Great beer, great service, great atmosphere. And best of all, you don't need a cab cause its in Chesteremere!

There are getting to be quite a few beer houses in and around Calgary, so these days you need to stand out in order to draw in the customers. Fortunately, North Taphouse has had the same idea and has built a pub with a large beer selection to lure in the the beer geeks for whom a small import and micro brew list are not enough to impress anymore. Is it worth traveling out to Chestermere though? Read on to find out. North Taphouse has gone the route of offering a large selection of bottled beers. The on tap list is small - I see nine taps on the website list. At least it's a broad selection having standard lager, brown, fruit, and stout. Surprising is that they have gone with a Pike stout rather than Guinness, a brave choice, but I think appropriate as the beer drinker can get Guinness pretty much anywhere these days. The bottled selection is huge, with many selections in the standard beer categories, and several in most of the more unusual categories. I stopped counting at 100, I would say at least 200 are on the list. I was happy to try a couple of new beers, having several to pick from that I had not tried or even heard of before. Prices are quite good, lots to pick from at $5-7 per bottle, with some specialty and large bottles exceeding $10. I will quickly mention that there is a decent selection of non-beer bevvies for those people not into beer. The food menu is not so extensive - it would pretty much be a standard pub level selection of food. We started with the bruschetta, which was quite good. Lots of tomatoes, nicely toasted bread, a sprinkling of goat cheese. It could use a bit more herb spicing though, and was a little pricey at $11. I tried the pizza which was a decent rendition of a meat pizza - a touch on the greasy side, thicker dough crust, good amount of toppings. At $16 for a 10", I would rate it a good value - you could split one of these if you are not too hungry. The decor is industrial, however softened with wood beams in the ceilings. It's predominately black, so has a colder feel than the traditional pub decor. The space is all one large open area, which did fill up on the Thursday preceding a long weekend we were there. It gets noisy, but the ceiling structure does keep it down somewhat. I was surprised the washroom was as small as it was - I'd expect a little larger for the space given. You might have to wait your turn when the place is full. There is the standard assortment of large TVs hung around the place - muted, although there was nothing of local interest playing at the time. The service was really attentive, almost too much so, but I'll take it over too slow for sure. Only one beer selection was out, which the server knew about right away, saving the whole back and forth picking beer that I've seen a few times now. Food came out promptly, beer came quickly, she was always checking to see if our glasses were getting down. Frankly, I'm not used to this level of attention these days! Overall, if you are looking for a place to try many different bottled beers, this pub is worth making the trip out to Chestermere for.