New Orleans Beer Spotlight: Dorginac's Food Center

Most of the grocery stores in New Orleans get a pretty bad rap from us beer nerds for their beer selection. Usually if they have a craft beer selection it's because they only care about the money it can make them and the selection usually goes to crap because you need someone to look after that selection. It's important to have someone that knows the product, can hand sell the expensive stuff and knows when a product is not going to do well. You can't solely rely on your distributor to tell you what to do. Most grocery stores aren't willing to pay for a full time beer person or they get a wine specialist to run the beer selection which can sometimes work but sometimes it doesn't.

Dorignac's first came onto the New Orleans beer nerds radar when Dan Stein from Stein's Deli spent some time working there. After he left so did most of the beer nerds. Obviously like the children from Hamelin we followed our pied piper.

Lately though I had heard some rumblings that Dorginac's beer selection was still something to be considered so yesterday I took a little trip out to Metairie. I must say that I was pretty damn impressed. They obviously have all of the macro beers necessary in all shapes and sizes(even a 6-pack of 8oz Buds!) but they also had a damn good import and craft beer selection as well. Just some of the beers I noticed were Bear Republic, Mikkeller, BrewDog, NOLA Brewing, Abita, Lazy Magnolia, La Fin Du Monde, Rogue, St. Peters, Duvel and many others. They even had some German mini kegs.

I asked who the person in charge of the beer selection and was given a card for David Burley so if you're picking up some beer at Dorginacs's make sure you thank David for contributing to the ever growing craft and import selection here in the New Orleans area!

Cheers!

The Beer Buddha