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The app Untappd is coming up on four years of helping their users “drink socially,” sharing what beers they drink with friends or just keeping track of what they’re drinking for their own reference. With four years of use comes lots of data about New York’s beer scene. So we wondered: where are Untappd users drinking the most in New York? What are the most surprising places where their users are drinking?
Brooklyn’s brewing boom continues. This fall, the borough will welcome its third new brewery this year, Threes Brewing (333 Douglass St., at 4th Ave., Gowanus). The booming space will be part brewpub, part coffee shop, part event space, and part production brewery – a big draw to what’s already an active craft beer scene in the area. Former Greenport Harbor brewer Greg Doroski was wooed by the partners in the project, and moved his family back to Brooklyn to take on the project of crafting Threes’ beers, which will be served once construction is complete in October.
All this week, we’re celebrating our fifth anniversary by sharing some of our favorite and most-read articles on the site. This one was first published in early 2012, two years before Bell’s finally rolled out in New York City. But the message still rings true today. In fact, with more competition than ever from both local brewers and new distributors carrying more craft beer brands, the difficulty of entering the New York market is true now more than ever.
It happens on an almost daily basis to beer store and bar owners all over New York. The questions that, to the industry insider, have an obvious answer. But to those unaccustomed to how the beer industry functions, the questions are fast and furious and almost always net a disappointing response.
Some of those questions look like this:
- Do you guys have Pliny the Elder?
- Do you have Fat Tire on tap?
- Do you carry Bell’s Two-Hearted?
- When is your store getting a shipment of Three Floyds?
- Where in the city can I get Surly Darkness?
The answers to those questions are: no, no, no, never, and nowhere.
Five years ago, we set out to create a little project to inform beer geeks in New York City about the latest happenings on the craft beer scene. Back then, the city was only starting to discover craft beer – fresh-faced spots like Rattle-N-Hum and The Pony Bar had just joined the handful of existing beer bars, and only four breweries were in operation city-wide.
How things have changed.
These days, bars in far-flung neighborhoods from Staten Island to The Bronx are serving craft beer. And much of that beer is local – by the end of this year, the city will have at least 21 brick-and-mortar breweries. We’ve weathered the trends like beer cocktails and beer gardens, and we’ve seen New York’s beer bars and breweries come and go – although a lot more have come than gone. And we’ve shared this all with you, our readers, who have supported Brew York all along the way.
This week, it’s time to celebrate. We’ll be publishing some of our favorite pieces about beer from the last five years during the week. And to cap it off, on Saturday, we invite you to come join us at One Mile House (10 Delancey St., at Bowery, Lower East Side) to toast five years of covering the city’s craft beer scene. Meet our editor (okay, fine, the one guy who runs this site and writes pretty much everything), hang out with other beer geeks, and enjoy a tap list of special brews and some of our favorite local beers. You can get the details on our Facebook Page.
Thanks for supporting us for five years, and here’s to many more!
Over the weekend, Canadian beer writer Ben Johnson published an advertising brief from Anheuser-Busch/InBev subsidiary Labatt that detailed their campaign for Shock Top across the country for 2015. The brief revealed things craft beer insiders believed to be true for a long time, but was never put in writing: big beer companies are relying on the fact that people don’t know who makes their “crafty” brands to help build their business.
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 Saturday’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 20th to October 5th 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…
