ales
Newburgh Brewery | @newburghbrewing
