Pilsner Urquell Four Ways

Who knew one could get all fancy about Pilsner Urquell?

Hospoda, a new restaurant that recently opened in the old Bohemian National Hall on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, has brought back some of the eastern European flavor to what was once a heavily Czech area of the city. The place has a fine liquor list, topped by Becherovka, and a smattering of wines. But the drinking program's distinction lies in its treatment of the Czech Republic's home brew. Tanks of Pilsner Urquell are shipped over cold; according to the restaurant, they are the only people in the U.S. who go to this bother. All other tanks are shipped room temperature.

There are no other beers on offer. Instead, Hospoda serves the Urquell in four different way, based on the amount of head they give you. Here's how they describe it:

Creme Urquall (Hladinka): the classic way of draughting Czech pilsner, with a thick creamy head and a full, balanced flavor.
Slice (Snyt): drawn from the tap with a substantial four-finger foam to impart a refined bitterness and velvety mouth-feel.
Sweet (Mliko): a rich and original all-foam specialty designed to impart the beer with a hint of satisfying sweetness.
Neat (Cochtan): rarely seen, even in the Czech Republic, this headless beauty offers razor sharp bitterness that cuts straight through the heaviest meals.

Strange Brew in Brooklyn

Not as strange an idea as you might think. But strange nonetheless. An item I wrote for NYT Diner's Journal:

Something in the Air Is Brewing

By Robert Simonson

It seems that no part of Brooklyn can be left untouched by its ever-striving culinary scene, even its microorganisms.

As part of his ongoing “Mad Scientist” series of limited-release drafts, Shane Welch, the founder of Sixpoint Craft Ales in Red Hook, plans to tame the wild yeasts swirling about New York Harbor.

“I was enjoying a crisp evening in the fall on the roof of the brewery,” said Mr. Welch. “After a couple of beers, I was looking out at the harbor and thought, ‘You know what I should do? I’m going to make a malt solution and put it in a sanitary petri dish and place it on the roof and see what kind of stuff comes into the harbor and grows in the dish.’” He did just that. Soon after, he was peering at the findings through a microscope. “It was amazing,” he recalled, “the blend of crazy, wild yeast. A very interesting spectrum of critters.”

Most of the time brewers employ carefully cultivated strains of yeast in the creation of their brews, but the use of wild yeast is not unknown. The lambics of Belgium are routinely produced through exposure to wild yeast, and other American brewers are trying similar approaches.

Still, the idea of conjuring beer out of the little beasties riding the Red Hook breeze does give one pause. Mr. Welch, however, has no qualms.

“Air that comes in from the harbor is hardly the air that you breathe when you’re riding your bike behind a New York City bus,” he pointed out. “You’re pulling the live microorganisms that might be living in the air, and you’re fermenting the beer with that. It’s not like you’re extracting the pollution.

“You get a lot of ocean currents,” he continued. “You get air from all over the country. It’s a sort of natural, ambient soup that is circulating in New York Harbor, which is a very interesting confluence of currents, because you have the East River, the Atlantic Ocean, the Long Island Sound and Harlem River. It stirs up a lot of interesting wild yeast.”

Moreover, Mr. Welch said he wanted to “get in touch with the flora of where we are” and work with a genuinely indigenous strain of yeast.

The brewing process will begin sometime in the next two months, with the beer to be ready this fall. “With these type of beers,” he said, “they generally take longer.” He will likely used a grain base of malted barley and wheat.

Once the beer is ready, Mr. Welch plans to put some of it in stainless steel tanks and the rest of it in barrels, as is common practice with lambic beers. Sixpoint is using some charred oak barrels custom made for the brewery. Mr. Welch expects the result to have some lambic-like qualities.

The beer does not have a name as of yet, which is unusual at Sixpoint. “Normally I think of the name and concept first and then work on the beer,” he said. “But I don’t have the nomenclature yet.”

Beer Gardens Get an APP

I've love to say the new iPhone APP for New York beer gardens is the direct result of my August NYT round-up of Gotham gardens. But, alas, the creators started working on the thing in June.

Beer Garden Radar

 By Robert Simonson

It seems as if beer gardens are opening around every corner of New York. Now there’s a iPhone app to make sure you don’t miss that turn.

