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​With the rapid growth of craft beer in St. Louis, it was only a matter of time before someone opened a retail store like Wolfbräu House of Beer (286 Mid Rivers Center, St. Peters; 636-242-1040). Founder Ryan Wolf describes Wolfbräu, scheduled to open the second week of December, as a "local store with a beer-exclusive focus" -- something that's surprisingly difficult to find.

With more than 600 varieties on the shelf, Wolf isn't kidding. But although Wolfbräu will offer brews from around the world, Wolf understands the importance of the growing local beer community and the excellent brews being produced right here in St. Louis.

"In Missouri, we are very fortunate to have such high-quality local brewing, and we plan to put it on display," says Wolf. His store plans to offer beer from O'Fallon Brewery, Six Row Brewing Company, The Civil Life Brewing Company and 2nd Shift Brewing, to name a few.

To stay up to date on Wolfbräu, including its grand-opening event and special promotion, visit its Facebook page.

Alicia Lohmar

​There it is, right there on the cocktail list in front of us. Rye Manhattan. We want one of those, on the rocks. Truth be told, that's what we feel like drinking most of the time. It's our drink. But we covered that ground already (Drink of the Week #6, Off Broadway) and we have a column due in two days, so tough noogies. Pick something else, buddy. There's a Sazerac, but we've done that, too (Drink of the Week # 33, Herbies' Vintage 72). None of the other cocktails are speaking to us. We're having fish for dinner, so no red wine. White wine seems too summery. Voila, champagne.

We arrived at this restaurant in a similar fashion. The last stop on our to-do list left us in downtown Clayton at 6:30 p.m. We searched our phone for nearby restaurants, then eliminated the ones that are closed on Sunday nights. Hello, Pomme Café and Wine Bar!

We sip Laurent-Perrier Brut and look out the window at the dusky sidewalk and its sparse foot traffic. Inside a row of globe-shaped pendant lights are turned low, each like its own setting sun. We imagine this chic café is all hustle and bustle on weekdays, but tonight it is serene.

We are absorbing this place, watching, waiting. We have found that if we are aware and patient, then we will be rewarded with a small gift; a snippet of overheard conversation, a detail, something to grab onto and spin into a story. We study our glass of bubbly and listen intently to the murmurs in this French bistro. When we finally hear that little whisper, this is what it says: "Au revoir."

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Alicia Lohmar

​Our bodies are miraculous machines, almost as intuitive and user-friendly as Steve Jobs' creations. They try to tell us what is good for us, try to steer us in the right direction. When we need rest, we get tired. When we need to eat, we get hungry. Even what, specifically, we are hungry for is a coded message from the corporeal realm.

When we are hung over, we feel like a greasy diner breakfast because our body knows it will sop up the booze. When we have a head cold, we yearn for the sinus-clearing hot and sour soup from the late, great In Soo. When we have PMS, we crave chocolate and kindness.

Certain foods have medicinal, nearly magical properties. We don't mean "super foods" like walnuts and blueberries, green tea and red wine. The way those work is more like math - if you eat lots foods rich in omega 3's and antioxidants, then over time you will have fewer health problems and probably live to a ripe old age.

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Alicia Lohmar

​We are hungry. We don't feel like cooking (and there isn't much in the fridge anyway). We don't want to get dressed up, don't want to go far and don't want to spend a fortune. The question before us is not a fanciful one, not, "Where should we go for dinner?" but, "How can we solve this problem?" It's Monday night, many places are closed. The later it gets, the more limited our options become. Our eyeballs are throbbing dully. We are craving a bowl of pasta and a glass of wine. We are looking to be comforted and comfortable.

This is how we came to be sitting at a sidewalk table at the top of a hill on the Hill on a perfectly clear night, lit by a bright moon. The answer floated down to us like the first fall leaf - Anthonino's Taverna (2225 Macklind Avenue; 314-773-4455). Open till 10 p.m. on Mondays, they serve a menu of Greek and Italian classics, and we don't feel the least self-conscious in blue jeans and no makeup. In the last waning days of patio season, we've arrived at the Platonic ideal of outdoor dining - warm enough that you don't need even a sweater, cool enough, with a little breeze, to drink Petite Sirah.

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Alicia Lohmar

​First, a quick retraction. We wrote in this very column, just a little over a year ago, "...don't sully the time-honored occupation of respectable drinking by concocting all sorts of foolishness that ends in '-tini' and isn't 'gin martini' or that contains the words 'nipple' or 'bomb.' We like cake and candy as much as the next girl, but that doesn't mean we want our cocktails to taste like them."

Now, Swedish Fish-flavored vodka is not technically a cocktail, which by definition contains more than one component. So, if we wanted to cling to semantics, we could probably wriggle off the hook. Then again, it was only a few weeks ago that we featured the Hog Bomb at HotShots, so perhaps it's time to redact that statement altogether. When caught in an apparent contradiction, we find the best tact is to smile beatifically and quote Oscar Wilde Walt Whitman: "I am large, I contain multitudes."

The better part of this multitude is contrarian as hell, so now that vodka, and in particular flavored vodka, is officially passé, we are inclined to like and defend it. The softest part in our mushy little heart is reserved for underdogs; we are always making friends with the least popular kid in class, always drawn to outcasts, oddballs and three-legged cats.

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Alicia Lohmar

​On our way out the door the other afternoon, we spied a squirrel taking a nap, sprawled on a low, fat tree branch in the backyard. Arms and legs hanging, belly stuffed with black walnuts, he was suspended directly above a woefully underused hammock. We felt a sharp pang of jealousy. Drink of the Week has a bad case of the late summer lazies. Normally an assiduous to-do list checker-offer, we haven't flipped the page of our notepad in more than a week.

