Beer Superlatives: The best and worst of the New York beer scene in 2011

It’s been a long and very active year on the craft beer scene in New York City this year. We’ve seen new breweries launch, new bars open, a few new out-of-state breweries arrive on our shores, and a few blockbuster beer events. Here are some of the highlights and lowlights of New York’s beer scene in 2011:

Best New Bar Opening
Taproom 307 (307 3rd Ave., at 24th St., Murray Hill)

We’ll admit, we were skeptical of this place before it opened in April. “A beer bar on 3rd Avenue in the 20s?,” we thought. “The only bars over there are frat bars that pump loud 80s music and serve swill beer.” But after visiting a few times, we learned this place had some real craft beer cred. Their “beer sommelier,” Hayley Jensen, has curated an excellent 40-tap-deep selection of classic craft brews and rare beers, and their beer events (like a series of dinners pairing Mikkeller beers with the five senses) have impressed us, too.

Biggest Disappointment of the Year
Spritzenhaus (33 Nassau Ave., at Guernsey St., Greenpoint)

A bar with 100 taps! A beer garden! That’s what the press was bragging about before this massive spot in Greenpoint opened in May. Unfortunately, what they got was 25 different beers repeated four times, a few tables out on the sidewalk, table service that was eliminated by November, and a food menu that was eventually pared down to pretzels and brats. The place is still a serviceable German-themed bar, but it certainly didn’t match the hype.

Best Beer Business Trend of the Year
Local brewery expansion

Everyone is getting too big for their britches, it seems. Four local breweries expanded or announced expansions in 2011: Captain Lawrence, who’s moving to Elmsford, Brooklyn Brewery, who continued expanding to triple capacity in Williamsburg, Sixpoint Craft Ales, who launched canned beers brewed in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Greenport Harbor Brewing, who announced its planned expansion last week. This is a great sign of the demand for craft beer growing in New York, especially considering two of these breweries don’t even distribute outside of the Tri-State area.

Most Creative Local Beer
Tie: Brooklyn Brewery The Concoction, Birreria Ruby

We’re not going to tell you what the best local beer is (that’s a matter of opinion and taste), but these two brews had people’s taste buds pleasantly confused. The Concoction, released as a Brewmaster’s Reserve beer over the summer, was inspired by cocktail from Milk & Honey, with honey, ginger, lemon, and peat-smoked malt. The Ruby from Birreria, released in November, is an American Amber ale with figs and mustard seeds. It might be one of the first American-brewed beers with mustard seeds we’ve found, and it’s been a popular choice at the rooftop brewery. Regardless of what you think of these beers, you’ve got to give them credit for creativity.

Best News for Hopheads
Sixpoint’s “Nano-Kegs”

When Sixpoint announced their canned beers in the spring, one little note that was buried in the fine print was that they were all going to be dry-hopped. And for those that like aggressively-hopped beers, the release of their 16-ounce beers was heaven-sent. The beers are definitely more hop-forward than their earlier predecessors, a trend that continued with the fall release of Autumnation and the winter release of the Diesel stout. Hoppy beers that are also portable!

Biggest Godsend for Suburban Commuters
Beer Table Pantry (Grand Central Terminal, Graybar Passage, Midtown)

If anyone was starving for craft beer, it was Metro-North commuters, who were subjected to a barrage of cheap domestic and imported beer at the tracks and in the bar cars as they passed through Grand Central each day. That all changed in August, when a beer shop opened just across from Track 13, offering cold cans, bottles, and growlers that can be enjoyed on the train or back home in the ‘burbs. We hope that a similar concept at Penn Station isn’t far behind.

Borough That’s Too Hard to Overlook Anymore
The Bronx

Okay, Bronx beer lovers, you’ve got our attention now. We already loved Bronx Ale House (216 W. 238th St., at Broadway, Kingsbridge), but the launch of two breweries in the Boogie Down this year made the borough too hard to ignore. Jonas Bronck’s Beer Company launched in July with the Woodlawn Weiss and later, the Pelham Bay IPA, both brewed at Butternuts in Garrettsville upstate. In September, Bronx Brewery launched their Pale Ale to rave reviews. That’s brewed at Cottrell in Pawcatuck, Connecticut, but both breweries have grand plans to relocate to The Bronx once they’ve got the success and capital to do it. We’ll be rooting for both of them.

Most Unlikely Brewery Opening
The 508 Gastrobrewery (508 Greenwich St., at Spring St., SoHo)

Tucked onto a side street just a couple blocks from the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, The 508 was an unlikely spot to see a brewery open. But chef - and now brewer - Anderson Sant’anna De Lima was inspired to brew in the restaurant’s basement, and after the long and arduous permitting process, the brewery opened this spring. Serving more than a half-dozen different beers to stay and to go, the news of this place’s opening got kind of buried as it opened around the same time as Birreria at Eataly (200 Fifth Ave., at 23rd St., Flatiron). But it deserves just as much - if not more - praise.