Beer Gardens NYC leads you to 50 different beer gardens, listed by borough, neighborhood, beers and price range. The guide is the work of Raj Moorjani, the owner of the Forest Hills-based Web technology firm Calpaq Interactive, and Hope Tarr, a novelist and travel writer. The couple hatched the idea in June when they were enjoying a couple of frosty ones at Goods, a restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with outdoor seating that serves burgers and dogs out of an Airstream trailer.

“It had just opened that day,” recalled Ms. Tarr. “It was so pleasant. I love outdoor dining spaces anyways. We were just chatting and had a eureka moment.”

Not much later — after determining that there was not yet a beer garden app for New York (the only one they found was for Munich) — they began putting together Beer Gardens NYC. Research was arduous: For five consecutive weekends, Ms. Tarr and Mr. Moorjani did nothing but visit beer gardens. “We went to 11 in one day,” recalled Ms. Tarr. “We did a lot of the information collection during the World Cup, so we got a good sense of the outdoor space because everyone was inside watching the games.”

The result includes descriptions, photos and videos of 50 New York beer gardens, including the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens; theRadegast Hall and Biergarten in Williamsburg; the Vietnamese beer garden Bia on the Lower East Side; and the newly opened Bier International in Harlem. “The fun thing about this is the diversity of the gardens,” Ms. Tarr said. “You can pretty much find a beer garden for any tastes.” The app, which costs $1.99, also includes a directory of more than 900 beers, searchable by venue and brand, just in case a user is interested in locating not a particular restaurant, but a particular draft. Ms. Tarr and Mr. Moorjani are already considering creating similar sudsy guides to other American cities.

While it’s true that the days are starting to get nippy, making beer gardens less attractive, Ms. Tarr points out that many of the city’s gardens are attached to indoor spaces. Also, fall and beer do go together in one big way.

“We timed it to come out in plenty of time for Oktoberfest,” she said.

A Visit to Strong Place

Strong Place—which is not on Strong Place, but a block away, on Court Street—is the third Cobble Hill venture by the folks behind the juice bar Nectar and the wine bar Bocca Lupo, and to my mind the most successful. (As a wine bar, Bocca Lupo always felt like a missed opportunity to me.) The look is very clean, stark and wooden, with a couple of wood booths up front, a long bar to the right and a few more small booths at back.

Beer is the story here, drink-wise. There are wines, but nothing to shout about. 24 drafts in all, mainly craft beers and all from the U.S. Fine and reliable names such as Captain Lawrence, Sixpoint, McNeill's, Avery, Allagash and Victory are all in evidence. I like how they've zeroed in on a few excellent, smaller breweries and stood by them, offering a few beers by each. The draft names are displayed on little pieces of rough paper in front of each tap. (There's a printed menu as well.) I had the Captain Lawrence's Kaptain's Kolsch, a worthy version of this top-fermented Cologne style, and tasted the Allagash Black and Avery Ellies Brown Ale. (The bartender, who was friendly, was liberal with tastes.) Beers were between $5 and $8. There were also a dozen beers in bottles and a couple in cans.

New Brooklyn Brewery Beer Detonates in Prospect Park

Holding a launch party for its latest Brewmaster's Reserve release, Detonation Ale, at Prospect Park's Boat House was a pretty savvy idea from a marketing angle. Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate, dumping torrents of rain into the mossy lake that borders the Boat House, and effectively creating the most muggy, hot and uncomfortable day yet in August.

The beer, however, mitigated matters. Brooklyn Brewery called Detonation the "big brother" of Blast!, a  robust IPA it trots out every not and then. It's well-named. The beer's alcohol content is a whopping 9.2%. But you don't taste it when you drink it. The amber-colored, medium-bodied, hoppy ale goes down pretty sweet, it's alcoholic potency "detonating" later. They use seven different kinds of American hops it this, and three malts, two British and one German. Worth a try if you see it around.

Drinking in Brooklyn

I spent a good deal of the early part of the year talking to anyone and everyone who has anything to do with the cocktail, beer and coffee scenes in Brooklyn. The canvasing was in service of a feature on the Brooklyn drinking scene for Imbibe magazine. It wasn't difficult to research; a Brooklynite for 16 years, I had been doing casual, unscripted research for such a survey two or three years by simply paying calls on the new Brooklyn bars and cafe as they opened in waves in 2008 and 2009. And most of the people I interviewed for the piece I had already come to know. Nothing quite as pleasurable as doing an in-depth piece on your own hometown.

