The Great American Ale Trail (Revised Edition)
Page 33
PHILOSOPHY
Old-world flavors and techniques mingle with unhinged experimentation, both in the kettle and on the plate. “This may well be the craziest and most amazing brewery in the world,” says Di Vincenzo.
KEY BEER
All of the Birreria’s beers are served on cask, with three cask beer engines featuring two year-round beers and one rotating seasonal. Staples include an English mild made with Italian chestnut powder and American pale ale made with dried thyme from Italy. In addition, there are eight draft taps with beers from Italian and American craft breweries.
ELEVEN MADISON PARK
11 Madison Ave. • New York, NY 10010 (212) 889-0905 • elevenmadisonpark.com • Established: 1998
SCENE & STORY
Only in New York could a restaurant with three Michelin stars, four stars from the New York Times, and James Beard Awards count as a great beer destination as well. And while it’s not exactly the typical beer experience to sample artisanal beers and delicate market-driven cuisine in an elegant, hushed dining room, it’s an experience whose time has come. The chef, Daniel Humm, is among the best in the world, and if he says beer’s acidity, residual sweetness, and sometimes oak barrel-given tannins work just as well with certain foods as the best wines, then who are we to protest? Pick a special occasion. Splurge, guiltlessly. The quieter the room, the louder you can hear your beer.
The beer list here is profound, with just four drafts but over 100 rare and vintage brews that are rarely seen in the United States. In 2011, Humm developed two unique collaborative beers with Brooklyn Brewery’s Garrett Oliver and the Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery. Then to kick things up a notch, Humm and Oliver began to plan a series of dinners for which both the entire menu and the beers were created from scratch to work together for a single meal. When a single beer can take anywhere from ten days to three years to brew, this will be no small effort going forward, and you can be sure spots will be hard to come by.
PHILOSOPHY
Respect, consider, revolutionize. “We have been pushing the presence of beer in our dining room,” says Kirk Kelewae, a former server and staff beer guru who worked his way up to GM before age thirty. “I provide beer pairings to guests when they request it, and we’ve picked up a whole collection of crystal beer glasses from Spiegelau. We’re working to redefine how beer is served in a fine-dining restaurant.”
KEY BEER
Other than the Brooklyn collaborative beers? It just depends on what you’re ordering for lunch—by all means ask for pairings from Kelewae or a member of his staff—but the restaurant’s collection of beers from Brasserie Franches-Montagnes, an obscure but highly collectible producer, rivals any in the world.
VOL DU NUIT
148 W. 4th St. • New York, NY 10012 (212) 979-2616 • voldenuitbar.com • Established: 2001
SCENE & STORY
Vol Du Nuit is a bar in three parts: a dimly lit back room with a back bar made for slurping moules frites and Abbey ales, a courtyard in the middle for sitting sort of al fresco, and a tiny bar that most people breeze past as they enter the inner sanctum through a covered tunnel. But it’s that one, the street side bar in its diminutive glory, that makes this place worth a stop. And though there are plenty of trendier West Village bars that have better beer lists, and maybe even some that want to transport you to the University district of Brussels, this one succeeds the most convincingly. It’s all about the atmosphere, sort of Ronin meets Amélie minus the gnomes and gunplay. You might suddenly want to bum a smoke from the NYU grad students hanging out, write in a leather-bound journal, and bike around cobblestone streets humming Bjork. It happens.
PHILOSOPHY
This no-frills bar is simply amiable and doesn’t pretend to be more nor less than it is, a great place to have a good Belgian beer and some good, restorative food, and catch up with an old friend or two. It’s an escape in the busy Village, a hideout from the hustle.
KEY BEER
The Belgian ales Orval and Saison Dupont are both available by the bottle, and they are both world-class, inimitable brews normal college kids can seldom afford, so you probably didn’t drink them on your junior year abroad. Belgian ales are often better consumed by the bottle rather than on draft, so simply ask for the list and see what’s in the cellar.
