Far From This Opera Forevermore
An adventure in Kansas, drinking in East Pastrytown, and some good cat news
Hello from a Boeing 757 that’s 38,000 feet above a place that appears to be Northern Minnesota (there are lots of lakes below me). I’d check where we are, but we’re now on this plane’s third reset of its in-flight WiFi. This seemed like the perfect time to write this week’s newsletter, but instead I’m just typing in a blank Microsoft Word file and hoping I can post this later.
Expect a wildly under-researched newsletter this week. Good thing I’ve got good idea of what I’m writing about in my head, which will work out just fine for me as long as I don’t bump my head hard on the overhead bin.
Anyway, at the end of September, I was out in Yakima, Washington during hop selection season. If you don’t know, many brewers travel out to that part of the country to sample the hops they’ll purchase in the following growing year, visiting different farmers, producers, and processors over the course of several days. My visit was purely to reap the benefits of drinking beer during fresh-hop season, but I ran into several brewers in my travels from around the country, and late one night at Single Hill Brewing, in the midst of a food coma, a beer-fueled haze, and some jet lag, I somehow committed myself to visiting Wichita, Kansas, home of Central Standard Brewing. Their production team was in town for hop selection and our paths ended up crossing.
At one point over those beers, I think I said, “I’ve never been to Wichita,” which, coming from someone who’s lived in New York for the majority of his life, is the least surprising thing I said all night. (I had driven through Wichita before, on a 2006 road trip across Kansas and Eastern Colorado that also took me and a friend through other metropolises like Dodge City, Garden City, and Greensburg, a tornado-scarred town that’s home to the world’s largest hand-dug well.)
Anyway, I’ve been to Wichita now. I flew in last Saturday afternoon, dropped my bags in my hotel, and hopped on a bike share to Central Standard, where they were hosting a taco festival. There was a block party with six taco vendors, a stage with live music, a Michelada station, and plenty of fantastic beers. I had heard of the brewery before I met some of them in Yakima – they have a couple of GABF medals under their belt – but I have to say, even after six hours hanging out there, I didn’t want to leave. Ian and Nathan and Emily and Sumer and everyone else were busting their asses to make that party great, yet still took time to show some incredible hospitality to me that was completely unnecessary… I would’ve had a great time that day, regardless of who I knew there, but the company was quite nice.
I started the afternoon with their flagship IPA, Wizard of Hops, which was a juicy dialed-in hazy IPA that is now sitting in my fridge at home in New York. Space Clouds was a delightful mixed-culture Saison that was just a small portion of CSB’s aggressive (Ian Crane, the brewery’s co-founder and head brewer, poured some straight off a Halloween-decorated Foeder for me as we hung out in the taproom). The Horchata Yard Games was a play on their Berliner Weisse that was made especially for the event that day – and it was so full of warming Horchata-inspired flavors and ingredients, yet still maintained a subtle acidity you’d expect from the base beer. The Blackberry Standard Issue, a grisette aged on Kansas-grown blackberries, was an absolutely gorgeous pour, lightly tart and bursting with fresh fruit. In between the less conventional beers I tasted, I sipped on their Mild and Vienna Lager.
I did eventually leave Central Standard to visit the other breweries in town. Hopping Gnome had some excellent fruited sours in a cozy, friendly taproom on Wichita’s main east-west drag, Douglas Avenue. Norton’s Brewing was the closest brewery to my hotel, so I finished my Saturday and started my Sunday there – and the return visit was not just out of convenience. Norton’s Deez Hops with Idaho 7 was a stand-out Hazy IPA, and the Everything is Temporary White Stout on Nitro was a smooth, light-bodied wonder of coffee and cocoa flavors. Wichita Brewing Company was making some solid beers of their own, but to my surprise, had revived the Tallgrass brand and was now making 8-Bit Pale Ale, which was an old standby on visits to the region in the past. And Augustino Brewing made an enjoyable, true-to-style English Brown Ale called Casting Shadows that capped off a whirlwind weekend through town.
Wichita isn’t exactly teeming with breweries, but what it lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality. I doubt this is going to get anyone to fly to Kansas for a visit like me, but don’t make the mistake of passing through without stopping like I did the first time.
Pastrytown is in ten days
There are still tickets available to Other Half’s Pastrytown, their annual celebration of beers and treats being held next Saturday at 588 Baltic in Brooklyn. The full lineup of beers bottled to celebrate the event is on their pre-sale, which went live yesterday. You don’t have to be attending the fest to reap the benefits of Pastrytown, but it’s a lot easier to drink all these beers if you do. Other Half is rolling out the full beer list for the event each day this week on their Instagram if you need more convincing — and don’t worry, there’s some crushable beers being poured, too, to cleanse your palate.
Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a place in something Pastrytown-adjacent (in real estate-speak, this would be East Pastrytown), several of the brewers coming to town for the festival will be holding events of their own next week. Among them, Halfway Crooks, a personal favorite of mine out of Atlanta, will be hosting an event at The Grand Delancey next Thursday evening. The next night, the same venue will host a whole bunch of breweries from Florida, including 3 Sons, Dream State, J. Wakefield, Tripping Animals, and Woven Water. More events will be posted soon — keep an eye the Brew York Calendar for more.