Here's the article. There are also lists of places to go for  cocktails, coffee, beer and wine (yes, wine does get a mention in the piece, though not a thorough going over, thank God—adding that aspect to the article might have killed me), all put together by yours truly. But I won't print those here. I have to leave some reason to go out and buy the mag.


A SCENE GROWS IN BROOKLYN

By Robert Simonson

IN THE LATE 19th CENTURY, BROOKLYN WAS A GLORIOUS PLACE TO DRINK. The borough (then a full-fledged city in its own right) boasted 48 breweries and lent its name to The Brooklyn, one of the country’s most popular cocktails at the time. Two of America’s largest coffee roasters of the area—R. Buckle Brothers and the A & P company—called Brooklyn home, and the venerable, gas-lit Gage & Tollner restaurant on Fulton Street served coffee so strong, some customers asked for it to be diluted.

Then came Prohibition, the Depression, high taxes and rising labor costs. The Breweries—Trommer’s, Piels, Rheingold—closed one by one. The last, Schaefer, turned off its Brooklyn taps in 1976. The Brooklyn Cocktail died from memory as an essential ingredient, Amer Picon, fell into obscurity. Gage & Tollner closed, its landmark interior eventually invaded by TGI Friday’s and then Arby’s.

In the last decade, however, craft breweries, cocktail lounges and coffee bars have been cropping up from Greenpoint to Bushwick. The shift took root in the ’90s, when New Yorkers crossed the East River in droves to escape rising rents and encroaching homogenization bred by Manhattan’s bear hug of chain stores and luxury condos. Some of those transplants became entrepreneurs, opening bars and cafés over the years to slake the thirsts of the new locals. That trend has steadily gained steam, and today Brooklynites have reclaimed one of the most enviable drink cultures in the country.

The Modern and Sixpoint to Handle Some Hot Rocks

A team of staff members from The Modern will be heading down to Red Hook's Sixpoint Craft Ales brewery to take part in a two-day beer-making class. The result will be the Manhattan restaurant's third proprietary beer with the Brooklyn beermaker.

The beer already has a name: Dr. Klankenstein. (A bit clunky, but memorable.) It will be a "stone" beer, an ancient brewing technique that entails superheated rocks being thrown into the mash to caramelize the malt.  It will be Sixpoint's first stone beer.

Look for Dr. Klankenstein (ask for it by name!) in May. On tap, of course. Because Sixpoint doesn't do bottles.

A Visit to Cantina La Estrella de Oro

Personal Mission One on a recent trip to Mexico was to visit as many true cantinas as possible. I knew I'd find plenty of the old bars in Mexico City. I did not expect to encounter a peerless example of the breed in Coatapec, a small city of 50,000 in the heart of coffee-growing county in the Vera Cruz province.

I was in Mexico to tour the coffee fields and plant of Kahlua, and it was our guide Pablo Zacarias that led us to the cantina. If I hadn't been in Pablo's company, I probably would have been too intimidated to enter La Estrella de Oro, which is obviously the province of the locals, and, more specifically, old male locals. The broad front room seems to be put to little purpose other than silent domino games. The bar proper is in back and all of its 100 years tell on it. The plaster walls are faded and peeling, the wooden bar battered, the mirror behind it dirty and scratched, the various bottles of booze layered with dust. A half dozen Mexican men in jeans and cowboy hats sat hunched at the torquoise-and-cream-tiles bar, their routine disturbed by the intrusion of a dozen Americans.

But we stood our ground and quietly asserted our right to enter. (Or, rather, Pablo secured approval for our presence.) We took up residence in old white plastic chairs around a couple round tables and ordered a round of beers. I took an Indio, a local dark beer I was not familiar with; nothing special, just OK. I would have gone for a tequila or mezcal, but the dust on the bottles didn't flood me with confidence in their contents. Nonetheless, a bottle of mezcal, decent but not great, made its way to us, the label suspiciously modern. (Some more adventurous members of our party swigged from a local liquor infused with "donkey herb.")

Old pictures and newspaper clippings paper the walls. Pablo, translating for another guide who spoke only Spanish, gave me the joint's history. La Estrella de Oro dates back a century and was once a celebrated cantina. The train tracks used to run on the street right outside, and the bar was a regular stop for politicians and the stars of Mexican cinema who were en route to Mexico City from the coast. Old pictures show it to have been much more spruce back then. It was founded by a Spaniard, who, having no children, left it to an employee. That employee's son now runs it. It is a treasured local landmark. You'd never know it to look at the place. But it does reek or authenticity and true Mexican culture.

