Join us on Thursday night for another edition of Open Mic Night with Jim & Wanda Curtis – sure to be a rockin’ and rollin’ good time as usual.
On Friday night, we have the talented Lena Maude, who you can see in action here:
On Saturday night, join us for Jen Sygit and her wonderful tunes:
As usual, our Friday and Saturday shows are no cover and family friendly – come on down to the tasting room to try our wine, mead, beer, and cider along with charcuterie plates.
To celebrate spring, we’re also offering you a 50% discount on Rose’ Ambrosia, along with 20% off merchandise, and, if you buy one regular price growler fill, 50% off on your second fill. This sale runs through Memorial Day!
Don’t forget – Painting with Toinette returns on April 16 at 3PM – pick up your tickets here or in the tasting room. $30 per person, and you get 10% off your charcuterie and drinks.
The Cheese Lady returns Sunday, April 22nd – no advance tickets required, it’s just $15 per person at the door and you’ll get to sample a variety of mead/wine/cheese pairings from The Cheese Lady Traverse City!
How many times have you gotten to the winery at 11:00 AM and waited patiently for us to open up? I know at least two of you have – because I have seen your cars. Well, we’ve noticed, and we’ve made the change! For the rest of the summer, we’re opening up at 11:00AM for all your mead, wine, and beer needs. Get those growlers filled earlier, pick up some wine for your afternoon picnic, and don’t forget the honey. As a reminder, our new operating hours for the rest of the summer are:
Monday – Wednesday: 11AM to 9PM
Thursday – Saturday: 11AM to 10PM
Sunday: 11AM – 6PM
Music This Weekend
Your home for the hottest music in Benzie County is right here at St. Ambrose Cellars. We’ve got three more night of tunes for you this week.
Open Mic
The ever-popular Open Mic series hosted by Jim & Wanda Curtis rolls on this week, starting Thursday at 6PM! We’ve got a fancy sound system and everything for you to play with now!
Alfredo Improv
Local legends Alfredo will be back on Friday night, starting around 6PM.
TBA
The hottest band in the land – To Be Announced – will be hopefully joining us on Saturday.
Ok, The Whiskey Charmers had a situation pop up and had to unfortunately cancel, so we’re working on a replacement. TBA ! TBA ! TBA !
TNT Food Truck
Joining us on our Thursday nights, Friday nights, and Saturdays will be the TNT Food Truck! The menu is constantly evolving, but here’s a selection of what they have been serving up lately:
In the Wild
HopCat East Lansing
Looking at our Untappd check-ins, it seems the HopCat down in East Lansing is really purring with love for the Black Madonna draft lately. If you’re downstate and need your fix, head down to the HopCat and check out Black Madonna – along with about 1 million other beers, ciders, and meads – and show them some love!
VinoShipper – our shipping partners for online sales – have made some shipping changes for the summer. Shipping during the summer months can be a challenge due to varying temperatures around the country, so this summer, in partnership with UPS they are offering substantially reduced UPS Next Day Air shipping rates – a reduction of about 45%.
This helps save your mead and wine from being left in hot trucks or other delivery points during these blazin’ summer months. You can shop our VinoShipper store here.
Yard Yoga!
Join RYT200 certified yoga instructor Jenn Ryan & guest teachers for YardYoga at St. Ambrose Cellars, Tuesday evenings, beginning June 13th!
REGISTER via text: 231-218-0655
Classes will always be different – sometimes gentle, sometimes a well-balanced vinyasa flow – we’ll have fun, enjoy nature’s beauty, & afterward, perhaps have a sip or a snack.
YardYoga will happen IF:
1. it’s not raining
2. it’s at least 65 degrees Farenheit
3. the ground isn’t soaked from a day of rain that has ceased
Namaste!
Mt. Pleasant Craft Beer Festival
We’ll be pouring our wares at the Mt. Pleasant Beer Festival on Saturday, June 10th! More info here:
It’s May 17th, and we’re really getting into the swing of summer here at St. Ambrose Cellars. You may have heard some of the big news – we’ve got beer! – and I’m sure you’re excited to come try No Frills IPA, if you haven’t already. This is a limited edition first run – so you’ll want to get out here and grab a glass before it is gone! The men in the back are working hard on adding more delicious beers to our taps, and we’ll have more info on those once they are ready to go.
