Beers of the 80s, 90s and Today
Is there anything better than that first warm day where you’ve got to slap on some sunscreen before you head out to a brewery? I Citibiked from Bushwick to Astoria to visit Singlecut Queens on Sunday. Fourteen miles round-trip on a 40-pound bike isn’t recommended, but I burned plenty of beer calories in the process. Spending two consecutive weekends in the city has been a rarity for me this year, and it’s nice to get out to some of my favorite spots and events, like KCBC during Lager Appreciation Month, The Grand Delancey for their Brasserie de la Senne event, Threes Brewing’s Can Jam, NS Beer’s first Bushwick-brewed beer release, Flagship Brewery’s Eighth Anniversary, and just a sunny warm day outside on the sidewalk at Singlecut Queens.
I swear, I do things other than beer in my spare time. For instance, I cleaned the filter in my air conditioner, did some laundry, and worked on a cut-out of New York State that I’m covering with brewery stickers.
Needless to say, these have not exactly been restorative weekends… nor will the upcoming weekend in Rhode Island for Finback Brewery’s Whale Watching festival. Here’s hoping the hotel bed in Providence is comfortable.
Thanks to everyone who came out for the Beer in Manhattan panel discussion that took place at Torch & Crown Brewing Company last Wednesday. And thanks to the readers who came up to say hello and chat! It’s always nice to put faces with names and chat about beer.
Anyway, our panel was joined by Garrett Oliver, who brewed at both the defunct Manhattan Brewing Company (which closed in 1994) and Brooklyn Brewery during that decade, and Kirby Shyer, who was at the helm of Zip City Brewing Company from its opening in 1991 until it closed in 1997.
Here are some things we uncovered about that era in our conversation, in case you couldn’t be there:
Brewing equipment was expensive and from far afield. While today’s brewhouses can come from just a few hundred miles away, there were no American manufacturers of brewhouses in the early days of craft beer. Manhattan Brewing Company’s equipment was imported from England and Zip City’s was from Austria — and they were built, mainly, for brewing the regional styles of those places.
Lager lovers would’ve loved the 1990s. The era before hazy IPAs and fruited sours and pastry stouts was more about making beer that was vaguely familiar to beer drinkers. In the case of Zip City, that came in the form of German-style beers, so there was plenty of Pilsner and Vienna Lager pouring from their taps in the Flatiron District.
English Beers were a hit then, too. Meanwhile, a bit further downtown at Manhattan Brewing Company, Garrett Oliver was picking up his tricks of the trade from Mark Witty, whose previous gig was at iconic English brewery Samuel Smith’s. Oliver apprenticed there before taking a full-time brewing role, which ended abruptly after a shake-up at the Soho brewpub (not far from Torch & Crown, in fact) and ultimately led to his job as brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery.
To bring people to beer, you had to have great food in New York City. These days, brewery taprooms without food are quite common, with the refrain from brewers being “I didn’t start a brewery to run a restaurant.” But back in the 1990s, any customer-facing brewery in New York had to serve food, and to make a splash, it had to serve good food.
Julia Roberts showed up at Zip City quite a bit. Several articles about Zip City from the 1990s strangely mentioned that the Pretty Woman star had been seen at the brewpub, but we got the back story straight from Shyer when Aaron Goldfarb brought it up, and it’s quite simple, really: her sister was a bartender there.
It’s not much easier to brew in Manhattan now. Torch & Crown founder John Danzler came on at the end of the panel to discuss the challenges of opening a brewery here in the present-day, as we sat among equipment that still sits idle while they brew beer in the Bronx — at a brewery that, by Danzler’s own admission, they got lucky when it fell into their hands for cheap. The cost of entry, the regulatory hurdles, and the lack of affordable or viable spaces for production breweries all lead into why it’s so rare to find breweries in Manhattan and why so many folded in the 1990s.
Torch & Crown has some connective tissue to the 1990s brewpub era. Their Bronx facility is the former Chelsea Brewing Company, who moved there in 2015 after a twenty-year run on Chelsea Piers. Chelsea was the last remaining physical brewery from that era, though Heartland Brewery, who ceased brewing in Manhattan in the early 2000s, lasted until 2020.
A brewery closure is always sad. But in Shyer’s case, it was an irksome day when he had to dispose of beer that hadn’t been sold in front of an ATF agent. The New York Times headline — a newspaper that Shyer noted did not seem to pay attention to the brewery until its demise — is truly tragic:
Total brewery count: 2,686
Total breweries visited in 2022: 157
Total breweries visited in Washington: 150
Brewery #2020, Doomsday Brewing Company, Washougal, Washington (Visited 12-Sep-2020)
There are breweries that I remember because of amazing experiences, and then there are breweries that I remember because of unfortunate circumstances. Doomsday is the latter.
On a trip to the Pacific Northwest in the midst of a pandemic, in a year defined by our world being turned upside down, in a year defined by empty streets, full hospitals, and mobile morgues — a visit to a place called Doomsday Brewing was so on the nose that I almost skipped it.
It was even more on the nose when you consider the conditions the day I visited: the sky was so thick with smoke from nearby wildfires in Oregon that you could barely see a block in front of you. The air quality index was maxed out at 500. And even in the mid-afternoon, streetlights were on, with the sky dimly lit a very creepy tinge of orange.
But look, the folks at Doomsday Brewing didn’t intend to open with the prospect of doomsday being so close. It’s just two guys trying to make good beer in the back of an industrial park as freight trains rumble by. The imagery they chose — like a mural of a mushroom cloud and tap handles that look like nuclear missiles — was a little less on the nose at the time they opened in saner times back in 2012.
Anyway, the Legendary Lager here was pretty tasty, and it washed down their pizza with smoked mozzarella quite nicely. At least I think it was smoked and not just the air outside seeping in.
Did you know Allagash White won bronze at World Beer Cup this year?
For those asking, “only bronze,” did you know that the judges didn’t award a gold or silver?
All Smiles
Kings County Brewers Collective in collaboration with Other Half Brewing (Brooklyn, NY)
Czech-Style Pilsner
4% ABV
KCBC continues to pull out all the stops with their Lager Appreciation Month, and last week’s release just might be the best collaboration between two Brooklyn breweries I’ve ever had. This 10°Plato Czech-style Pilsner is making me long for a trip back to Prague — not because it’s not true-to-style, but because it very much is. So much Saaz, as we’d expect in something that adheres to tradition, but also a subtle addition of German Saphir in the whirlpool that adds a touch of berry character while complementing the Saaz earthiness. Stock up on this beer if you want it for summertime rooftop drinking… it won’t last long.
Last weekend, I was at a dive bar in Bushwick that had been recommended to me by some friends who work in beer, and I immediately recognized one thing that seems to be common at every industry-favorite bar: they serve Underberg. The digestif has a disproportionate popularity among people I know in the beer industry, so this piece from Grace Weitz on Hop Culture was a helpful read on exactly what I’ve been offered on many late nights with friends who’ve closed out their taprooms, and how it got there in the first place.
I was cleaning out some of my beer supplies and found this little bit of recent craft beer history:
This is a pair of coasters from The Alchemist when it was in its original brewpub location in Waterbury, Vermont. Yes, they were making Heady Topper then, but the iconic cans were still a ways away — they would open their first production facility the following year, just weeks before the brewpub on South Main Street was destroyed from flooding during Hurricane Irene. Sitting at that bar after a ski day in 2010, sipping on Heady Topper and elevating my leg due to a freshly-torn meniscus, I had no idea just how much the beer in my hand would change the industry for the next decade.
Cheers,
Chris
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