Few wanted to leave the cantina, but we had dinner reservations. The dinner that followed was fine, but we probably should have stayed put and bought some freshly made tamales offered by the old woman who made the round of the cantina tables.

I walked by the place the following morning around 8:30 AM. There were just opening for business.

(Thanks to Lew Bryson for the middle photo.)

The Roar of the Growler, the Smell of the Beer

My latest assignment for the New York Times allowed me the pleasure of driving my wife crazy by saying the word "growler" around the house several times a day. You have to admit, it's a amusing word, and a lot of fun to say. Nor was it a burden to visit several growler purveyors and invest in a few jugs of their delicious, fresh-pour, craft beer drafts. And, of course, any drinking prop with a pedigree that goes back centuries is of particularly interest to my drinking arcana-hungry brain.

The New Old Way to Tote Your Beer

By Robert Simonson

BY midafternoon on a recent Saturday, Bierkraft, the beer emporium and grocery on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, was half-filled with customers, many of them parents with babies or toddlers in tow. They were browsing the more than 1,000 varieties of bottled beer or surveying the listing of selections available on the 13 taps and 3 cask lines. Some carried a good-sized satchel.

Diaper bag? Gym clothes?

No. It was a tote for their growlers.

Growlers — 64-ounce glass vessels that look like a moonshine jug — have become the beer accessory of the moment. And the jugs, filled at taps in bars and stores, are not just the toys of the bearded, flannel-shirt, beer-geek set.

“In the beginning we tried to figure out, ‘Who’s going to be our market?’ ” said Ben Granger, 32, an owner of Bierkraft, which began filling growlers in spring 2006. “We thought, mullet-heads and beer-bellied dudes. But the first run was ladies with strollers. They will tell you they’re buying them for their husbands. Three weeks later, they’ve got two. One’s his and one’s hers. The next one that caught me by surprise was dads coming in with their kids. Then there’s the beer crowd who’ll rush in to get on this or that before it’s gone. There’s no age limit.”

Michael Endelman, a journalist at Rolling Stone, is one of those growler-loving fathers. “I don’t go to bars too much anymore,” he said, gesturing to his baby daughter Mimi. “It just seems like a great way to be a beer geek without going out.”

Some customers appreciate growlers for reasons of economy (refills range from $8 to $20 or more) or ecology. And as more craft brewers choose not to bottle their products, many fans like the idea of getting fresh beer that until recently was sold only in specialized bars.

Liz Thorpe, vice president of Murray’s Cheese, said she had two to four growlers at home at any given time. “Good beer makes everything more special,” Ms. Thorpe said while stocking up for a recent National Football Leauge playoff game. “I like me some football, but I don’t like me some Coors Light. So I’m ensuring I will be happy this afternoon.” Barely a week has passed in recent months without some bar or beer store in New York City trumpeting the arrival of growlers, which are typically embossed with the name of their business. Even the Gristedes grocery chain has gotten in on the act; the University Place store in Manhattan began carrying them in November.

Offerings can change daily, even hourly.

Some new growler users believe they’re getting in on the latest thing, but beer lovers know better.

“Growlers have been around since Christ was a child,” Mr. Granger said. “We’re not doing anything new.”

In the late 19th century and the early 20th century, both The New York Times and The Brooklyn Eagle regularly published contentious stories about the containers, which then took the form of small galvanized pails. The articles cataloged the complaints of saloon keepers, who thought growlers cut into their profit, and those of temperance groups, who hoped to curb home drinking.

“Rushing the growler,” connoting children hustling pails of beer for adults from bar to table, was a common expression. The curious name is thought to be inspired by the rumbling noise escaping carbon dioxide made as the beer sloshed about in the pail.

In more modern times, growlers could be found at brew pubs like Heartland Brewery, which has served beer to go since opening in 1995. The jugs — which, according to the New York State Liquor Authority, have always been legal at both retail outlets and bars — have proliferated lately, said Heartland’s founder, Jon Bloostein, because there are more interesting beers to go in them.

“People’s palates have become more sophisticated,” Mr. Bloostein said. “Look at the number of beer bars in Manhattan, and especially Brooklyn. And the offerings at regular bars are leaning toward craft beers.”

The Whole Foods beer store on Houston Street began its program in 2007. The chain’s first to carry the vessels, it has done as much as any store to introduce New Yorkers to growler culture. The manager, Jeff Wallace, said he saw other reasons for the trend.

