Good Beer Brings Good People Together
Gun Hill's Brooklyn outpost opens, a Kips Bay beer bar closes
Hello! Substack recently started offering a new feature called Chat in their app for iOS and Android, so I’m starting my first thread on there today around beer travel plans for 2023. I’ll also start an open thread around brewery and beer bar recommendations in cities I’ve visited that you can pop into at any time and I’ll share what I’ve loved in those places. Additionally, any late-breaking NYC beer news will show up in chat if it can’t wait until the weekly newsletter on Thursdays.
Here’s how you can join in:
Download the app by clicking this link or the button below. Chat is only on iOS for now, but chat is coming to the Android app soon.
Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.
That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.
Happy chatting!
Gun Hill opens new Industry City location this weekend
The Bronx heads to Brooklyn! Gun Hill Brewing Company will open a satellite brewery and taproom this weekend in Industry City, bringing a second brewery taproom to the sprawling complex and making Gun Hill more accessible to their fans in South Brooklyn. Gun Hill Publick House, as it’s called, will host their grand opening on Saturday starting at 1pm. The new space, complete with a bar, lounge area, small-batch brewery and barrel-aging space, is located in Building 6 at Industry City, accessible from 34th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue.
The bar will have nine beers on tap for the grand opening, including 2022 Barrel-Aged Void of Light Stout and and 2021 Barrel-Aged Fort Ticonderoga Barleywine. Festivities on Saturday will run until 10pm. If you can’t make it Saturday, their soft opening begins Friday at 2pm, and they’ll be open Sunday for football viewing as well.
Taproom No.307 to close this month
Longtime Kips Bay beer bar Taproom No.307 will close later this month, they announced on social media last week. “A landlord sees a need for a new high rise in our home,” a post on Instagram explained. The bar, just off the corner of 23rd Street and Third Avenue, currently resides in a small, narrow two-story building among blocks with several new residential developments.
The bar opened among a slew of new craft beer bars back in the spring of 2011, bringing with it an upscale lineup of beers in a neighborhood that was mostly dominated by cheap swill and college bars. Eventually, that fresh-out-of-school crowd found the bar (especially on weekends), but they stuck to their guns, serving a solid rotating lineup of local and national beers even when the crowd didn’t look like they would be into it. Looks can be deceiving, and Taproom No.307 probably helped guide more than a few twenty-somethings into their craft-drinking phase with a gateway beer or two.
Brewery Visit of the Week
Brewery #2850: Skydance Brewing Co., Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (Visited 20-Nov-2022)
It’s quite apparent that there’s something special about a brewery that everyone in town asks if we’ve visited. That’s what happened in Oklahoma City, where nearly every bartender or beer drinker we encountered asked if we had visited Skydance. We saved it for a blockbuster final day in town, along with Prairie’s OKC location and American Solera’s new spot in the northern suburbs. Even with Skydance being hyped up by locals, it still exceeded expectations. The beer was truly dialed-in — each one we tried was true to style, from the Rez Dog Blonde to the Famous Horses Cold IPA to the Sovereign Nation Imperial Stout.
If those beer names sound like they have some Native American flair to them, that’s not a coincidence. Skydance is one of a handful of indigenous-owned breweries in the U.S. Owner and brewer Jake Keyes is a member of the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma. He learned to homebrew from his father, and left a career tribal gaming to found the brewery in 2018.
The space is welcoming and comfortable, with plenty of room to spread out across the main floor, mezzanine, and patio. The bar encourages socialization — on the day we visited, we happened to meet a regular from one of my favorite breweries up I-35 in Wichita, making friends with total strangers over some really tasty beer. It’s fitting that there’s a mantra scrawled across the back bar above the taps: “good beer brings good people together.”
Long Read of the Week
Kate Bernot is writing about the premiumization of non-alcoholic beer in Good Beer Hunting the same week that I had a conversation with a friend about how paying for a $8 can of a 0.5% ABV beer at a bar seems ludicrous — and how the price of NA beer might alienate people who would otherwise be willing to try it. NA beer is one thing, but I quickly came to my senses a couple weeks ago before hitting the purchase button on a $15 four-pack of carbonated water with hops. Come on now. It’s carbonated water with hops.
One Last Thing
Another noteworthy opening that just came to me hours before it’s time to send this out: Hops Hill Atlantic, the new location of the Clinton Hill bar that resides in the former St. Gambrinus Beer Shoppe, has opened at 533 Atlantic Ave., a block west of Barclays Center. Give them a follow on Instagram and then pay them a visit!
Cheers,
Chris
I was there for 307’s opening. We have lost some greats in NYC for real.