Hope you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving! Mine was spent catching up with family and family friends in Rhode Island over a delicious smoked lager with dinner and a dark spiced ale with dessert. I realize that defies my own beer pairing recommendations from last week’s newsletter, but it all worked wonderfully given the time constraints I had for finding beer. Unfortunately, we had to use all of the ‘Gansett Lager to brine the turkey (which by all accounts came out great, as always), so there were not any crushable beers at the dinner table.
As always, I’m thankful this Thanksgiving to you for supporting this newsletter project that’s somehow close to entering its third year. Thank you for the positive feedback and for reading, sharing, and even saying hello when you see me at a beer event (really, I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t love talking beer, so say hi!).
Anyway, a quick beer trip summary: last weekend, I went to Oklahoma City for the first time since early 2016. Since that time, the state of Oklahoma dramatically loosened their beer laws: first allowing full-strength beer in 2016 by a statewide referendum, then voting locally to eliminate all dry counties, permitting happy hours for the first time, and, most importantly to my re-visit, legalizing cold beer to be sold at brewery taprooms. At the time of my last visit, there were exactly three breweries in Oklahoma City. Today, there are over two dozen, and there’s even a published guide to the city’s beer scene with maps and descriptions.
For such a young scene, there’s a lot of good beer. I’ll be highlighting some of these breweries in future weeks in the Brewery Visit of the Week section. Stay tuned!
Brooklyn Brewery to leave Williamsburg location in 2024
After two and a half decades on North 11th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn Brewery will move its taproom in 2024, but they won’t be going far: the new location will be just four blocks away. They’ll be in a new construction building at 1 Wythe Avenue, occupying three floors of a mixed-use development at a triangle lot bounded by Wythe, North 15th Street, and Banker Street in Greenpoint.
The current North 11th Street brewery has been around since 1996, later adding a much larger brewery in an adjoining space in the early 2010s. There was brief concern that the brewery’s lease would not be renewed in the mid-2010s, resulting in a real estate deal in the Navy Yard that eventually fell through, and ended with a pledge from brewery co-founder Steve Hindy that it would remain at the current location until their lease expires in 2025, with the hope “that we will be able to extend them way beyond that year.”
The new space will occupy about half of the building that will break ground later this year on Wythe, which will add about 10,000 square feet of space in comparison to their current location. Brewing operations, offices, and the taproom will all be included in the new space, which has a projected summer of 2024 opening.
It’s Stout Season — and Other Half is celebrating
The days are getting darker, and so is the beer, so Other Half is celebrating the arrival of Stout Season with an event on Saturday, December 3rd from noon to 5pm. The event, at their Centre Street brewery in Brooklyn, will bring together stouts from thirty of their favorite breweries around the country in an all-you-care-to-drink ticketed event. Stout Season also marks the annual release of Other Half’s Snowbirds series — their stout collaborations with Miami’s J. Wakefield Brewing. Ticketholders to the event will get early access to some special Snowbirds releases. The indoor/outdoor event will also have food available for purchase, which is much needed with all the boozy stouts you’d expect to see at an event like this.
Among the breweries slated to be in attendance next Saturday: Vitamin Sea, The Veil, Finback, Ology, Bottle Logic, Great Notion, Horus Aged Ales, with more to come. Tickets for Stout Season are $65 and are available online now.
Brewery Tracker
Total brewery count: 2,858
Total breweries visited in 2022: 329
Total breweries visited in Oklahoma: 38
Brewery Visit of the Week
Brewery #2844, The Big Friendly, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (Visited 19-Nov-2022)
When I was sitting at the Great American Beer Festival awards ceremony last month, I took notice of a brewery with a bit of an odd name that had just won the Brewer of the Year award in the 250-500 barrel category. That brewery happened to be in a city where I had just booked a trip. So The Big Friendly immediately went to the top of my to-do list when I was in Oklahoma City last weekend. Not surprisingly, the judges at GABF know what they’re talking about, because this brewery is an absolute gem.
They had some outstanding beers across styles, so I started with the In My Mind, a Carolina Gold Rice Lager that was true to style, then moved onto something that was very much not: Forest Floor, a Dunkel with lapsang souchong, cypress oil, and cedar tips. The combination was outstanding, tasting close to the beer’s name, and like nothing I had ever had before (for the purists out there, they had a traditional Dunkel that was also excellent. I ran through their fresh hop IPAs (one with Amarillo, one with Strata), and their fruit sours were bursting with flavor while not being cloying.
The aesthetic of the space made an hour at their taproom slide into two or three. The high ceilings, an archway-adorned bar area, a quiet mezzanine space, a variety of seating options inside and plenty of outdoor space made this a spot that I didn’t really want to leave. My favorite touch: the business originated in a school bus, and two booths on the mezzanine are made from the school bus seats.
Long Read of the Week
There’s been a lot written this week about Rich Fierro, the co-owner of Colorado Springs’ Atrevida Beer Company, who heroically attacked the assailant at the city’s Club Q during a mass shooting last weekend. That attention is well deserved, and there’s been an outpouring of support for the brewery in the aftermath of the shooting. Jess Fierro, who was also injured in the shooting, is also a co-owner, Rich’s wife, and the face of the brewing operation, as an accomplished homebrewer who even appeared on a national TV show about beer. It’s worth reading a profile of her from this past summer from Halle Thornton in the Colorado Springs Business Journal.
One Last Thing
Tomorrow is Small Business Saturday, and a reminder that many breweries are small businesses, too. But maybe don’t patronize ones that appear to openly spite their customers, like a certain one in Massachusetts with a taproom that resulted in this actual paragraph in a post from a Beer Instagrammer who visited:
They still said they were “thankful” to be able to visit this place, and that you should “add this stop to your agenda.” Hype is a hell of a drug.
Shop Small!
Cheers,
Chris