“It’s basically a really good way to promote recycling, because you bring back your jug,” Mr. Wallace said. “And it’s a cheap and affordable way to get fresh draft beer.” He said growlers made up half the beer store’s business. Whole Foods stores in TriBeCa and on the Upper West Side also offer beer for growlers.

That much-vaunted freshness, however, depends on how the bottle is filled.

“There’s always the possibility that someone may not fill the growler properly,” said Shane Welch, founder of Sixpoint Craft Ales brewery in Brooklyn, which sells its products in stores in growler form. Most stores and bars run the beer straight from the tap to the bottle. “If you don’t fill it to the top, if you don’t purge the air out of there, when you close the container it will be stale beer,” Mr. Welch said. “You probably have to drink it that night.”

Mr. Granger, who says growlers constitute a large percentage of his sales, has tried to avoid that possibility. He has a system in which bottles are filled under pressure through a plastic hose to keep out oxygen. Filled that way, he said, they could stay fresh for months unopened, and three to five days when opened.

“Ergo, no flat beer,” he said. “No oxygen in the bottle, no foaming beer, no waste."

No bar tab, either.

What Did Ben Franklin Say Again?

Looking at the Six Point Brewery website recently, a quotation at the bottom caught my eye: "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." It's attributed to Benjamin Franklin.

I've seen this quote a lot lately. In books about beer, in articles, on t-shirts and stickers. It's very popular. Only problem with it is, it's wrong.

Franklin was praising wine, not beer. Or, more precisely, the rain from the skies that feeds the vines that produce the wine. As recent research has shown, the origin of the quote is a letter Franklin wrote to André Morellet in 1779, in which he said: "Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine, a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy."

When you really study the line, you realize that Franklin's point was more to do with God and faith than wine. (There's also the not significant point that the original quote was God "loves to see us happy," not "wants us to be happy"—two very different things.) Still, it's wine, not beer. And while I'm sure Ben had a beer from time to time, it was wine that the Founding Fathers truly loved and revered. I have no doubt that Franklin tastes a high number of the fine wines his pal Jefferson collected.

According to some sources, the misquote started taking hold a decade or so ago (though you'd still see the "wine" versions of the saying at the same time.) No doubt, brewers embraced it with gusto and felt no urge to rust to the library to double-check it's authenticity. It was so widely adopted that, in 2006, in celebration of Franklin's 300th birthday, a special beer was made in his honor. Of course, it's easier to make a beer than a wine, and maybe the idea was a last-minute thing. I'm sure Ben wouldn't have minded much. He was easy-going and well-adjusted to human foibles. Probably, he would have found something witty to say about the matter, and then quickly drained a tankard or two.

Spuyten Duyvil Owner's New Wine Diner, St. Amselm, Close to Opening

Joe Carroll, the man behind Williamsburg drinking emporia Spuyten Duyvil and Fette Sau, is close to opening his third, slightly-hard-to-pronounce Brooklyn drinkery, St. Anselm.

St. Anselm, located right next door to beer bar Spuyten Duyvil, at 355 Metropolitan Avenue, was supposed to open last November, but has been delayed. Carroll said he expected it to be unveiled next month.

St. Anselm will be more food oriented than its neighbor. "It will be a mix of high-brow, low-brow stuff. We're doing burgers and dogs and also doing old school diner, blue-plate special things.  A lot of offal, a lot of organ meat dishes, and a pretty sizable wine list. We're trying to do something simliar in wine to what we do at Spuyten Duyvil with beer."

They're be a diner with stools in the space. A peek inside revealed a charmingly roughhewn look made of hand-cut wood, creating wavy, layered designs on the ceiling and a kind of country-fence look along the counter.

Brooklyn Brewery Reaches Into the Cookie Jar

Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett Oliver has come up with something particularly comforting for his winter-months edition of the Brewmaster's Reserve, the limited-edition beer he whips up every two months of so.

The grew is called Cookie Jar Porter. "One of our brewer's is friends with somebody who works for a bakery in Jersey City called Feed Your Soul," said Oliver. "They make these stupendous oatmeal cookies. We were sitting around eating them one day and we said, 'Wouldn't it be really cool if a beer tasted just like these cookies?' So, now one does."

The beer is made with toasted oats, roasted malt, brown sugar, whole vanilla beer, and raisin puree. "It's an oatmeal raisin beer," said Oliver.

