When Buffalo won the annual Golden Snowball contest for 2018-19, awarded to the city in New York with the largest snowfall for the season, Mayor Byron Brown took a pass when asked if his office staff would like to pick up the accompanying trophy to display at City Hall.
John Domres Jr. wants to make the latest Buffalo victory a lot easier to swallow for Brown and other winter naysayers.
The owner of Buffalo Brewing Co. brewed his first batch of Golden Snowbeer on Thursday in his Fillmore Avenue production brewery – and will gladly take a turn displaying the related trophy Buffalo just won again after its latest 133.6-inch seasonal snowfall total more than doubled that of those in Albany, Binghamton, Rochester and Syracuse and was more than any city of more than 100,000 people in the United States.
“The thought is that we brew it once a year as a celebration at the end of snow season,” Domres said. “Then when it goes to the next city, if we don't retain the title, we’ll offer the label artwork and recipe to other brewers and they can do their own thing.”
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His version is a cream ale made with cascade hops and pilsner and Vienna malts, all grown in New York, as well as municipal Lake Erie water.
“I’m excited that brew day is here,” Domres said as his mixture swirled, thinned and smoothed in his brewhouse.
He added another ingredient as he moved the batch into the boil kettle – a mason jar filled with snow that Stephen Vermette collected a couple of days after the Christmas weekend blizzard outside his Buckham Hall office at SUNY Buffalo State.
Vermette, a Buffalo State geography and meteorology professor, grew up in Windsor, Ont., and came to Western New York three decades ago.
He settled in Glenwood, in southern Erie County, “to be in the bull's-eye of lake-effect,” Buffalo News columnist Sean Kirst wrote last November, after a storm dropped more than 70 inches on much of the Southtowns.
Upstate snowfall has long enamored Kirst, who grew up in Dunkirk and was a newspaper columnist in Syracuse for more than a quarter century before joining The News staff six years ago.
He has enlisted help from Vermette and other snowfall experts during those years, while encouraging hearty residents of both regions to celebrate how snow helps shape their communal lives.
The Golden Snowball trophy – first made from an old Little League trophy topped with a painted tennis ball – has become a touchstone in that quest.
Meteorologists across upstate helped launch the competition after the winter of 1976-77, when a record 199.4 inches of snow walloped Buffalo during a historic blizzard and other storms that season.
It dried up after several years during a consolidation of National Weather Service offices, Vermette said. The contest re-emerged in 2002, when blogger Pat DeCoursey started charting state and national snow totals for cities with a population of more than 100,000.
Rosanne Anthony, of the A-1 Trophy Shop of Syracuse, created a new trophy as Syracuse started a run in the renewed competition.
Kirst wrote a 2020 column that rued Brown’s decision to abandon the trophy. Domres emailed him afterward with an idea to brew a related beer in Buffalo. Kirst mentioned the idea to Vermette last November while writing another column about the competition after a lake-effect storm buried the Southtowns, then connected the two men by email.
By that point, Domres had replaced the small brewing system in his 6-year-old taproom in Larkinville with a 10-barrel system in a new production brewery in the old Schreiber Brewing Co. on the East Side.
Even Thursday morning, Domres stewed over the mayor's decision to forgo the trophy four years ago.
"This is kind of like the pomp and circumstance that you're supposed to do as the mayor," said Domres, 36, who holds a business degree from Buffalo State, grew up in the city and learned how to brew beer on the West Coast before returning home.
"I could be in Sacramento in July," he said, "and people would say, 'Oh, you still got snow in Buffalo?' It's like it's kind of like our our moniker."
The trophy ended up in Binghamton after that city won the 2020-21 competition. Vermette picked it up there last spring after Buffalo won for 2021-22.
It stands 14 inches tall now that he arranged to add a 9-square-inch base that notes seasonal winners on engraved plaques as the years, and snow, pile up.
A crystal ball, with glass bubbles and gold flakes inside, sits wedged atop the memento on three prongs.
With Vermette as its custodian, it sat in his office for a few months as he worked on plans to spread it around.
It has spent time since late last summer at the Buffalo Wing Festival, Museum of Science and Vidler’s 5 & 10 Store, the Central Library, set of Off Beat Cinema at WBBZ-TV, and Russell’s Steaks, Chops and More.
“We had a little fun with it,” he said, “and when I was approached about a beer, I just jumped up and down. That's a brilliant idea."
The Buffalo Brewing batch will ferment for three weeks in steel tanks before Domres moves it into kegs and cans. There will be enough for 2,480 pints, which he will sell starting in his Myrtle Avenue taproom. Cans and four-packs also will be available in a small number of taprooms across the region, and possibly Tops Markets.
Domres used his 1862 cream ale as a base for Golden Snowball, which is also true of his Sunday Sauce and Pineapple cream ales. Because he uses only hops and grain – and no corn – in all of his beers, the one-off batch will have a smooth taste with subtle notes of hops and citrus.
Appropriately, he said, it will pour with a bright, white, long-lasting head.
He plans to put the trophy in his Myrtle Avenue taproom, in a display case filled with pieces of the city brewing history, until Vermette whisks it away on its latest annual tour.
"In the old days, I'm told that when they did the transfer, from city to city you may get hundreds of people coming out to celebrate," Vermette said. "Nowadays, we don't do anything like that. And the guy who originally organized it had visions of like a parade. I think it'd be great to see snowplows through the summer celebrating, people twirling snow shovels."