Price-Gougers of the Year
Alewife Queens (5-14 51st Ave., at 5th St., Long Island City)

Sorry, as much as we appreciate the well-trained staff and excellent craft beer selection here - both domestic and imported - we paid $8 for a pint of Ithaca Flower Power. That’s not acceptable in Manhattan, let alone Long Island City, Queens. This is flat-out price gouging in a neighborhood that’s starving for good craft beer, and exceeded our expectations that this place would be modestly overpriced like its sister bars in Cambridge, Mass. and Baltimore. Their long list of rare, imported beers are priced a $9-10, and we can justify those prices. But $8 for a pint of a pretty standard American craft beer? In Queens? Stop it.

Local Beer Trend of the Year
The advent of the bottle shop

In just over a year, we’ve seen four beer stores open in New York that also sell pints: Good Beer (422 E. 9th St., btw. 1st Ave. and Ave. A), Breukelen Bier Merchants (182 Grand St., at Driggs Ave., Williamsburg), City Swiggers (320 E. 86th St., at 2nd Ave., Upper East Side), and On Tap at Whole Foods Columbus Circle (10 Columbus Circle, at 59th St., Upper West Side). While Bierkraft (191 Fifth Ave., at President St., Park Slope) is the original - celebrating ten years just last month, the imitators aren’t too bad, either. And there are two more shops slated to open in the first half of 2012: Beer Street (413 Graham Ave., at Withers St., Williamsburg) and Top Hops Beer Shop (94 Orchard St., at Broome St., Lower East Side).

Saddest Story of the Year
The passing of Ray Deter

Even six months removed, we still deeply miss Ray Deter, co-owner of d.b.a. East Village (41 1st Ave., at 2nd St., East Village) and d.b.a. Brooklyn (113 N. 7th St., at Berry St., Williamsburg), who passed away in a tragic bike accident in June. Thankfully, he was remembered with two moving events: a New Orleans-style Second-Line march in July and a memorial fundraiser in August. His spirit lives on in his two New York bars (and a branch in New Orleans), and especially at the Brooklyn location, where the menu above the bar reads “Ray is still drinking Red Breast.”

Sad Reality of the Year
The advent of the $7 pint

This superlative falls into the “sad but true” category. Virtually no craft beer bar that opened in 2011 in Manhattan charged less than an average of $7 for a pint of craft beer. A few bars played the high-low game, where some were priced above and below that, but it seems that $7 is the new normal. Unfortunately, this has a lot to do with the success of a handful of Manhattan bars that charge $7 for a pint… monkey see, monkey do. But something’s definitely wrong when The Pony Bar (637 10th Ave. at 45th St., Hell’s Kitchen) still charges $5 for a 14-ounce serving of craft beer while bars in low-rent Brooklyn neighborhoods charge $7.

The worst part about this trend is that it does more harm than good for craft beer. Craft beer is supposed to be an affordable luxury, but bars in New York are starting to command a luxury price for it. When one bar charged $7 for a pint of Stevens Point Special Lager, I remarked that that was more than they charge for a six-pack of the stuff in Wisconsin. It’s hard to convince people to switch to craft beer when it’s costing them $2 or $3 more for a pint of entry-level craft beer than a can of PBR or a pint of Bud Light. And that’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of beers worth $7 - or even more - by the glass. But not all craft beers command that pricetag, and any bar that refuses to price appropriately is doing both the consumer and the brewery a huge disservice.

For more perspective on this, read this piece from the Washington (DC) City Paper in October. We have a similar situation in New York. So, who’s to blame for the $7 pint? Everyone. The bars for gouging consumers, the consumers who are willing to be gouged, and the distributors that play a high-low game with kegs. If you’re annoyed by this trend, vote with your wallet. This is a big city with a lot of bars. Choose wisely.

Most Annoying Trend of the Year
The overuse of the term “beer garden”

We admit, we were the biggest critics of the use of the term “beer garden,” but it seemed as though nobody in the mainstream press knew what a beer garden actually is, and fell prey to every PR flack trying to tout the opening of a “beer garden” in New York City. The New York Times did a trend piece on beer gardens, and most of the press was rooted in two women who created a “Beer Gardens NYC” app that listed dozens of backyard “beer gardens” that would put any German on the floor laughing. The fact is this: the only three places in New York that meet our very simple definition of a beer garden are Bohemian Hall & Beer Garden (29-19 24th Ave., at 29th St., Astoria), Killmeyer’s (4254 Arthur Kill Rd., at Sharrotts Rd., Charleston, Staten Island), and Studio Square (35-33 36th St., at 36th Ave., Astoria).

So, that’s all she wrote about 2011. Now, onto next year! Who knows what awaits us in the beer world next year? Feel free to share your predictions in the comments. Here’s to another great year of great beer!