Barking Orders
goodbeerseal.com
When in the New York City area, stop and look for a little red sticker on the window or near the door with a red seal hoisting a big stein of beer—“the Good Beer Seal.” That means it’s one of the beer bars a small but dedicated group of local beer lovers and bar owners (led by Jimmy Carbone of Jimmy’s 43 and also including Dave Brodrick of the Blind Tiger) have anointed as a great place to drink craft beer. Jimmy writes, “Good Beer Seal Bars are committed to the presentation, promotion and enjoyment of good craft beer; seeking out the best beers from local, national and international producers. This commitment includes serving these beers the way brewers have intended, including proper glassware and temperature (within reason!). A good portion of a Good Beer Seal Bar’s beer should be via a draft beer/cask ale program and draft lines should be properly maintained and cleaned . . . An active community presence is essential for a Good Beer Seal bar.” Now you know!
RATTLE N HUM
14 E. 33rd St. (between 5th and Madison) New York, NY 10016 • (212) 481-1586 • rattlenhumbarnyc.com • Established: 2008
SCENE & STORY
Rattle N Hum is the best place to escape the hubbub of Midtown, an ace up the sleeve. Narrow and cozy with a grand, mirrored wood bar and forty beers on tap, the lines are routinely serviced. There are some 100 bottles on the list, and a rotating bevy of cask-conditioned ales (twenty-four on a recent visit). Practice your best New Yorker attitude when sidling up to the bar (it’s all in the elbows). And in April—a nice, not too hot time to be in town—RNH hosts a cask ales festival, the back of the bar stacked high with firkins of delicate English-style ales.
PHILOSOPHY
This is a straightforward, narrow, and sometimes crowded bar with a serious beer list and decent pub grub. The menu has a strong Northeast focus, plus specialty Norwegian and Belgian imports, and hard-to-find American releases on cask as well.
KEY BEER
Captain Lawrence Xtra Gold (10% ABV; ten dollars for twenty-five ounces), brewed in nearby Westchester County, is an American interpretation of the traditional “tripel,” a hazy golden ale with a spicy backbone and notes of clove and lemon peel. It goes perfectly with the beer-battered fish and chips.
Brooklyn
BROOKLYN BREWERY
No. 1 Brewers Row • 79 N. 11th St. Brooklyn, NY 11211 • (718) 486-7422 • brooklynbrewery.com • Established: 1987
SCENE & STORY
Once, there were some four dozen breweries in Brooklyn, producing a fifth of the nation’s brews. Today, there are just a few in operation, and all of them are products of the modern craft beer era. The most famous of them is Brooklyn Brewery, a short ride from Manhattan on the L train into Williamsburg and by all means worth the beer traveler’s efforts. Since former Associated Press journalist Steve Hindy and his downstairs neighbor Tom Potter founded the company in 1987 (with a ribbon cutting by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani), and especially with the arrival of brewmaster Garrett Oliver in 1994, the company’s fame and acclaim have grown. There’s even a brewery in Stockholm now, and Oliver travels there frequently.
The beers are distinctive, especially the small batch brews crafted in Brooklyn (the rest is brewed in Utica, New York). Visitors mingle in a rustic tavern setting (opened in 1996) in view of the shiny tanks in the company’s new 50bbl brewhouse. Friday nights have a raucous happy hour vibe and Saturdays and Sundays are for tours; many make the stop en route to other Williamsburg drinking destinations including Brooklyn Bowl, Spuyten Duyvil, Fette Sau, Barcade, the Diamond, and others.
PHILOSOPHY
Brooklyn’s beers, under avowed foodie Garrett Oliver’s watch, strive for dryness layered over a fu
ll malty backbone, and often hint of overt spiciness. Recently the company has released a slew of complex Belgian ales, collaborations, and experimental one-offs including beers made with bacon (!) and barrel-aged whimsies like Cuvée de la Crochet Rouge (his Belgian-style Local 1, a strong Belgian pale ale, aged on botrytis-altered Riesling lees) that continue to spread Oliver’s reputation for a steadily creative hand at the kettles.
KEY BEER
Brooklyn Lager, the company’s 5.2% ABV flagship, is an unusual brew: it has the spice and fruitiness and body of many ales, but also the creamy but clean and palate-cleansing mouthfeel of German lagers (thanks to a long cold fermentation). Blast, an American-style Double IPA that the brewery has quietly produced for years, is a delicious grape-fruity hop bomb.
