| Subscribe Now |
Craft beer-drinking southern expats living in New York can start feeling at home again next week. Georgia’s most well-known craft brewery, SweetWater Brewing Company, launches in town on Monday, September 28th. It’s part of their first expansion into the Northeast along with New Jersey, where their beer launches this week.
It’s that time of the year again. Dissatisfied with having only one beer-drinking 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 this weekend’s start of Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany.
For a little history, Oktoberfest 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 178 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.
But wait, you say, it’s September. Why do they call it Oktoberfest? Well, it was originally celebrated in October, but the Germans were practical about things: the weather in better in September, and the beer - traditionally brewed in July and August - is fresher, too.
So, from September 19th to October 4th in Munich, two million gallons of beer will be 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…
A sampler tray at Meantime’s Old Brewery in Greenwich, London, England (Photo: Chris O’Leary)
There’s never a dull moment on the city’s beer scene lately, so we’ve got a wrap-up of the latest bits and bites of New York beer news in this summary. Among them, an easy way to brew a Brooklyn Brewery beer, the return of Community-Supported beer from a local brewery, beer at the Greenmarket, and new laws making life easier for brewers in New York.
Coney Island Brewing Company has had an interesting history in its eight-year existence. The brand was founded by Jeremy Cowan as an offshoot of his Shmaltz brand in 2007, contract brewed in Saratoga Springs. Four years later, the freakshow came to Coney Island to celebrate the opening of the “world’s smallest brewery,” a small storefront just off the boardwalk that brewed one gallon at a time. That brewery was wiped out by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, but that same license was used to open Shmaltz’s first brick-and-mortar brewery in 2013 in Clifton Park, just north of Albany. Just two months later, Cowan sold the Coney Island brand to Alchemy & Science, the “craft beer incubator” arm of Boston Beer Company. After reviving the brand and rolling out a whole lot of new beer offerings, Coney Island Brewing Company (1904 Surf Ave., at W. 17th St., Coney Island) is returning to its namesake location with the debut of a new brewery underneath the stands at MCU Park.
Bridge & Tunnel Brewery’s Rich Castagna hard at work finishing the bar in his forthcoming tasting room in Ridgewood (Photos via Facebook)
After a banner year last year, 2015 has been a slow one for brewery growth in New York City. The current brewery count stands at 21, but there are plenty in the pipeline. Here’s a roundup of some of the breweries in planning in the five boroughs.
Time for another edition of New Brews, where we tell you about the new beers arriving on draft lines and beer store shelves around the city. In this edition, we’ll tell you about some new bottles, cans, and draft beers from four of the city’s brewers.
