| Subscribe Now |
It’s a quiet week as everyone gets geared up for NY Craft Beer Week. Here’s one beer-related going-on after work tonight:
Each day through the rest of September, we’ll feature an event during NY Craft Beer Week, which kicks off this Friday. With a complete list of events that’s a mile long, we’ll fish through all of them and tell you about the shining stars.
Do you like beer? (Of course you do; you wouldn’t be reading this site otherwise.) Do you like burlesque? Do you like sideshow freaks? Do you like live music? Well, in its third year, Freaktoberfest will satisfy all of those cravings in one place… and it is the kickoff event for this year’s NY Craft Beer Week.
Held this Friday night, September 24th, from 7pm-Midnight at the newly-opened Rock Shop in Park Slope, the festival will pair an open bar of craft beers from over 30 different breweries with sideshow freaks straight out of Coney Island. Musical interludes from local bands and performances by burlesque dancers will entertain beer drinkers, too. Among the breweries in attendance: sponsor Shmaltz Brewing Company, Founders, Ramstein, Stone, and Ballast Point.
Tickets for the celebration are available online for $55. In addition, there will be happy hour specials at bars all over Park Slope for pre-party festivities. And if you’re still thirsty for some odd reason afterwards, you can always head right downstairs to Mission Dolores.
Each week, we’ll feature a craft beer bar in New York - some that are well-known, and some that fly under the radar - in a feature we’re calling the “Beer Bar of the Week.”
The Double Windsor
Location: 210 Prospect Park West, at 16th Street, Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn
Hours: Every day, Noon-4am
Subway: F/G train to 15th-Prospect Park
Beers on tap: 14, primarily American microbrews, $5-7
Beers in bottles and cans: 5, with a “Craft Beer Can of the Week,” $3-4
Food: Mostly sandwiches and salads, fries and hush puppies, plus daily specials, $8-14
Happy Hour: Monday-Friday Noon-7pm, Saturday and Sunday Noon-4pm, $2 off all draft beer
On a corner just a block from Bartel-Prichard Square lies this relaxed craft beer bar that opened just last year. There’s little pretension, and the crowd is as laid back as the vibe the bar gives off. The Double Windsor mainly pays homage to American craft beer - most of it local, too - and at very affordable prices. During happy hour last week, I managed to get a glass of Southern Tier Pumking for just $3 - probably the lowest price I’ve ever paid for such a beer. They serve cans of macrobrews for the less particular beer drinkers at a reasonable $3 all the time.
The food is almost as good as the beer. There’s no table service - you just walk right up to the kitchen and order from a menu that offers sandwiches and salads, as well as the occasional dessert (a cherry-vanilla bread pudding was part of the specials menu last Tuesday night).
The bar is a great place to socialize and has very few distractions. The music wasn’t competing with the conversations at the bar, and a single TV doesn’t make it a magnet for sports fans. The biggest distraction might be the children of neighborhood parents who frequent the bar - although the bar has a policy of not allowing children after 5pm.
The beer is what’s placed front and center here, as it should be. And if you’re placed in front and center of the beer, you might get sprayed on.
Each day through the rest of September, we’ll feature an event during NY Craft Beer Week, which kicks off this Friday. With a complete list of events that’s a mile long, we’ll fish through all of them and tell you about the shining stars.
After months in the making, the stage is set for New York’s largest cask beer festival ever, and it’ll pair great beer and local food in a beautiful landmark building.
On September 25th and 26th (at the beginning of New York Craft Beer Week), Get Real New York will be held at Chelsea’s Altman Building. On the docket: 80 casks of beer from around the world, as well as food from 20 different New York restaurants. A panel of experts from Rattle-N-Hum, Ale Street News, Gotham Imbiber, and the Malted Barley Appreciation Society are still choosing the beers, but the list is pretty impressive. Expect beers from Ommegang, Great Divide, Heavy Seas, and Greenport Harbor, plus appearances from the brewers at Sixpoint, Victory, and Flying Dog. And is there food? You bet. L'asso Pizza, Luke’s Lobster, and Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream are among the vendors who will be serving up eats to pair with the cask beer.
Deeply discounted tickets are available today from Groupon. A $65 ticket to any session of Get Real is just $30 - a 54% discount. Each ticket even includes a copy of the NY Craft Beer Week Passport - which is worth over $300 alone. Get it while it’s hot… the deal ends at midnight tonight!
It’s that time of the year again. Dissatisfied with having only one drinking-related holiday each year, more and more beer bars in New York have been jumping on the Oktoberfest bandwagon - offering copious amounts of beer to coincide with tomorrow’s start of the 200th anniversary of Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany.
For a little history, Oktoberfest (which always begins in September) began in 1810 as a celebration of the wedding of King Ludwig I to his bride Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen. The celebration grew as time went on (although it’s only been held 177 times because of cancellations due to war and disease), and has grown into a two and a half week party that brings over six million people to Munich each year.
Nearly two million gallons of beer are consumed in fourteen huge tents dedicated to the mainstays of German brewing: Spaten, Löwenbräu, Paulaner, and Hacker-Pschorr each have more than two tents, where they serve up a Maß - a one-liter (about 34 ounces) glass of their beer for $10-12 US. Oktoberfest is a celebration of excess when it comes to food, too - 140,000 pork sausage pairs were sold at Oktoberfest in 2007. That’s a lot of pig.
Okay, so nothing in New York will compare to the celebration in Munich. But we can try, right? Here’s a list of some of the spots celebrating Oktoberfest during Oktoberfest:
There’s plenty more small celebrations of German beer happening that we’ll update you on in our daily happy hour feature. Prost!
Each day through the rest of September, we’ll feature an event during NY Craft Beer Week, which kicks off one week from today. With a complete list of events that’s a mile long, we’ll fish through all of them and tell you about the shining stars.
What event during New York Craft Beer Week will be attended by Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery, Shane Welch of Sixpoint Craft Ales, Scott Vaccaro of Captain Lawrence Brewing Co., and Kelly Taylor of Kelso of Brooklyn - brewers at the four of the most well-regarded breweries in the New York area? NYC Brewers’ Choice, held September 30th, will feature these four and fifteen other brewers who will pour some of their rarest beers and pair them with food in a walk-around tasting at City Winery (155 Varick St., Vandam St., Soho).
The food will run the gamut from meat to cheese to chocolate, with pairings from The Meat Hook, Brooklyn Larder, Jimmy’s No. 43, Jacques Torres Chocolate, and Saxelby Cheesemongers.
The beers will be chosen by the brewers themselves, and some promise to be hard-to-find. In addition to the local breweries, brewers from Dieu du Ciel (Montreal), McNeill’s (Brattleboro, Vermont), Two Brothers (Warrenville, Illinois), and Bear Republic (Healdsburg, California) will be on hand to serve up their beers, and Greg Hall of Chicago-based Goose Island will be the keynote speaker for the event.
Tickets for Brewers’ Choice are $90 and available online. They include unlimited food and beer tastings. While you’re getting stuffed, you can take heart in knowing that proceeds for the event go to the New Amsterdam Public Market. But don’t drink too much… after all, you don’t want to embarrass yourself too much in front of the people who make the beers you worship.
