The Year the Brewing Died
NYC beer's darkest year, finding Valhalla, and Lager Lager Lager Lager
This weekend did not exactly go as planned. I was away in Houston on Friday night and intended to fly home on Saturday, but there was that whole blizzard thing that resulted in a certain beloved air line telling me I couldn’t get home until Sunday night, and even then, it would be after a three-hour layover in Atlanta and another a four-hour layover in Columbus, Ohio.
So I sprang into action and saw if I could fly to Albany instead, where they barely got a dusting of snow from the Nor’easter. And sure enough, I could not only get there on Saturday, I could get there in time for the New York State Craft Brewers Festival in Albany, which was just a half-mile from the airport. That sure beat a four-hour layover in Columbus (no offense to Columbus).
The festival, which is run by the New York State Brewers Association, exclusively features New York breweries, from Olean to Greenport. It was my first time drinking from a number of Upstate beer producers, including the much-hyped Fidens from just down the road, Canandaigua newcomer Frequentem, and the Belgian-style focused Brewery Ardennes in Geneva. New York City was well-represented, with Finback, 18th Ward, Wild East, Endless Life, Strong Rope, Fifth Hammer, Big aLICe, and Evil Twin all pouring.
What impressed me was how much the festival had grown since I last attended. There are roughly two hundred more breweries statewide than there were when I last attended back in 2017, so it makes sense that more would attend these days, which is why the event had doubled in terms of floor space since then. And while it was a well-attended festival, the expanded, high-ceilinged space along with a ticket cap meant that it never felt particularly crowded, and the requirement of proof of vaccination put some attendees I spoke with at ease. I’m happy to see the NYSBA making in-person festivals work again for those who are ready for them while still offering virtual tasting events, too.
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Celebrating NYC’s Beer Bars: Valhalla
Valhalla
519 9th Avenue (at 54th Street)
Hell’s Kitchen
For thirteen years, I toiled away as an office drone in Midtown Manhattan. Too many times, it felt like a soulless place: block after block of generic delis, chain sandwich shops, Starbucks across the street from another Starbucks, and some really awful bars that served shitty beer out of dirty draft lines for way too much money to people in suits who threw down their Amex cards.
But the best thing about Midtown was that if you actually cared enough to seek out a gem of a bar, you didn’t have to venture too far to the east or west to find it. Case in point: Valhalla on Ninth Avenue, which was a seven-minute walk from my office for many years, an easy escape from the Midtown monotony.
Valhalla suffered the indignity of being a bar without outdoor seating for most of 2020 and a big chunk of 2021, thanks in large part to the construction on Ninth Avenue that left them without a curbside space and a sidewalk that seemingly had the last phone booth left in the city. It wasn’t until April of 2021 that they greeted their first Covid-era customer, and it was a long wait for the bars longtime fans, especially the locals in Hell’s Kitchen.
In the post-lockdown era, Valhalla is a bit cleaner and polished and more mainstream than I remember, but it’s still got a draft list that plays like a greatest hits album: Allagash White, Delirium Tremens, Ithaca Flower Power, Left Hand Milk Stout, Reissdorf Kolsch, and Smuttynose Old Brown Dog all graced the menu on a visit this week. There’s mead on the menu too, naturally, because you can’t call yourself Valhalla without serving the drink of Vikings. It’s good to be back is something I never thought I’d say while in the West 50s of Manhattan.
The State of Beer 1976: The Year the Brewing Died
On New Year’s Day 1976, two breweries in New York City were employing nearly two-thousand people and making nearly forty percent of all the beer served in New York City.
Not even a month later, a one-two punch had wiped the city’s entire brewing industry off the face of the map.
Those two breweries — Rheingold and Schaefer — announced their closures within a week of each other in January of that year.
Rheingold would go first. In 1974, the brewery on Forrest Street in Bushwick was making about 1.7 million barrels of beer each year, but it was on life support. Then-owner Pepsico wanted out of the beer business that year, and temporarily shut down the brewery for six weeks before selling Rheingold to Chock Full O’Nuts. Even Mayor Abe Beame and City Council President Paul O’Dwyer stepped in to reduce the brewery’s tax assessment to help bolster a deal to find new owners, which kept operations afloat in the city and saved several hundred jobs. A celebration was held in March of 1975, with city officials, union leadership, and new corporate leadership gathering to pat themselves on the back. But the new owners saw their books take a hit with the purchase in the midst of a recession, which would quickly turn Rheingold’s fortunes south. By the turn of the new year 1976, Chock Full O’Nuts signaled that the brewery would close within two weeks, citing financial losses. Efforts by city officials, a court order, and even ConEd’s offer to help cut utility costs couldn’t stop Rheingold’s closure, and brewing operations ended January 15th, with more than half of the brewing staff laid off and the rest relocated to Rheingold’s brewery in Orange, New Jersey.
Schaefer was still alive and well at the start of 1976, ranking as the seventh largest brewery in the nation the previous year. Locally, it was still beloved, with a whopping 25% market share in the city. Its brewery, at Kent Avenue and South 9th Street in Williamsburg, would produce 5.9 million barrels of beer in 1975 — far more than is brewed today by all the city’s breweries combined. But mere days after Rheingold ceased brewing operations, Schaefer announced that its Brooklyn facility would close its doors, citing the high cost of doing business in the city. Schaefer would relocate its brewing to a new highly-automated Allentown, Pennsylvania facility, reducing their labor costs and trimming their tax bills significantly. The unions challenged the closure, but ultimately settled with Schaefer to the tune of three million dollars — a small price in the scheme of the money saved by moving operations out of the city. On March 29th, 1976, the last drop of beer of the old guard of breweries was brewed in New York City.
It wouldn’t be until more than eight years later, in the fall of 1984, that another drop of beer would be commercially brewed in New York City, when Manhattan Brewing Company opened its doors in SoHo, signaling a new era of brewing that continues to this day.
Brewery Tracker
Total brewery count: 2,562
Total breweries visited in 2022: 33
Total breweries visited in Georgia: 25
Brewery Visit of the Week
Brewery #1755, Halfway Crooks Beer, Atlanta, Georgia (Visited 3-Nov-2019)
I usually take recommendations from anyone when I travel to a city. But when people who work in beer — and multiple people who work in beer — insisted that I visit Halfway Crooks when spending just one night in Atlanta back in 2019, I made it my first and only stop in town before heading out to the airport (which, if you’re looking to squeeze a brewery into a long layover at ATL, is less than 15 minutes away).
Halfway Crooks might be better known for a certain hat that they sell (and I own) than for their beer. That’s fine, because the slogan is a good reminder of what they’re truly remarkably good at making: lagers. On a nicely-timed fall visit, I dived right into their Festbier, a delightfully clean offering with sweet malt and a traditional noble hop character. The Metric Helles was a bready, floral brew that hit on all the right notes — it’s an exemplary version of a style that’s among my favorites.
The aesthetic of Halfway Crooks is also noteworthy. ASCII art dons its labels, table numbers are on old floppy disks, and menus are printed on what look like old optical scan cards. But the bar, dining area, and rooftop in this 100-year old building are less quirky and simply clean and welcoming, just like the lagers. It’s a must-visit if you like lagers and you’re in Atlanta, and I’ll be making it my first and last stop next time I’m in town.
Social Post of the Week
Speaking of lagers, Threes never disappoints when their anniversary approaches. I want all of this.
Beer of the Week
Greenhorn
Subversive Malting + Brewing (Catskill, New York)
Kellerbier
4.2% ABV
I had been meaning to visit Subversive since I had first heard about them in 2019. Celebrating local ingredients and malting on-premise got me on board, and being founded by two fellow Ithaca College alum made it a must-visit for me. I finally got a chance on Sunday on the way back from Albany and went right for this simple, clean-drinking, straightforward pilsner with New York-grown Saaz hops. Not every brewery that uses New York ingredients uses them this flawlessly.
Long Read of the Week
Josh Noel in the Chicago Tribune documented his Dry January experiences with non-alcoholic beer. He describes his favorites that he might continue drinking now that we’re in February, and details some of the processes used to make N/A beer taste more like beer.
One More Thing
I’ve been diving down some nostalgic audio rabbit holes on the Internet lately, and I really don’t know where else to share this, but on Tuesday, I found an eight-hour recording of Live 105, then an alternative rock station in San Francisco, from June 24, 1995, with DJs, music, commercials — everything as it aired that day in the hours leading up to a Pearl Jam and Neil Young (topical!) show at Golden Gate Park. It’s an incredible snapshot of 1995, and as a middle-schooler who was getting into alternative rock at the time, I’m discovering and rediscovering songs from that era as I work through it.
Oh, okay, I guess there is a beer angle here: the commercial breaks include some old beer ads for Moosehead and Henry Weinhard’s. Happy listening!
Cheers,
Chris
Assuming that old Schaffer brewery at Kent and South 9th doesn’t exist anymore? Unless it’s been turned into apartments and it’s just unrecognizable now.