From Beer to Bier to Pivo
The origins of NYC craft brewing and a brewery fitting for Fourth of July in Vienna
Hello from Bratislava, Slovakia — probably one of the more unlikely places where I’ve started my newsletter. After stops in England and Austria this week, I’m currently sitting in 100 piv (100 beers), a small beer bar and bottle shop in the city center, sipping on a “Vermont IPA” called Die Antwort from Čierny Kameň, a brewery named for a mountain peak about a hundred miles away. I’m astounded by how well the brewers nailed the “softness,” for lack of a better word, in this style. I’ve had a lot of European-brewed NEIPAs that are a bitter, sweet, heavy mess. This isn’t one of those, and it makes me happy.
Really, it’s another reminder of how flat the beer world has become. I think back to visits overseas as recently as five years ago when every European interpretation of an American beer style I’d have on the trip was lacking something. I joked (though, honestly, it might not have been a joke) that some brewers here were mimicking the flavors and aromas they got from five-month old IPAs from the U.S. that sat in port before getting to their European distributors. That may have been the case then, but it’s not the case now.
Despite all this, I spent most of my time drinking German-style and Vienna Lagers in Vienna, and much of the lager I’ve seen here in Bratislava comes from the Czech Republic, and I sure as hell can’t complain about that.
The Beer Time Capsule: New York’s Craft Brewing Roots are in SoHo
In 1983, zero barrels of beer were commercially brewed in New York City. It had been more than half a decade since Rheingold and Schaefer had closed the doors of their Brooklyn breweries in one fell swoop. One man - a Brit - had a plan to bring beer back to New York: in SoHo, no less.
British-born beer fan Richard Wrigley opened Manhattan Brewing Company in 1984 in an old Con Ed transformer station on the corner of Thompson and Broome. Not only was it New York’s first brewpub, but it was also the first brewpub on the East Coast in the modern era of craft brewing. The spot became a precursor to the New York craft beer scene until the mid-90s.
When it opened in November of 1984, there weren’t many beer geeks in New York. Most of them had been consuming sought-after imported beer, and only a handful of American breweries were even in operation. Its location generally drew Wall Street types and a college crowd (when it opened, the drinking age in New York was still 19). Said of the brewpub in New York Magazine in 1988:
Fun if you like college kids, are one yourself, or are looking for an excuse to act like one.
Ouch.
But MBC went on, serving well-respected craft beer and eventually moving on to bottles in the late 1980s by contract-brewing its Manhattan Gold, a pilsner that often competed for shelf space with another Manhattan-based contract brew, New Amsterdam Amber. The late beer writer Michael Jackson heaped praise onto the brewpub and its beers. And in 1989, Manhattan took both the Gold and Silver medals at the Great American Beer Festival in the European Pilsner category, including one it brewed for sale exclusively at D'Agostino supermarkets called D'Agostino Fresh.
It’s no coincidence that it was at this time that an up-and-coming homebrewer quit his day job at a law firm and joined MBC as an apprentice brewer. That homebrewer was Garrett Oliver, now brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery. He bit his chops at the brewpub, eventually being promoted to head brewer during the company’s slow, ugly death that involved a closing, reopening, and ultimate closing not long after Oliver left to join Brooklyn.
But despite its going out in a whimper, Manhattan Brewing Company set the bar for New York’s brewing scene, groomed New York’s foremost brewer, and introduced New Yorkers to something that we nearly take for granted now: fresh, local craft beer.
Brewery Tracker
Total brewery count: 3,115
Total breweries visited in 2023: 220
Total breweries visited in Austria: 9
Brewery Visit of the Week
Brewery #3,111, Beaver Brewing Company, Vienna, Austria (Visited 4-Jul-2023)
If you think that a place called Beaver Brewing Company seems more suited for the upper Midwest than a neighborhood north of the city center in Vienna, Austria, you’d also not be surprised to learn that its founder hails from Kalamazoo, Michigan. And it couldn’t be more fitting to visit a brewpub that specializes in American bar food and barbecue along with American-style beers with American hops on the Fourth of July. So that’s what I did on Tuesday.
The taproom itself isn’t too different from the other small brewpubs in Vienna (of which there are quite a few) — a basic bar and front garden, along with a small brew kit wedged into the corner of the space. But instead of offering a list of lagers like the others, the beer list reads like it’s straight out of the US — a Pilsner with Loral hops, an Idaho 7 Pale Ale, and a West Coast IPA called Sunny Day that I enjoyed immensely — so much that I think it’s the best American-style IPA I’ve had in Europe in recent memory.
It’s hard to stand out when you’re making the same beers as everyone else in town, even if they’re delicious. Beaver rightly zigs when others zag, and if the largely non-American crowds and busy servers were any indication, it’s going pretty damn well for them.
The Weekly Reader
The history and future of Trappist beer [Beth Demmon, Food & Wine]
The affordable luxury of some of the world’s best beers [Em Sauter, Forbes.com]
A product of brewery closures: there’s a glut of cheap brewing equipment [Kate Bernot, Good Beer Hunting]
Bud Light threw Dylan Mulvaney under the bus [Parker Malloy, The Present Age]
One More Thing
I’m sending this newsletter out while I sit at a brewery on a boat docked in the Danube River. Not to make you jealous, but here’s a view of Dunajský pivovar, with the gorgeous Bratislava Castle on the hill in the background.
Cheers,
Chris