But there’s other stuff happening too!
Festival Season Has Returned
The return of the sun means the return of the busy festival calendar here in Northern Michigan. As usual, St. Ambrose Cellars will be out and about pouring our favorite beverages at your favorite festivals. We’ve got a couple events lined up in the next two weeks:
Empire Asparagus Festival
One of our favorite events, the Empire Asparagus Festival is this weekend and we’ll be there with XR Cyser and a rotating selection of other meads filling the other three taps. Don’t miss the world famous parade at the Asparagus Festival, it’s a delight. There will also be a pig roast on Friday night, and music from outstanding artists like K. Jones & The Benzie Playboyz throughout the weekend.
Next weekend – Memorial Day Weekend – we’ll be pouring out at Crystal Mountain for their Beer n’ Brat Festival. Roll your self away to Crystal Mountain, turn the page on spring, and work on your night moves with Lookin’ Back, a Detroit-based Bob Seger Tribute Band and some sweet St. Ambrose mead!
As we announced last week, it’s Michigan Wine Month and in honor of this grand occasion we’re offering four of wines and meads at a special 30% discount. These Michigan grown, Michigan made wine and meads will make a great addition to your cellar. Grab our Marsanne Viognier, Dancing Bare, Rose Ambrosia, and 2011 Riesling Reserve at this special discounted price now through the end of the month!
Music This Weekend
Benzie’s home for the best jams is going to host three musical blockbusters again this weekend.
The action kicks off on Thursday with the Famous Curtis band and our Open Mic night. It’s also Thirsty Thursday, so you can take home a growler of your favorite mead or our new No Frills IPA beer for 35% off! It’s a great way to try something new, and stick around to watch the show starting at 6PM with Jim & Wanda Curtis.
On Friday, we’ve got hometown favorites The Feral Cats returning to the tasting room stage. The fur will be flying when these cats get scratching. As always, no cover for our musical performances. Enjoy a glass of wine, mead, or beer and a build your own charcuterie board while they slay you with some tunes.
On Saturday, “Michigan’s darkest ukulele band” – SALDAJE – is back in action. These St. Ambrose favorites are sure to pack the house for another night of mystical music and storytelling. We love when Saldaje makes time for the tasting room, and you won’t want to miss this performance.
$7.77 Draft Meads
If you can’t make it to the tasting room, and you can’t find your favorite drafts on store shelves near you with our store locator, don’t forget that we ship to 37 states through our online store. All draft meads are now just $7.77 (plus shipping) through the web! Our line of wines and meads are also available through the store. Check out the full list here.
After the excitement of our fundraiser and music last weekend, we’re back again for another weekend of fun here at St. Ambrose. It’s been a chilly start to the week but it seems like the temperature is rising a bit, and this weekend looks like an absolutely gorgeous time to be out on the lawn with a glass of mead and some good friends.
On Tap
Not many changes to the tap list this week. We’re still pouring our spring seasonal “Cool Breeze” lavender and mint mead, as well as the new trio of springtime wines – Secret Beach, Pinot Noir Riesling, and 2016 Pinot Grigio.
The one change to the list is the return of our Orange Vanilla mead for a limited engagement, replacing the dearly departed (for now) Spirit of ‘67 cranberry hibiscus mead.
In the Tasting Room
Escaping Pavement
Escaping Pavement joins us on Friday at 6PM. Here’s a clip from their bio:
From Detroit to Pasadena, to the high seas and then back to Detroit; it’s only when singer/songwriter duo Emily Burns and Aaron Markovitz escaped the neon blitz and car-strewn concrete of the city that they discovered how well their music could bloom when they brought it back to the roots. There is so much life and vitality in the Americana-folk journeys of Escaping Pavement, sprung entirely from an acoustic guitar, a mandolin, and two voices. Fiery passion, wistful reflection, awestruck adventurousness, and heartstring-plucking poignancy, the duo discovers, through song, the range of human emotion and celebrates the purities of what we’ve left behind for the artifices of tech trends, drug stores and cacophonous city centers.
