Brooklyn-based brewery Other Half called out a Bushwick retailer on social media over the weekend for illegally reselling beer just hours after they released it in a sale to customers at their brewery. The brewery released cases of 16-ounce Mosaic IPA cans on Saturday morning for $90 per case, and $16 for a four-pack. Just hours later, Fine Fare, a supermarket on Myrtle Avenue in Bushwick, was bragging about selling the cans for $24 per four-pack to in-store customers and to those who wished to have it shipped. This was the most recent of several instances of the store selling their beer, which they could only have obtained by buying at retail at the brewery.
Queens has come a long way from having exactly zero breweries and a
handful of beer bars five years ago. The borough now boasts eight breweries and a plethora of options for
drinking local beer from Bayside to Astoria. So it’s no surprise that people there are finding a reason to celebrate the borough’s beer scene… Queens Beer
Week is back for a second year, kicking off today and running through May 17th.
There’s a whole host of events to celebrate beer in the borough, including a kickoff party along the East River, the debut of Queens’ newest brewery (LIC Beer Project, which has two events during the week), and a big party to celebrate a brewery that happens to turn a year old during beer week (Finback brewery, who recently scored the top beer brewed in NYC).
Here comes the list of events… for more details on all the events, just click on through to our calendar. Each event is marked with “QBW” on there for your convenience. If the event is ticketed, there’s a link below. Enjoy!
The new kids on the block are making an impressive showing on our top beers list
Untappd is - pardon the pun - an
untapped wealth of knowledge about beer. With millions of beer check-ins
and ratings, there’s so much data to peruse. So, each quarter, we
provide an update on a pressing question: what are the top rated beers
brewed in the five boroughs?
So, here’s our update on the Top 20 beers brewed in New York City by
rating. A reminder on methodology: we pulled the ratings for every beer
brewed in New York City and their ratings. We also had a cutoff of
minimum check-ins (100) for a beer in order for it to be included, so we
could get a fair sample size. This means some smaller, newer breweries
weren’t included, and only beers brewed in New York City by
breweries that also brew outside (Brooklyn, Sixpoint, Bronx) were
included. We also excluded one-off beers that are out of production or
have been relatively inactive on Untappd for more than one year. In
total, we tracked 300 beers from 20 different beer brands brewed in the
city, up from 230 beers the last go-around. The data comes from a
whopping 385,000 user-inputted reviews on Untappd.
We had previously ranked the top ten beers in this update, but it’s time to expand our horizons to twenty beers. To be quite honest, there are only shades of difference between most of the top ten and the next ten, so we thought it was only fair.
Nya Carnegiebryggiet (New Carnegie Brewery) opened last year in Stockholm, Sweden, a joint venture between Brooklyn Brewery and Carlsberg.
On the heels of their first venture with Scandinavian brewer Carlsberg that opened last year in Stockholm, Sweden, Brooklyn Brewery now has its sights set on Norway. They announced they will open a brewery and taproom in collaboration with brewer E.C. Dahls that will open in 2016 in Trondheim, about 300 miles north of Oslo.
Last month, 11,000 members of the beer industry came together for the Craft Brewers Conference in Portland, Oregon. It was by far the largest of the annual event – 22% larger than even last year’s conference. That alone is a sign of the rapid growth of an industry that was barely a blip on the radar a decade ago. But with that growth comes challenges and opportunities for the craft beer industry. These days, it’s less about the newness of craft beer, and more about the changing landscape. Brewers must try to distinguish themselves from macrobrewers bent on blurring the definition of craft beer. They must try to distinguish themselves from each other, with a crowded field of over 3,400 breweries in the US and another 2,000 in planning.
So what’s in the cards for craft brewers in 2015? The conference gave us a few ideas of what’s trending this year:
The state’s largest gathering of its brewers is this weekend in the Catskills. TAP New York at the base of Hunter Mountain, in its fifteenth year as a celebration of the state’s brewing culture, will boast nearly 100 New York breweries this year, and can now proclaim to be the largest single-state beer festival in the country. The growth isn’t surprising: New York state had 67 breweries open in 2014, the second most of any state in the nation. TAP, which has both a Saturday and Sunday session, also features a competition that honors the best breweries and beers brewed in the state. Oh, and did we mention there’s food inspired by all corners of the state, too? Tickets are still available if you haven’t made weekend plans yet.
With a total of 98 breweries registered for this weekend’s festival, it’s difficult to sample a beer from all of them. But here’s a few that we think are worth checking out:
