Big Failures and Little Animals

NYC's newest brewery, navigating taprooms in a pandemic, and a beer fit for a Sweater Song

First, what goes on here?

You should have a podcast. You should have a Twitch channel. You should have a YouTube show. You should have a [insert extension of my “brand” in something other than writing].

Every week, I hear something like this from a friend or acquaintance or social media follower. Each requires dedication and some heavy lifting, when the whole reason I started Brew York was to have an outlet for my writing, which had been truncated to trite emails to clients and co-workers in my career in advertising. The small irony is that Brew York’s website has been lacking significant writing for those same past few years, as it’s become more of a reference point for beer in New York City. And that’s great! That’s what I wanted it to be. But I still want a place to write.

No one has said, “you should have a Substack.” A few weeks from now, I might figure out why.

Part of why I might live to regret this is a lack of coherent plan on what will go on in this space. It will undoubtedly be New York City-focused, but there will be plenty of content about my travels in search of beer, and occasional observations about the beer industry in the context of my travels.

In case you have no idea what you got yourself into, here are the credentials that somehow give me expertise about these subjects: I’ve written about New York’s beer scene since 2008; I’ve visited 2,101 breweries in 22 countries, all 50 U.S. states, and 7 Canadian provinces; I’ve spoken on panels about beer at festivals and conferences; I’ve been considered a reliable-enough source about beer to be quoted in places like the New York Times, Daily News, and Post, Good Beer Hunting, Beer52, Vinepair, and, most randomly, SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel.

So, here we go. Each week, I’ll pass some NYC beer news your way, if there’s news worth sharing, I’ll let you know about breweries I’ve visited recently and what beers I’ve enjoyed, and I’ll probably toss in a fun tidbit about something not directly related to beer. And your feedback will help me make this better, so keep that in mind as you read through issue number one!

Endless Life Brewing debuts in Crown Heights

Endless Life founder/brewer Jeff Lyons rings up my first purchase at his taproom in Crown Heights

Endless Life Brewing had a super-soft opening last weekend at 585 Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Jeff Lyons is the proprietor and brewer after nearly seven years of brewing professionally that started at Greenpoint Beer & Ale and had him most recently at Keg & Lantern Brewing, where he’s brewed his first batch under the Endless Life name, Construed to Waste Your Time — a lovely straw-colored Kolsch. That’s the first beer he’s selling in four-packs of cans in his taproom, which previously housed Bad Seed Ciders.

Jeff plans to focus on rustic lagers and mixed-fermentation beers. He’ll do so using 100% New York State malt and hops, making Endless Life the second brewery to do so in New York City (Brooklyn’s Strong Rope was the first). That once posed a challenge even at the smallest scale, but the state’s encouragement of beer-based agriculture has greatly expanded both the availability and quality of New York-grown ingredients.

As a little taste of what’s to come, Jeff handed me an unlabeled bottle of a forthcoming mixed-fermentation Saison called Does This Feeling Come Again? that I cracked open during the Superb Owl. It was delightfully lemony, danced on the tongue with its carbonation, but it wasn’t so dry as to be astringent.

Give Endless Life’s Instagram account a follow for the latest updates on an official opening date and when they’ll be open next in the meantime.

On beer travel during a pandemic

Follow the signs to choose your own adventure at Asheville, North Carolina’s Burial Beer Co.

After five months of not venturing beyond the confines of New York City, spending every night falling asleep to the rumble of a garbage truck and every morning waking up to the foot-pounding of my upstairs neighbor, I desperately needed a break from the city for my mental health. So, in mid-January, I rented a car for two weeks and drove to Asheville, North Carolina to spend time in a place with many of the creature comforts of the city, but enough access to enjoy the outdoors, enough space to be socially distant, and enough sunshine to have a beer or two in a brewery’s outdoor space without freezing my ass off.

I went into the trip with a twinge of paranoia about wandering into a situation that looks like that supermarket in Naples, Florida, but was pleasantly surprised with how safe I felt throughout the trip. Mask adherence was as high at gas stations in rural Virginia as it is at my local bodega. A few forgetful patrons at the breweries I visited forgot to flip their masks up when they left their tables, but were quickly reminded by their companions. Not a single brewery staff member flinched at my insistence on drinking my beer outdoors, and most encouraged it, even in chilly weather. I did not drink a single beer in an enclosed space other than my own room in a desolate hotel that was giving off some Shining vibes.

The twenty-seven breweries I visited over two weeks left me thinking about best practices for operating a brewery taproom in a pandemic. The most responsible ones would greet each visitor with a brief explanation of their Covid protocols, post the rules everywhere possible, direct customers to a table clearly-marked as sanitized, and offer protections to workers in the form of pass-through windows, or even better, offer contactless beer ordering and payment. Outdoor heaters were plentiful and most breweries offered covered, but not enclosed, outdoor areas. More-stringent breweries banned children and discouraged petting of other people’s animals (though it was very hard to resist petting the leashed cat I saw at one brewery).

On the whole, breweries seemed to cater to a spectrum of comfort levels with drinking during a pandemic — except the “too comfortable to care about masks” side of the spectrum, thankfully. I very much appreciated the ones who took extra care to make their venues welcoming and safe and stayed longer at those places. More than once, I was the only person bundled up in the cold on a patio, which is an indication that my tolerance for drinking in bad weather is significantly higher than my comfort level for drinking indoors.

