Brews News—Bar Alto Opens in Whole Foods Highland Park

Mark your calendars for this Saturday when Whole Foods in Highland Park will open the taps on Bar Alto, the company’s newest beer & wine bar. Bar Alto will be handing out free tastings from noon to 4 pm and has booked some live music, so a Saturday afternoon stop-thru doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. The bar also has the distinction of putting some pretty spiffy eco-friendly measures into place. In their words:

· The opening of Bar Alto marks the 2nd retailer in North Texas to offer “growlers.” These 32- or 64-ounce sealed, refillable jugs can be purchased to take home fresh beer straight from the tap. The growler can be returned to the store, sanitized and used for the next beer purchase. This concept is very popular with beer aficionados. (The 1st retailer to offer growlers was the Lakewood store’s “Lakewood on Tap” bar, which opened last week. Our Park Lane bar will get growlers this month.)

· The use of growlers saves on packaging: no bottles, caps, cardboard six-pack or other packaging in trash, landfills or on the side of the road.

· Many of the beers will be local, and will cut down on carbon footprint with delivery.

· Tiles in the wall of the bar area were made from post-industrial waste.

To get to the point I’m sure you’re waiting for me to make. Yes, I was a little hard on Whole Foods’ last week over the whole growler pricing issue. And I did jump the gun on posting about it before they had more than an hour to get back to me. Consider this a mea culpa. The fact is that growlers aren’t the only place where people pay a premium for the hipness factor. And growlers are still a rarity here, which, while it doesn’t excuse charging a premium, does explain it in economic supply & demand terms. So, instead of complaining about it, let’s turn those energies toward affecting the changes at the state level that will allow for more plentiful and fairly-priced growlers from tap rooms and micro-breweries from Carrollton to Corpus Christi .