Jen Sygit is a regular here at the tasting room, and we’re super pumped to have her back on Saturday night at 6PM.
A gifted vocalist and masterful songwriter, Jen Sygit has a golden ear and a deft touch on guitar. Her smooth, sultry voice brings just the right timbre to traditional ballads, acoustic blues, torch songs, country music or lighthearted folk tunes. To supplement her solid acoustic guitar playing, Jen often turns to her open back banjo or soprano ukulele performing mountain melodies and timeless jazz tunes further emphasizing her vocal dexterity. A countrified girl with a generous heart, Jen’s songwriting is personal and heartfelt, but always expressed with a universal appeal. Whether writing about the country roads of her childhood or about watching families send their sons and daughters off to war, Jen Sygit represents “the music of front porch America.”
Jen in action:
Bayou in the Barn
Ok, it isn’t this weekend, but the posters and ads started going up this week for Bayou in the Barn – the spiritual successor to the popular Bayou on the Bay festival in Frankfort! This year, we’ll be hosting three amazing zydeco acts in our barn here at St. Ambrose Cellars. In addition, all the amazing food that goes along with the festival and our meads and wines and beers (yes! Beer!) will be available.
This evening fundraiser celebrates the cultural connections that Louisiana and Michigan share through music, food, and community leisure. National and local musicians perform blues and zydeco music, while Louisiana cuisine is made from scratch with Michigan ingredients. Ticket prices include admission to the event and auctions- food, alcohol, beverages and merchandise will be available for purchase (EARLY BIRD PRICES END JULY 5th). Attendees are encouraged to bring lawn chairs, blankets, and dancing shoes. Yard games including bocce ball, cornhole, and disc golf will be available. All funds raised will benefit Grow Benzie’s community center, youth and educational programs (www.GrowBenzie.org).
We’ll have a ton more on this event as the date gets closer! You can buy advance tickets for this great night here:
As always, you can check out the 400+ (and growing!) number of stores that carry our products at our store locator.
This week we wanted to feature a great store in the Metro Detroit area – Steve’s Party Store has been carrying our mead for some time now and they do a great job introducing new customers to the wonderful world of mead! If you are in the Detroit region, a stop to Steve’s is a must to check out the huge selection of craft beverages available.
1. You’ve got a lot of influences (like the ones listed on your site – Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Suzanne Vega, Nina Simone, Eastern European, Arabic and Celtic musics) that is verrrry diverse, which is cool. But how did that come about? Do you have a family history with any of those regions that drove you to explore specific regions or style? Just an interest?
We do share a strong dose of Eastern European blood. I believe the thread that connects all of our influences is passion, and a sort of dark romanticism. Saldaje is a fusion of all the music our hearts were ever broken to.
2. How challenging has it been over the years to merge all of those diverse interests into your sound?
It happens naturally, it is not generally something we set out to do. The songs just come.
3. What’s your favorite thing about performing at St. Ambrose? You’ve been here a few times recently, so we assume you must enjoy it 🙂
St. Ambrose is a special place that just keeps getting cooler, bees are magical and mead is good!
4. Where’s your favorite place to shop for the awesome band wardrobe? Custom made? Thrift shops?
Ahh, the wardrobe…my favorite part…I design and make much of it. We are also avid thrift store up cyclers. I am a visual artist as well, so how we are painted on stage is important to me. Shaun is just dapper in general.
5. Any awesome new projects in the works?
We are presenting a special, winter-themed show at Higher Art Gallery in Traverse City in February that will involve a bit more theatrics. We are also recording a new CD, probably out next year.
Check out some Saldaje performances in the videos below!
Celebrate the weekend with a great lineup of music this week at St. Ambrose Cellars! We’ve got shows on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday this week. Kick off the holiday with the musical stylings of Soul Patch, starting at 6PM – then take a load off after your Black Friday shopping with the always wonderful DeDe Alder, again starting at 6PM! And finally, Maggie McCabe comes out to St. Ambrose for the first time. All these events are – as usual – no cover and you’ll be able to enjoy our mead, wine, and food specials.
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