Some good kitty news
Last week I told you about a GoFundMe to support Simcoe, the brewery cat at Grimm Artisanal Ales in Williamsburg. The news was already good then, as the fundraising effort had covered her vet bills after she was experiencing neurological problems potentially caused by ingesting rat poison.
Anyway, the news is even better this week: Simcoe is home from VERG and back in the arms of Aiyana, the operations manager at Grimm. Her latest update late last week:
Simcoe has come home! SHE MADE IT!
She was released today from VERG. The cause of her illness is still unknown. I’m keeping her at my house for a few weeks because she needs to receive medication daily and stay indoors until her recheck appointment, and needs to be closely monitored in case her condition worsens! But for now she is fairly healthy and very much alive! She was very popular at VERG and gave everyone headbutts.
Thank you everyone who has helped out in so many ways — sharing this fundraiser, donating, helping to run errands for me, drinking a beer for Simcoe at whatever bar you happened to be at (thank you Tørst fam!), keeping her in your thoughts. Unbelievably good juju in the world for Simcoe.
Her hospital stay was thankfully at the lower end of the estimate I was initially given, but as the cause is TBD, she’ll need some follow up appointments and potentially medication or further/different treatment for longer than a month. After our recheck visit in late November, I’ll donate whatever is not needed for her care to an animal rescue and/or TNR group.
Here’s hoping we can see Simcoe around our feet at the brewery again soon!
Brewery Tracker
Total brewery count: 2,451
New breweries in 2021: 377
Breweries visited in Colorado: 189
Brewery Visit of the Week
Brewery #2421, Wiley Roots Brewing Co., Greeley, Colorado (Visited 22-Oct-2021)
If you’re a beer geek, I probably don’t need to tell you to visit Greeley, Colorado’s largest brewery, WeldWerks Brewing. If you’re an über beer geek, I might not need to tell you to visit Greeley, Colorado’s second largest brewery, Wiley Roots. But I’m going to tell you to visit regardless of your level of beer geekery.
It’s kind of fitting that this brewery sits on the other side of the tracks from WeldWerks. That’s yet another reason it deserves a lot more respect than it gets. But when we walked into the taproom as a freight train rumbled through, we were informed that a pour of the Cerveza Flavored Beer, a Mexican Lager, was the train beer special — a $2 pour of a beer of their choice after a train rolls through.
I asked my anonymous friend and companion for this visit to better explain this brewery visit (see above for excuses about spotty airplane WiFi, see below for me phoning in a Beer of the Week at the hotel bar where I’m desperately trying to finish this newsletter up at 10:30pm Pacific Time). Here are his words — way better than mine, because he’s an actual, paid, professional journalist:
They are quite literally on the other side of the tracks from the better known brewery in town, but they hold their own with just as ambitious beers.
I appreciate that they make really terrific beer without taking themselves too seriously. I mean, they have a beer called Beer Flavored Beer.
Lots of breweries have various discount gimmicks but there is pure childlike excitement about scrambling to order a beer quickly enough after a train passes to get the train beer discount.
So, there you go. Cheap, honest, fun beer on the other side of the tracks. Venture there after you go to WeldWerks. Or, like us, be contrarians and go before.
Social Post of the Week
Beer of the Week
Tropic Haze
Silver City Brewery (Bremerton, Washington)
New England-Style IPA
6.4% ABV
Very early on in this newsletter, I mentioned this beer in passing after a visit to this brewery on my very first post-vaccination trip. Well, tonight, I’m drinking it again for the first time since that visit, in a way-too-hip hotel lobby bar in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle. It still hits the spot.
This beer’s rocking an aggressive hop bill of Strata, Mosaic, Citra, and Idaho 7, but it’s super smooth with the addition of wheat and oats, making for a beer that’s not grasping at my esophagus as I sit here trying to knock out the last 500 or so words of this newsletter.
Long Read of the Week
I was surprised that my friend Dave Infante had not heard about Kelsey Grammer’s suspiciously odd brewery that brews at a farm in the Catskills, but he couldn’t have done a better job documenting everything he learned about it in his must-subscribe newsletter, Fingers. Come for the reference to Tops Supermarkets, stay for the photo of a tuxedoed Kelsey Grammer on a Toro Tractor at a New Jersey Landscape Contractors Conference.
One More Thing
Here’s a photo of the Keeper of the Plains, a statue at the confluence of the Arkansas (pronounced Ar-KAN-sas) and Little Arkansas (also pronounced Ar-KAN-sas) Rivers in Wichita. This work by sculpture by Kiowa-Comanche artist Blackbear Bosin sits thirty feet above the junction of the two rivers, and is an even more worthy reason to stop in Wichita.
Cheers,
Chris
Far From This Opera Forevermore
Enjoy reading about your travels!! This is great and again, so honored you made it aboard Little Hopper. CHEERS to YOU!