Indoor dining returns Friday in New York City

Re-opening Night at Kings County Brewers Collective in Brooklyn on September 30th, the first time indoor dining and drinking was permitted in New York City after the onset of the pandemic

Speaking of my comfort level with drinking indoors, Governor Cuomo’s office announced on Monday that indoor dining and drinking would return two days earlier than planned for New York City bars and restaurants. Beginning Friday, indoor dining can resume at 25% capacity with all the State Liquor Authority-imposed rules that existed prior to the shutdown on December 14th. That means closing time is still 10pm, you’ll still need to order food with your drink at a bar, and you’ll need that bag of chips to pair with your beer at a brewery.

All levels of government have failed to find financial support to keep these restaurants and bars closed until it’s truly safe to reopen, and our governor was too much of a political coward to set a precedent by shutting down indoor dining elsewhere in the state when their Covid metrics spiked. So, welcome to the indoor dining clusterfuck. It’s reprehensible that New York City’s restaurant workers were only able to access vaccine appointments a week ago and will work for several weeks in dangerous environments without the protection it offers, and it shouldn’t be up to us as customers to be forced to choose between risking our own safety and having restaurants and bars to visit once the virus is under control.

Meanwhile, science be damned, the restaurant lobby is pushing the state to move the city to 50% indoor capacity immediately. Nineteen New York City Council members have penned a letter urging the same. But you really can’t blame them when Nassau County restaurants have been able to operate that way while their competitors’ dining rooms down the street in Eastern Queens have been fully shuttered, despite Long Island having a consistently higher case rate and positivity rate for the past two months.

Anyway, we’re doomed. May an invisible force protect the restaurant workers who are being put in harm’s way. Stay safe out there. I’ll be out here on the patio sipping my half-frozen beer and washing Cheeto dust off my winter gloves.

Brewery Tracker

Total brewery count: 2,101
New breweries in 2021: 27
2021 State Breakdown: North Carolina (24), Virginia (2), Tennessee (1)
Days spent in state-mandated post-travel quarantine: 4

Brewery Visit of the Week

This is my terrible photo of the brewery, but keep in mind I took it while holding a four-pack of cans and two bottles of beer.

Brewery #2076, Little Animals Brewery, Johnson City, Tennessee (Visited 23-Jan-2021)

I chose to drive the inland route from New York to Asheville, which cuts through the northeastern corner of Tennessee, where I figured I could sneak in a new brewery visit. I reached out to someone I met in Knoxville last February on one of my last pre-pandemic trips and asked if there was any brewery in the area worth a stop. He suggested a spot in Johnson City called Little Animals Brewery that had transformed from a homebrew shop to a brewery making its own beers last April. I feel obligated to support any brewery that had the misfortune of opening in the midst of a pandemic. Their intention to specialize in mixed fermentation and sour beers was abundantly clear from everything I researched, so I stopped into the brewery, which was only open for to-go beers given Tennessee’s daunting Covid numbers at the time. I really dug the bottle of their Brettanomancer that I picked up. It’s a Farmhouse Pale Ale that sourced malt from down the road in Asheville and used Michigan-grown Cascade and Chinook hops. Their Snakeskin Jacket Spelt Saison was a fun little new world-meets-old world beer, brewed with Cryo Simcoe Hops and bottle conditioned on Brettanomyces. The beers were both impressive, especially for the brewery’s young age. I’m excited to see what these folks are up to next time I’m headed west through the Cumberland Gap to Johnson City, Tennessee.

Geo-Nerdity of the Week

Now that I’ve got “Wagon Wheel” stuck in your head, I’m going to ruin the song for you: that lyric is geographically-nonsensical. You can’t head west through the Cumberland Gap to Johnson City, Tennessee, because Johnson City, Tennessee is 75 miles east of the gap, as the [old] crow flies. If you’re heading west through the Cumberland Gap, you’re setting course toward Corbin, Kentucky — a town famously known for Colonel Sanders’ first restaurant and infamously known for an ugly race riot. Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor explained this geographic error to The Tennessean in 2011 with two simple sentences that make this life-long East Coaster question his own existence: “I just wanted the word ‘west’ in there. ‘West’ has got more power than ‘east’.”

Beer of the Week

Undone 6th Anniversary Beer
Threes Brewing (Brooklyn, NY)
Foudre Fermented 10° Czech-Style Pilsner
3.9% ABV

This beer is the first one of 2021 that had me gasping for air on the very first sip in the shock of its perfection. I’ll admit that I’m a Threes fanboy, but I’m also a Czech Pils fanboy, and a low-ABV fanboy. Pile that on, and this beer was practically made for me — straw colored with soft touches of hay, grass, and wood from the foudre. You wouldn’t guess it’s 3.9%, which lends itself well to drinkability. I’m glad I bought two four-packs of this, but I might have to stock up on more of this one-off beer, because I never want my supply to run out.

Long Read of the Week

This awesome piece by Matthew Curtis at Pellicle perfectly captures the vibe at Sheffield, England’s Brewery of St. Mars of the Desert (brewery #1464), an outfit founded by talented husband-and-wife brewers Dann and Martha Paquette. If those names ring a bell, they previous brewed beer in Massachusetts as Pretty Things before closing up shop in 2015. Jack D’Or, more or less their flagship beer as Pretty Things, gets several mentions in the piece. And everything said about the kindness of Dann and Martha is absolutely true — they kept the brewery open for me, then spent an entire evening showing me around Sheffield when I visited two years ago.

One more thing

Thanks again for subscribing to… whatever the hell this is. Since you’re in on the ground floor, I want to hear from you and learn what you’d like to hear from me. Have an idea for a topic I should cover? A brewery-rich city that you’d like a deep-dive on? A weekly feature that you have no use for but think is perfect for me? Hit the button below and let me know.

Safe travels and good beer,
Chris O’Leary