Mission Dolores, New Tavern from Bar Great Harry Owners, to Open Soon

Mike and Ben Wiley, the owners of Bar Great Harry, the best beer bar along Smith Street's restaurant row, will have their new place, Mission Dolores, open by late January, early February at the latest.

Located at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Carroll Street, in Gowanus, it will be another craft beer haven, but with a larger draft selection and a big courtyard out back. Dub pies will be served, just as they are at Bar Great Harry.

With Mission Dolores' arrival, Gowanus East can safely be called a beer-lovers destination, what with Draft Barn at Third Avenue and 12th Street and Bell House at 7th Street near Second Avenue.

The Sipping News

There's something about the lowly Wisconsin classic, the Brandy Old-Fashioned, that make cocktail writers want to pen essays in its honor. I wrote my own lordly take on the peculiar refreshment in Imbibe magazine earlier this year. Now I see Mssr. Toby Cecchini has composed an ode in none other than the New York Times. Was there ever a local speciality more reviled, yet celebrated? Toby! Fellow Wisconsinite! We should meet for a round of BOFs. I'm buying. [NYT's T Magazine]

The new web-zine Liquor.com has been publishing for a week or so now. On the last day of November, Camper English weighed in with a primer on bitters. I hate him, however, for recommending Bitter Truth's Celery Bitters when it's currently impossible to get them in New York.

The pissant, parvenu, party crashers who tactlessly invaded Obama's first White House state dinner also own a bankrupt Virginia winery that uses plastic cups in the tasting room! [Dr. Vino]

Shane C. Welch, the owner of Six Point brewery in Red Hook, grew up in Milwaukee. I like his beers even more now! [NY Times]

Jamie Goode's decided Nebbiolo is a wonderful grape. He's just finding this out?

A Survivor of the Hindenburg

Of the 97 people aboard the Hindenburg, all but 35 survived that famous 1937 disaster. Plus one of their beers.

The New York Post reports that "a charred bottle of beer that survived the explosion of the Hindenburg will be auctioned off this month for an estimated $7,500. Although its contents are undrinkable, the unopened bottle of Lowenbrau would be the most expensive brew ever sold. Leroy Smith, a New Jersey firefighter found the beer along with a pitcher shortly after the airship burst into flame over Lakehurst in 1937, killing 38. Smith buried six bottles and the pitcher after police sealed off the scene of the wreckage. He returned later to retrieve the souvenirs."

Fast thinking, Smith. And morbidly opportunistic, too.

The relic is being sold by Smith's niece, Rhea Longstreet, to whom he gave the bottle and jug in 1966.

Whole Foods Speaks Truth to Power

I'm not a slave to trends, but I do like to try new things, if only to keep my taste buds up the date.

So, earlier this year, when I read that Ferran Adrià—the supposed super-genius behind El Bulli, the Michelin three-star restaurant in Roses, Spain, where you need take out a third mortgage and deliver over your first born in order to get a reservation—had created a beer "to drink with food, from a wineglass,” I made a mental note. Several mental notes, actually. One was, "in a wine glass? Really?" How precious. The second was, "to drink with food? What does he mean? Can't all beers be drunk with food?" But, the guy is noted by all and sundry for his creativity, so I thought I'd give it a try.

I wasn't in a huge hurry, so it wasn't actually until this past August that I thought to buy the wine/beer. I was walking down Second Avenue when I saw the Whole Foods beer store on Houston Street. I recalled reading that the beer, called Inedit, was carried at Whole Foods.

As a side note, let me just say here that I had never been to the Whole Foods beer store until that moment, because, well, because I hate Whole Foods. It's so expensive and bourgeoise and pretentious. But I have to say that beer store rocks. The selection is fantastic and the help are informed and friendly and independent-minded. How do I know this? Because they told me their genuine opinion of Inedit.

I didn't have much time, so I just went right up to the counter and asked if they had that new El Bulli wine. The man didn't exactly scowl, but he's didn't smile, either. He just led me joylessly, silently to the beer, grabbed one and handed it to me. I then took the beer to the cashier, another young man with a beard. He didn't seem too enthused by my selection, either. Something was up. I ventured a question. "So, do you like this stuff?" They looked at each other, silently agreeing to spill the beans.