A BEER WITH
BROOKLYN BREWERY’S GARRETT OLIVER
One of the most accomplished figures in the modern craft brewing world, Queens native Garrett Oliver is also among the most quotable. Over the course of an evening’s tasting in Brooklyn on a chilly December night, Oliver, who, at the time, was in the midst of finishing the editing of The Oxford Companion to Beer (a tome—not his first—with 1,150 different subjects and 100 contributing editors on board), took time to elucidate his philosophies on being a brewmaster in New York City. And Oliver, as anticipated, was the perfect host.
Getting the Williamsburg operation off the ground, he recalled, was a dicey proposition, even for a seasoned local. “There was nothing. You went outside; it was dark; you were looking over your shoulder the whole time to make sure you didn’t get clocked in the head,” he said. “Brooklyn was ‘Crooklyn’ and the cabs wouldn’t take you there.” But the branding and the move to the budding scene of Williamsburg was incredibly prescient. “It’s really only been in the last ten years or something that I would say that the name Brooklyn has become positive to people. It was always positive to us because we’re from here, but in other places that we went, it was definitely kind of like, ‘Uh, really?’”
But Oliver had very clear ideas about bringing craft beer to internationally experienced New York audiences, starting with their most notoriously decisive organ, the stomach. “Food came before beer,” he reminisced. “My father was a serious cook.” Oliver’s love of food is evident in his book on the synergy of the two, The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food. Today, Oliver is a regular commentator on the delights of pairing food and beer, and has built a space inside the Williamsburg facility for special beer dinners.
Beyond the culinary aspects of beer that have helped Oliver brew for a New York mindset, he is most outspoken about craft beer’s place amid the larger culture of New York, and America beyond. “My original background comes out of filmmaking,” he said, “and people often ask me, ‘How do you go from being a filmmaker to being a brewer?’ In my mind, they are actually almost exactly the same. They are disciplines where you need 50 percent technical ability and 50 percent inspiration and art. Now, you can have a career with only one half or with an imbalance of those two things, but we have all been to movies where all the explosions and car chases are perfect, but you walk out of there and that’s just two hours of your life you’ll never get back. Basically Anheuser-Busch is Jerry Bruckheimer.”
As we moved from the lemon verbena-like Sorachi Ace Saison to the racy, aromatic Blast IPA to the maltier, Belgian Abbey–style Brooklyn Local 2 and Cuvée Noire, a complex, roasty stout, Oliver explained that unlike the nation’s truly mass producers, he sees brewing in more writerly terms.
“A beer is like a story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it should be interesting throughout, and it’s supposed to have a structure that beckons to you to say, ‘I would love to have a bunch of that’.”
To achieve this sort of drinkability, Oliver went on to explain, is to manage a factor that many winemakers also must confront: attenuation. How much residual sugar should remain? “I think dryness is vastly underrated,” he says. He’s right. What goes for wit in conversation works as well with wheat beer, wild ale, or whatever beer you like: more often than not, less is more.
The genius of restraint is that then you want more of it, achieving perhaps what Oliver calls “the Four Pint Threshold.” “That’s what I’m always trying to do . . . [the beer] falls into a place on your palate that causes you to say, ‘You know what? I could sit down and get really comfortable with this.’” Sounds like a threshold worth putting to the test. His methods have been working out pretty well. Oliver won the James Beard Award in 2014, for Outstanding Beer, Wine, or Spirits Professional in the United States.
SPUYTEN DUYVIL
359 Metropolitan Ave. (between 4th St. & Havemeyer St.) • Brooklyn, NY 11211 (718) 963-4140 • spuytenduyvilnyc.com • Established: 2003
SCENE & STORY
To many a resident of Gotham, Spuyten Duyvil—by its location in hipster-infested Williamsburg alone—always seemed too precious to be true: a craft beer bar built in a narrow old railroad apartment with a wide, old wood bar, lovingly scripted chalkboards, creaky wooden floors, pressed tin ceilings, and apothecary knickknacks, all completely dedicated to the enjoyment of “rare and obscure” Belgian and other European beers. Ehhh, fuggheddaboutit. The upshot is that by leaving the bar alone to the “rare and obscure” sorts of folks—beer geeks and assorted arrivistes equally content with a PBR or rare Flemish geuze in hand, whatever seems tastier at the time—New Yorkers have given the bar a break, and the concept works just about as well as the marriage of chocolate and peanut butter. Which is to say, as New Yorkers sometimes do, it’s “freaking awesome.”
