Beer and Chips with Fancy Dip
Beerfest season arrives, brewery number crunching, and a leafy spot on the Wasatch Front
It’s baseball season again! If you’re heading to Citi Field this weekend for the Mets’ opening weekend, a new beer spot will reappear in a familiar place: EBBS Brewing Co. will be open on game days on the exterior of the stadium under the right field stands on Seaver Way, where you would find Mikkeller Brewing NYC prior to the 2020 season. It’s in some ways a rebranding — Mikkeller dropped out as a partner during the pandemic, leaving the brewery in the hands of its majority ownership (including a member of the Wilpon family, to the dismay of a few Mets fans who hold a grudge), which spawned the EBBS brand. The space will look familiar, the beer will be familiar if you’ve visited EBBS’ Williamsburg location, and it’ll be an ideal pregame spot for beer drinking for the first time in three seasons.
Next week, I’ll have my annual reports from inside both of New York’s Major League Ballparks as I highlight where to find craft beer. Or in one case, a lack thereof. You can probably guess where this is going already, but you’ll have to wait until next week if you don’t know which local team is so greedy that they can’t be bothered to work with independent local breweries even when their fans want it.
Your 2022 BARch Madness Champion: BierWax!
For those who haven’t already heard the news: beloved Prospect Heights bar BierWax won this year’s BARch Madness, Brew York’s 64-bar bracket to find New York City’s favorite beer bar. Congratulations to Chris Maestro and the entire BierWax crew for making an incredibly welcoming, unique, and enjoyable spot to enjoy a beer. Looking forward to a whole bunch of sunny afternoons with a beer from BierWax outside on Vanderbilt Open Streets.
Thanks for all your participation. Tens of thousands of votes were cast throughout the tournament! Remember to support your local beer bar, and we’ll do this all again next year.
Green City returns while another NYC brewery takes its show on the road
Beer festival season is coming back as the weather warms up, and one local brewery is reviving a celebration of IPAs, while another is making a second attempt to hold a festival in Rhode Island.
Green City: An Other Half Experience will return this year after a nearly three-year hiatus, this time over two days — June 17th and 18th at Zerospace on Baltic Street in Brooklyn, the same venue where their Pastrytown event was held last fall. The festival will have a Friday night and a Saturday afternoon session, with ticket options to attend one or both. Among the dozens of breweries participating this year are Colorado’s Cerebral, Oregon’s Great Notion, Maryland’s Cushwa, Florida’s Dream State, and lots of New York representation from the likes of Fidens, KCBC, Barrier, Root + Branch, and Mortalis. Food vendors and, yes, wrestling will be in the mix again, as will a hop-forward Green City beer package that will offer a case of exclusive beers for the event. Tickets are on sale now, starting at $100 for general admission.
Meanwhile, Finback Brewery is taking their celebration on the road. Whale Watching, the brewery’s very first invitational beer festival originally scheduled for late March of 2020, will be held in Pawtucket, Rhode Island on Saturday, May 21st. The event, along the banks of the historic Blackstone River, and will feature over fifty breweries from across the country, including New England outfits like Tilted Barn, Schilling, Fox Farm, and Vitamin Sea, plus sought-after beers from 450 North, Burial, Southern Grist, and Horus Aged Ales. Why Rhode Island? Well, why not? (Actually, Finback co-founder Basil Lee is from Rhode Island, so that has a lot to do with it. And so is this newsletter’s author, so he’s excited for this, too.) Tickets for the event start at $80.
Is the brewery boom over in New York?
In last week’s newsletter, I talked about how brewery openings hadn’t really slowed down on a nationwide basis. But what about here in New York? The state already boasts the second most breweries in the country — and still saw several dozen new ones pop up last year. But just thirteen new brewery licenses have been issued in New York State since the beginning of 2022, according to data from the State Liquor Authority. That’s still a new brewery opening in the state every week, which is commendable, but it’s the fewest openings in the first quarter of a year since 2017.
Already in 2021, new brewery openings were down compared to the previous two years, and 2022 is trending slower, pacing to fifty-two brewery openings for the year, which would be the fewest since 2016. This could be a sign that the number of breweries is reaching a ceiling in the state. The state has more than five hundred active brewery and brewpub licenses, excluding multiple permits for the same facilities (breweries can hold both a traditional microbrewery license and a farm brewery license).
It’s worth noting that some of this slowdown could be the result of the pandemic. At least four breweries in New York City alone that announced in 2019 and early 2020 their plans to open never came to fruition, and given timelines for construction and opening can last years, the slowdown may also be reflecting those ripple effects, not just a slowdown in brewery growth.
Brewery Tracker
Total brewery count: 2,632
Total breweries visited in 2022: 103
Total breweries visited in Utah: 16
Brewery Visit of the Week
Brewery #2563, Grid City Beer Works, Salt Lake City, Utah (Visited 4-Feb-2022)
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Offset Bier, a brewery I knew nothing of that blew me away on a trip to Utah earlier this year. But on that same trip, there was another brewery that fit the same description: Grid City Beer Works. In a nondescript part of town surrounded by fast food joints and furniture shops, this visit didn’t come by anyone’s recommendation, but rather a cursory search for breweries on Google Maps. The taproom was warm and bright and green and welcoming, so we were off to a good start. But I was really glad I stumbled upon this place the second I looked at the menu and saw this headline: “3 Beers, 3 Ways & 3 Pours.”
Their Brown Ale, Cream Ale, and Pale Ale are offered on Cask, Nitro, and CO2, and each were tasty in every way. You can even do a flight of the same beer three ways, just to experience the intricacies of these familiar serving methods. It’s great for beer beginners, but for a more advanced beer drinker like me, I went with their delicious Pilsner, a traditional Czech-style Pils with Tettnang and Saaz hops that was offered on a side-pull tap three ways as well: Crisp, Smooth, and Milk — an American equivalent of the Hladinka, Šnyt, and Mlíko tradition in the Czech Republic. That’s something you don’t see everyday in the states, especially in the most teetotaling state.
Social Post of the Week
Just a thought — maybe the agency in charge of these things should already have the answers to these things?
Beer of the Week
HighVis
Torch & Crown Brewing Company (New York, New York)
American Lager
4.5% ABV
Last week, I enjoyed a visit to Torch & Crown’s first annual Bat Flip Day — a celebration of their spring beer and Major League Baseball’s Opening Day, complete with beer bats. Bat Flip was the Beer of the Week a little less than a year ago in this newsletter, but that’s okay. They have another baseball-friendly beer, and that’s HighVis, a lovely, light-bodied, clean lager with an easy finish. It’s a little floral, a little effervescent, and just a ton of fun to drink. It’s what I call beer-flavored beer.
Long Read of the Week
This is less of a narrative read and more like reading a list. This read reminds me of when I was a kid and would just pick up an 800-page almanac and open it up to a random page. Anyway, enjoy this list of the most checked-in beer on Untappd from every state from Vinepair. It’s kind of fascinating to see who’s drinking what and where.
One More Thing
Apologies to everyone for the fact that this newsletter was sent twice last week. Unfortunately, it appears Substack had a glitch that effected “a subset of writers’ email lists,” and the full subscriber list of this newsletter was apparently in that subset. Here’s hoping it’ll never happen again, and thanks for sticking with me!
Cheers,
Chris