"No," said the first clerk. "I think it tastes like cheap Champagne. Only not as interesting." Ouch. "Sorry, but you seemed like a nice guy," he explained. No, no, no! The truth is always appreciated. They then when on a mild tirade about how they found the maker's assertion that Inedit was the first beer to be drunk with fine food insulting and idiotic. I put the Inedit down and asked what they recommended instead. They steered me toward two other beers, one local and one foreign. They were both great.

Where Zywiek Is As Common as Bud

I've always thought the Polish beer Zywiek was a relatively hard brew to score, even in New York. I'd see it only in the occasional Polish deli, and very rarely on tap.

That was before I paid a visit to the Queens neighborhoods of Ridgewood and Glendale. More that other New York Polish nabes, like Greenpoint, Zywiek flows like water here. It's not only in every bar and every deli, there are huge advertisements everywhere proclaiming its existence. Posters, neon signs, and round hanging signs that are to this area what the circular Guiness beacons are to Irish neighborhoods in New York.


Zywiek was founded in 1852 and started brewing in 1856. It was an actual royal beer! It was built and initially owned by Archduke Albert, Duke of Teschen and his younger brother Karl Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, and called "Zywiec Archducal Brewery". It remained in the hands of the Habsburgs until the Communists nationalized it. After the Commies were kicked out, the descendants of the original owners sued the Polish government for $77 million. (The case was settled out of court on undisclosed terms in December 2005.)


All that historical hullabaloo doesn't seem to have affected the quality. I find it a more-than-above average lager.

As to how Ridgewood and Glendale get so much of the stuff. Well, take a look at this distribution center on Seneca Road in Ridgewood. You see where their priorities lie.

A Beer at...Denny's Steak Pub

I've often gotten off at the Church Avenue stop on the F line, on my way to doing some food shopping along Borough Park's 13th Avenue. Each time, I've taken a long look at Denny's Steak Pub, which anchors the intersection of Church and Beverly and wondered about the place. This week, I finally ventured in for my latest "A Beer At..." column for Eater.

A Beer at...Denny's Steak Pub

Like many other old, outer-borough bars in this city, Denny's Steak Pub in Kensington has a disused kitchen in the back. You can still get a $5 pizza heated up if you like (and not a bad pie for the price), but if you're looking for the steak that gave Denny's its middle name, keep looking. Maybe it's at the bottom of that bowl of stale fritos on the bar.

Denny's got its first name from Denny Ryan, the original owner, since deceased. His son runs it now. Though the corner tavern, which sits right above the Church Avenue F train stop, looks old as hell, it's actually the bar's second coming. The original Denny's was at Seventh Avenue and Ninth Street in Park Slope—there's a black and white picture above the old cash register. The register survived the move. The "new" Denny's is 39 years young, founded in 1975.

It's small inside. Brick pillars and arches, and dark linoleum give the place a snug, warm air. There's pool, if you've got the quarters, and darts, if you don't. Players range from a drunk hotshot who could hit four balls in with one shot, even with a load on; to a Yuppie greenhorn who managed to knock the cue ball clear off the table. Four televisions play whatever game's on. Turn away from the bar and look at the corner near the door, however, and you might catch James Stewart and Doris Day in "The Man Who Knew Too Much." (Hitchcock? WTF? Maybe Denny's is deeper than it looks.)

It's hard to tell if people have left at Denny's. They'll abandon their drinks on the bar for a half hour while they take a very long smoke outside. And everyone seems to smoke. "Where's Jay?" said the bartender, looking down at a half-drunk Bud and a $10 bill. "Did he go?" He didn't. Jay came back in 15 minutes and had another. It's a middle-aged, blue-collar crowd mainly, but that doesn't mean they're narrow-minded. Everyone joined in the birthday celebration of one half of a very out, 40-something lesbian couple, singing along with ABBA, giving and receiving kisses and yelling at the television when a Yankees-Blue Jays brawl emptied both benches. "Wait! They're fighting!" "My God, they're fighting!" "Of course they're fighting! But what for?" "My God, it's a free-for-all!" (They said the same things five minutes later, when the melee was replayed, thinking it was a new brawl.)

The next inning, the losing Yankees hit a few runners in. The pool-playing Yuppie came up to the bar for shots. The bartender poured generously. "What are these? Rally shots?" asked the disbelieving, but happy man. "No," said the bartender. "Regular shots."

The Beer That Tastes Like a Manhattan

Last week, I took Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett Oliver up on a long-standing invitation to tour the Williamsburg brewery.

