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It’s been busy on the city’s beer scene as the new year has gotten underway. But we’ve got a wrap-up of the latest bits and bites from the New York beer scene in this summary. Among them, updates from the latest breweries to enter the market, an annual homebrewing contest, and a brewer departing from Sixpoint. Happy drinking!
After years of planning and months of construction at their site in Glendale, Queens, Finback Brewery has begun kegging their first batches of beer and will debut them starting next week at events in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens.
New York City is full of unique neighborhoods, each with their own local spots that serve great craft beer. Occasionally, we’ll profile a few spots in each neighborhood - all within walking distance of each other - that you can explore in one trip.
Previously: The Beer Crawl: Greenpoint, The Beer Crawl: Upper East Side, The Beer Crawl: Park Slope
Today, we explore a neighborhood that’s been embraced as an up-and-coming beer destination: Astoria, Queens. Not only does the neighborhood have Queens’ largest brewery in Singlecut Beersmiths, but it also has a beer scene that’s grown exponentially in the past couple of years. Sure, you’ve been to the Beer Garden, but there’s a lot more beer to explore in this neck of the woods. If you’re the type who loves beer but doesn’t get to Queens that often, this is a crawl for you. We’re focusing this crawl around Broadway and 35th Avenue. Start at the 36th Avenue station on the N Train (the Q runs there on weekdays, too, if you’re looking for a stay-cation day activity).
In the late 19th century, dozens of breweries operated in Brooklyn, many by German immigrants who were replicating the lagers they drank back home. Because lagers are cold-fermented, these breweries required climate-controlled spaces, and many of those spaces came in the form of underground caves.
Today, those breweries are a distant memory, with the last of them - Rheingold and Schaefer - closing in 1976. But their legacy lives on at many sites across the borough, where architectural remnants of Brooklyn’s beer history still stand. One of those remnants lurks below the Ice House of brewery that once stood at a site on Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights. There, beer was brewed from 1849 until 1914 under names like Liberger and Walter Brewing, Bedford Brewery, Nassau Brewing, and, curiously and controversially, Budweiser Brewing. Recently, the underground lagering caves on this site were uncovered - and now beer writer Josh Bernstein is planning an event there where he’ll discuss and serve, appropriately, lagers.
Every year, Draft Magazine releases their list of the 100 best beer bars in the U.S. The 2014 list has a whopping ten entries from New York City - the city’s best showing ever on the list. For a city that is denigrated as “a wine and cocktail town, not a beer town,” Draft proclaims that a full tenth of the best beer bars in the country are right here in New York. Who made the list? Some mainstays, some surprises, and a pair of newcomers that are less than a year old.
The initial excitement has died down from the opening of Whole Foods Brooklyn (214 3rd St., at 3rd Ave., Gowanus) last month, so now might be the time to finally check it out. Why, you may ask, should I go to another outpost of a store that’s already got several other locations in Manhattan? Well, this particular location has managed to carve out a good portion of the store as an all-out temple to craft beer.