The breaking of the seemingly interminable heat spell brought relief but also some end-of-summer melancholy. This has manifested as profound listlessness, squirrel envy and a fascination with southern culture. These days about the only thing we can work up much interest in doing is sitting down with a big ol' plate of fried fish, black-eyed peas and stewed okra with a few thick tomato slices on the side, then retiring to the back porch with an iced tea and a copy of Garden and Gun to listen to the cicadas.

St. Louis displays a little of its own southern charm, like sweet-smelling magnolia trees with dinner plate-sized white blossoms and shiny dark green leaves, but the soul of this town is as solidly Midwestern as a soybean. We have the sense that time actually slows down as you move south. The Deep South of our imagination is full of decorum, languid drawls that roll softly off tongues, evening strolls and dripping moss.

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Sean McElroy

​It is the most delicious, most thirst-quenching lemonade that anyone has ever tasted, anywhere -- like bottled sunshine. It is sublime. If lemonade fairies plucked the ripest Meyer lemons and combined their juice with the sweetest clover honey and the purest, coldest spring water, they could not top the murky, pale liquid that pours forth from this plastic bottle. One of the sixth-floor nurses has filled a BJC travel mug with pellets of ice. We add the lemonade, snap the lid on and press the button to raise the incline of his bed so he can sip from the bendy straw. He smiles a Vicodin-laced smile and says nothing could be better. We agree.

2:00 a.m. We had just run home to change clothes and brush our teeth. Had to stop for gas. Lit by florescent lights, the neon letters painted on the gas station windows look garish, crazy. The door is locked. We get the attendant's attention and he lets us in. "Oh, sorry. Just went to the bathroom," he explains as we search the cooler for lemonade. "Forgot the door was still locked," he chuckles at himself as we set it on the counter. He must have noticed something on our face, because he became serious and added, "Really, sorry about that."

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Mary Mangan

You won't find bacon in HotShots' Hob Bombs.

​You've probably heard the term "McJob," or, even more likely, "GenX," both of which were coined by Douglas Coupland in his 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. We're going to borrow a couple more:

Nutritional Slumming: Food whose enjoyment stems not from flavor but from a complex mixture of class connotations, nostalgia signals and packaging semiotics: "Katie and I bought this tub of Multi-Whip instead of real whip cream because we thought petroleum distillate whip topping seemed like the sort of food that air force wives stationed in Pensacola back in the early sixties would feed their husbands to celebrate a career promotion."

Recreational Slumming: The practice of participating in recreational activities of a class one perceives as lower than one's own: "Karen! Donald! Let's go bowling tonight! And don't worry about shoes...apparently you can rent them."

They are included here because spending the afternoon drinking at HotShots Sports Bar & Grill (4021 Union Road, South County; 314-416-8516) and then blogging about it could come off as a variant on the above-described behavior.

Here are some facts about Drink of the Week that are working against us in this regard: we have never been to a HotShots before, we have never had a Jägerbomb (more on that later), we do not follow sports, and, though we call South City home, we rarely dip below the city line.

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​What do the countries of Scandinavia have in common? For one thing, Denmark,
Norway, Sweden and Finland are some of the happiest places on Earth. Every time a
new study comes out attempting to quantify "life satisfaction," these countries hold court
in the top ten, trading off the number one spot. Denmark seems to have a slight edge.
Something else they have in common? Aquavit. This traditional Nordic spirit has been prescribed as a cure-all since the 15th century, it is an integral part of holiday celebrations, and it can be found in any bar in the region. In the rest of the world, it enjoys the popularity of reindeer meat.

When we are tempted to jump to easy conclusions, like "drinking Aquavit makes
you happy," our internal voice of reason steps in. It is the voice of Sam Waterson, or,
more precisely, D.A. Jack McCoy. He knits his impressive eyebrows and points out
that correlation is not the same as causation. Just because the relatively small group of
people who drink the stuff are the same ones who consistently report that their lives are
brimming with joy doesn't mean Aquavit is some kind of magical elixir. Still, we are
more than willing to give it a try.

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​If you show up at Half & Half (8135 Maryland Avenue, Clayton; 314-973-0446), Clayton's bustling new breakfast-and-lunch spot, at 11 a.m., smack in the middle of the Sunday brunch rush and sans reservation, expect to wait. If the host informs you that it will be about a half an hour before a table opens, don't panic. It is undignified to declare that the air-trap holding pen set aside for waiting is claustrophobic and that the sunny patio is too bright and too hot.

Surrounded by families with young children who were holding themselves together admirably, Drink of the Week was on the verge of a meltdown. Because we really, really wanted a cup of coffee.

Fortunately, this is a desire the folks at Half & Half are well equipped to meet. They don't merely have coffee, they have a coffee program, complete with a coffee menu. Here's how it works: They offer two types of coffee beans (which will change seasonally) from which all coffee drinks are made. Pick which one you want, then decide how you want it prepared.

You can get your basic cup o' joe, brewed with an automatic drip machine and kept hot in a thermal pot. You can have an espresso and all of its variants (cappuccino, Americano, latte, etc.). Also available are options that are less commonly seen: hand-brewed drip coffee, iced "toddy" coffee and AeroPress coffee. All of this (and more) the menu clearly aims to elucidate, complete with footnotes and definitions, but it's all a little much to decipher for someone who hasn't actually had any coffee yet.

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