We here at BYNY take Metro-North often to visit family, and we’re always disappointed with the beer options from the vendors on the station platforms. Sometimes, we celebrate getting the option of the Bar Car on the New Haven Line, but even those options still fall flat: Budweiser, Miller, Coors, and if we’re lucky, Samuel Adams Boston Lager. Why can’t someone offer a halfway-decent beer that we can drink on the train on the way home?

Just wait. As Crain’s New York first reported yesterday, Justin Philips and his wife, the people behind Brooklyn’s Beer Table, has landed a deal on a 300 square-foot space in the Graybar Passage at Grand Central Terminal tentatively called Beer Table Pantry. The space will offer growler pours, bottles, and a limited selection of food, too. All of it will be packaged to-go.

(The Graybar Passage, for those who don’t frequent Grand Central - is the northernmost hallway to connects the Great Hall to Lexington Avenue.)

Philips bit his chops working for B. United International, which imports such beer brands as Harviestoun, Thornbridge, and Hitachino Nest, so he knows how to get his hands on some damn good, rare beers. And it appears that as long as we’ve complained about the beer selection at Grand Central, he’s been trying to do something about it; he says the deal for a space had been in the works for nearly three years.

Philips hopes they have the space up and running in two months. Hopefully, the State Liquor Authority Gods will be kind to them - they filed the liquor license application for this space back in late January, and faced a six-month wait the last time they waited for a license in Brooklyn.

Soon, the vast beer wasteland on Metro-North will be classed up. We can’t wait for the day when we can drink something better than a Heineken on the train.

Here are the beer-related goings-on after work tonight:

• Pretty Things is at Good Beer (422 E. 9th St., btw. 1st Ave. and Ave. A) tonight with tonight from 6-9pm with their quirky antics and quirkier beers. They’ll have specials on pours Jack D'Or, Baby Tree, St. Botolph’s Town, and their hoppy tripel, Fluffy White Rabbits.
• Weyerbacher takes over the taps at Rattle-N-Hum (14 E. 33rd St., at 5th Ave., Midtown) today starting at 4pm. Head brewer Chris Wilson will be on hand with six brews on cask and 20 on tap, including Blithering Idiot, and a vertical tasting of their anniversary beers: Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, and Fifteen.
• Two Brothers takes over ten taps and two casks at The Pony Bar (637 10th Ave. at 45th St., Hell’s Kitchen) tonight starting at 6pm. Among the offerings: Domaine DuPage, Reprieve Schwarzbier, and the 11.3% Bare Tree Weiss Wine.
• If you missed the April Sours event on Saturday, head over to a $10 Tasting tonight at 7:30pm at Jimmy’s No. 43 (43 E. 7th St., at 2nd Ave., East Village). This week’s theme is sours, and will include samples of Hanssens Geuze, Jolly Pumpkin Maracaibo, Lindeman’s Faro, and more.

There are over sixty breweries in New York State. Sure, there are plenty of ones you see regularly, like Brooklyn, Southern Tier, or Southampton, but there are plenty that don’t get around as much, like Long Island’s Greenport Harbor, the Rockland County’s Defiant, or the Hudson Valley’s Keegan Ales. A brand-new spot near Union Square is celebrating all New York State beer - and the only beer they serve comes from Empire State brewers.

Little Town NYC (118A E. 15th St., at Irving Pl., Union Square), which just opened over the weekend, is carved out of SideBAR, which specializes in fizzy yellow beer, woo girls, and loud pop music. The new space takes things in a completely different direction. In less than two weeks, the owners flipped the space, adding exposed brick and wood, a new food menu, and installing twenty tap lines that celebrate the beers of New York. It feels almost too elegant for a space that was doling out swill beer and tequila shots to college basketball fans a month ago. But that’s a good thing, right?

Beer and food in detail, after the jump…

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The paint has dried, the signs are up, the taps are running. After nearly a year of wrangling for every certification necessary from the city and state, Breukelen Bier Merchants (182 Grand St., at Driggs Ave., Williamsburg) officially opened for business yesterday.

The beer shop, which serves both pints to stay and growlers to go, rolled out a solid tap list for day one, including Oskar Blues Dale’s Pale Ale, Troegs Hopback Amber, Lagunitas IPA, and selections from Founders, Cigar City, Sixpoint, Greenport Harbor, Green Flash, and Brooklyn Brewery to name a few. There are sixteen taps in all, and upwards of a thousand different bottles, too. Food is on the way, too, with pressed sandwiches and cheese plates.

The shop is open Monday-Friday from 1 to 10pm, Saturday from noon to 10pm, and Sunday from noon to 8pm. We’ll have a full report one we check the place out for ourselves.

A fitting sign posted high above the bar at Spring Lounge

It’s pretty well-known that Spring Lounge (48 Spring St., at Mulberry St., Little Italy) is one of the only bars in town where you can drink a craft beer at 8am. Their early opening gets taken to a whole new level tomorrow morning with their very special Kegs and Eggs event.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, April 19th, when they open their doors at 8am, you’ll have three special draft beers each from both Smuttynose (Old Brown Dog, Vunderbahr Pilsner) and Lagunitas (Little Sumpin Sumpin, Hairy Eyeball) at your disposal, and the other thing that Spring Lounge does best: free food! Breakfast food, to be exact. They’ll have bacon and eggs and biscuits and gravy free for the taking to wash down with beer.

We absolutely do not condone getting hammered before you head to the office, but one beer and a little bit of breakfast can’t hurt, right?

Good morning! It’s Monday, and it was a busy weekend for beer in New York, with plenty of events to keep beer drinkers well-lubricated.

It was a packed (and apparently, blurry) house at Jimmy’s No. 43 (43 E. 7th St., at 2nd Ave., East Village) on Saturday afternoon for April Sours, an event that poured generous portions of sour beer, including Cantillon Rosé de Gambrinus, Leelanau Petoskey Pale Ale, and the Saison du Repois from Quebec brewers Hopfenstark. In the restaurant’s back room, people were especially crammed in for the creme de la creme of Belgian sours. And was there food? Oh, was there food! Smoked duck, chutneys, beer sausages, half-sour pickles, bacon, whole ham legs… enough to substantially soak up these beers, some of which where especially high in gravity.

Meanwhile, down at Bierkraft (191 Fifth Ave., at President St., Park Slope), Saturday was a rainy day to open their backyard, but the die-hards huddled under the tents to drink the casks. We’d share a picture of the backyard, but it would just look dreary, and it has lots of potential: a pair of long, communal picnic tables, some additional seating along the periphery, and a generous amount of sunlight early in the day (since it’s on the east side of a building, though, you might want to bring a windbreaker for the late afternoon).

Oh, yeah, and there was some cask beer at Bierkraft on Saturday, too! That’s why it was called the 1st Annual Bierkraft Cask Beer and Oyster Fest - a detail that escaped us until we saw the signs posted in the backyard.

Sitting in the rain were some lonely casks from Sierra Nevada, Blue Point, Captain Lawrence, and the Oyster Stout from Kelso of Brooklyn, which was just the right balance of roasty and briny. They shucked nearly a thousand oysters in the backyard to complement the Kelso brew, but with a packed backyard during the early afternoon drizzle, they were gone in less than three hours.

There’s plenty of events coming up this week and this weekend, including a big Weyerbacher Tap Takeover on Tuesday at Rattle-N-Hum (14 E. 33rd St., at 5th Ave., Midtown), and the 5th Williamsburg Cask Beer Festival this weekend at d.b.a. Brooklyn (113 N. 7th St., at Berry St., Williamsburg). We’ll keep you posted!