I chose a good time to visit. As many have read recently, Oliver—inspired by the bartender Don Lee's bacon-infused bourbon Manhattan at PDT—is in the process of trying a create a bacon-infused beer. Like Lee, he is employing the ballyhooed bacon of Allan Benton. So, when I arrived, the entire brewery on 11th Street smelled of breakfast. Oliver allowed me a whiff of the special, smokey-smelling malt he's using for the beer, as well as the Benton's derived bacon fat, explaining that the two, put together, will create the illusion of bacon.

I'm hoping to tasted some of this Frankenstein creation when it's ready, but that may be a long shot. Oliver explained that he's only making 25 cases and it won't likely be made available to the consumer.

But, that's OK. Oliver is constantly inventing new potions, and many are available to the thirsty masses. The rate of creation is due mainly to the Brewmaster's Reserve series. Oliver comes up with a new beer every two months (that's six times a year), which is released in limited qualities in keg form and available at select bars.

Oliver is apparently currently obsessed with making beers taste like things that they are not, because the next Brewmaster's Reserve, called The Manhattan Project and due out on Sept. 15, is being made to taste like a Manhattan Cocktail.

Let's say that again. It's a beer that tastes like a Manhattan Cocktail.

Oliver said this is the first time he's used a cocktail (his favorite cocktail, FYI) as a model for a beer. (Cocktail expert David Wondrich is providing some counsel and advice.) Here's the plan. Thirty percent of the mash will be rye. Thirty percent of the beer will be aged in rye barrels from Rittenhouse. The wash will also be infused with a variety of herbs commonly found in vermouth. Also, some cherry juice many be involved in there somewhere.

Sounds delicious to me.

Riedels on Spirits and Beer

Meeting a lot of Riedels lately.

In July, I met up with Georg Riedel in New Orleans and spent a civilized half hour talking about the Riedel glassware's new Bar Series, it's first organized foray into the spirits world, with dedicated glasses for everything from tequila to single malt scotch.

And yesterday, I met George's son, Maximilian, who goes by Maximilian, as only the scion of a vaunted European company like Riedel could. A slight, wiry man with an easy way of talking, he said he was wearing his father's lederhausen. "So he is in a way with us," he said.

The occasion was a lunch at Blaue Gans, Kurt Gutenbrunner's Austrian eatery on Duane Street in lower Manhattan. I and a clutch of other journalists were there to test and enjoy Riedel's newish line of beer glassware. The atmosphere was appropriately, and perhaps excessively, Bavarian. A German dance team of three provided entertainment. A spry old man of roughly 70 was doing some nimble knee and foot slapping that I would not attempt, even on a good day.

Both Maximilian and Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett Oliver spoke several times about the nature of good beer and the nature of good beer glassware. Oliver—dressed in a blue blazer adorned with the Brooklyn Brewery crest, and looking like a member of some booze-oriented yacht club—was quite cutting on the subject, comparing most commercial beers to the loaves of spongy Wonder bread you find in the supermarket. "That is not bread," he said. "It is not made the way bread is made, and it is not made from the stuff that bread is made of. Bread should not stick to the roof of your mouth. You should not be able to roll bread up into a ball and throw it across the room. I used to wonder why they called the edges crust, because they weren't crusty, until I found out that was sprayed-on food coloring."

There are three glasses in the line: one for lager, tall and slightly tapered at the bottom; a squat, modified tulip-shaped glass for pilsners; and a wheat beer glass, which looks exactly the way you expect a wheat beer glass to look: tall and a bit bulbous at the top. Wheat apparently has more protein in it than does barley—thus, the thicker head of foam.

We tested various German and Brooklyn beers in these glasses against the same brews drunk out of plastic cups and the bottle itself. Riedel is fairly peerless in the way it markets its products, which makes a reporter skeptical. Does every kind of alcohol need its own glass, really? But you have to hand it to them: wines, and now beers, do tend to smell and taste better when drunk out of one of their crystal vessels. After drinking a Bitburger out of the bottle and then out of the pilsner glass—the lip of which deposits the liquid neatly on the tip of your tongue—you begin to think of a beer drunk straight out of the bottle as a beer not drunk at all. Certainly not a beer enjoyed beyond the liquid's intoxicating effect.

The beer glasses are actually designed and produced by Spiegelau, which used to be Riedel's main competition. But Riedel bought Spiegelau in 2004. Spiegelau does retain some creative and administrative autonomy, though, and it was thought the Bavarian company was the best choice to create the beer line.