Today Spuyten Duyvil (loosely, “spitting devil” or “in spite of the devil” in Dutch, depending who you ask) has earned its rightful place among the great craft beer bars of the nation. A round of beers here with the cheese plate and its Brooklyn-made pickles would make the perfect stop before hitting Brooklyn Brewery, Brooklyn Bowl, and local barbecue palace Fette Sau.
PHILOSOPHY
Rare and obscure—what else matters?
KEY BEER
Start with shared bottles of De Ranke’s Kriek, then work your way up through a flask of Wostynjte Mustard ale, which is actually made with mustard seeds, giving it a delicious kick. Graduate to a 750-milliliter Cantillon Lou Pepe Framboise, and finish it all off with the world-classic Trappist monastery-brewed Rochefort 10.
Brooklyn Does Beer & Barbecue
FETTE SAU
354 Metropolitan Ave. • Brooklyn, NY 11211 (718) 963-3404 • fettesaubbq.com
Pork belly much? If you’re in the area long or late you owe it to yourself to seek out some incredible dry-rub barbecue from heritage livestock smoked over red and white oak, maple, beech and cherry wood; a huge American whiskey list; and craft beer taps from the likes of Kelso (with growler sales to go). Founder Joe Carroll, who built it (along with Spuyten Duyvil and the outstanding gastropub next door, St. Anselm) is also the author of an amazing book on barbecue, Feeding the Fire (Artisan), cowritten with Nick Fauchald. Own it.
THE DIAMOND
43 Franklin St. (between Quay St. & Calyer St.) Brooklyn, NY 11222 • (718) 383-5030 • thediamondbrooklyn.com
SCENE & STORY
A den of ironic glories where craft beer meets pop art and rock and roll, the Diamond is a little out of the way, a little bit kooky, and a lot of awesome. With its bright lighting, pop art in the form of a massive Michael Landon portrait, horseshoe bar, high metal stools, shuffleboard, and back patio equipped with an old ski gondola car, it’s a refreshing change of pace from the Ye Olden Days vibe that pervades so many bars and taverns in New York these days. It makes a superb afternoon stop on the way into Williamsburg’s other great beer destinations like Spuyten Duyvil and Fette Sau. The bar sponsors a Shuffleboard Biathlon, and “Brew n’ Chew,” a home-brew and home cooking competition, as well as occasional beer dinners, such as a recent sausage event.
148 Hoyt St. (at Bergen St.) • Brooklyn, NY 11217 • (718) 522-2525 • E
stablished: 1880s
It has no loud lighted sign—it has never needed one, and never will. Regulars and neighbors fretted in 2009 when the Brooklyn Inn, a perfect little jewelbox of a bar on a quiet Cobble Hill street, was rumored to be near closing, then remodeling to expand its seating, then appeared as a set for postadolescent angst in the Gossip Girl TV show. It was surely headed for the rocky shoals of history, smashed to bits amid the glare of misguided attentions.
But not so. History has been good to the Brooklyn Inn, open for the last 120 years or so in various incarnations, and with its creamy craftsman light fixtures, high windows, tin ceilings, dark wood walls, massive polished mirror bar (imported from Germany in the 1870s), eclectic jukebox, good local beers, and back room pool table, it’s got all the ingredients for perfection for centuries to come.
Perfection, it’s true, has its drawbacks. Like many of New York’s most vaunted bars, it’s to be avoided on Saturday nights, when the crowd seems to have wandered out of New York’s most flavorless, résumé-obsessed quadrants and drunk louts are sitting on the pool table instead of running it. It’s far better on a quiet afternoon, especially Sunday, ideally when it’s snowing and the only sounds in the bar are soft voices and the creaks of a barstool on the old wooden floors.
PHILOSOPHY
The fact is, you’re not going to come here for lectures on hop growing—you’re coming here to laugh and get a good buzz on. But the beer list is no less worthy, and if you’re really lucky, you might get to hear Van Heusen, owner “Diamond Dave” Pollack’s Van Halen cover band.