It's All at the Mall
Montauk gets high, Bronx goes high-end, and a tribute to a weirdo of a brewery
In the span of two weeks, I went to two very different beer festivals, nearly four thousand miles apart. One Saturday, I was in a sprawling arts complex in Barcelona at a beer fest focused on American-style beer, a rising trend in European beer. The next Saturday, I was in a parking lot on Long Island at a beer fest focused on cask beer, a dying art in American beer.
Mash Fest in Barcelona was another indication of how flat the beer world is. I know I’ve said this before, but the pendulum has truly swung from Europe influencing American beer to the U.S. influencing European beer. While there were brewers from New York and Florida and California pouring (to long lines and much hype, particularly when they cracked open special-release bottles), much of the beer being poured with European origins was in style categories I’d see back home, like a fruited sour from Basqueland Brewing in Basque Country, an imperial pastry stout from Peninsula in Madrid, and a Triple New England IPA from The Piggy Brewing Company in Liverdun, France.
The festival itself, though, was very European: a relaxed eight-hour affair where admission gets you a glass and a wristband and a few tokens for beers, and five-ounce pours of the beers are offered for two to three tokens, with tokens running a Euro a piece. Despite nearly four dozen breweries on site each serving some pretty big boozy beers, nobody here was rip-roaring drunk. Everyone was having a good time, for sure, but there was no rush to drink up, and plenty of places to sit and sip among friends.
Last Saturday, I hopped LIRR to Patchogue for a long-standing tradition: Blue Point Brewing Company’s Cask Festival. The outdoor celebration featured cask beer from fifty breweries from across the region and, in keeping with the corporate synergy of Anheuser-Busch, many craft brands in A-B’s beer portfolio (though there was also a cask of High Gravity Budweiser, which was a hoot). Foolishly thinking that the American approach to cask beer might have finally come around to appreciation of undisturbed beer served cool instead of cold, I was surprised to find many breweries using their firkins to add special ingredients to their beers — fruits, vegetables, cookies, sweets — that souped them up. This wasn’t always the case, thankfully. Wild East had an excellent mild, and Other Half brought two dry-hopped IPAs that reminded me of the few worthy dry-hopped, new-world cask IPAs I’ve had in England. The host brewery had plenty of simple, straightforward casks, too, including the still old-school Hoptical Illusion, which harkens back to the earlier days of this cask fest, when the IPAs still had a malt backbone to speak of.
The fest was much more of a raucous party than I expected for a celebration of cask beer — the crowd was young and energetic, helped on by live music. The all-you-care-to-drink affair was pretty crowded on a sunny fall day, and I actually ducked out early from a beer fest I paid for out of my own pocket, feeling I had enough beer and the crowd’s beer intake wasn’t exactly decreasing. It’s the double-edged sword of this beer festival pricing model: you might be able to know when to say when, but others might not, and it could result in a less-than-ideal experience. I even did this during one session of Great American Beer Festival this year — leaving 40 minutes before a session ended, getting a quick Uber back to my hotel, and being in bed before the last drunks were being shuffled out of the convention center was the most responsible thing I’ve done in my twelve years of attending that fest.
Either that, or I’m just getting old.
The Bronx Brewery to open Hudson Yards location
The Bronx Brewery will host their grand opening of their new Hudson Yards location next Friday, November 18th. The space is in the ritzy mall at 20 Hudson Yards, on Level 2 on the 10th Avenue side, next to Ana Bar & Eatery. Yes, the boogie-down’s first brewery is now in a space just upstairs from brands like Louis Vuitton, Tiffany, Fendi, Dior, and Cartier. The taproom will feature a wide array of their beers along with housemade snacks and cast iron skillet nachos — their first attempt at an in-house food menu (their other locations use outside food concepts).
The grand opening kicks off at 11am and runs all day, with DJ Nique spinning in the space from 5-10pm. Their regular hours will be Monday-Thursday 4-11pm, Friday 4-Midnight, Saturday Noon-Midnight, and Sunday Noon-11pm.
This is Bronx’s second satellite location in Manhattan. They opened their East Village location on Second Avenue earlier this year, where they partnered with Swedish chain Bastard Burgers on the kitchen and built out a small brewing system that releases one-off beers.
Montauk Brewing Co. acquired by cannabis company
One of the largest beer brands in the New York metro has been sold to Tilray, a cannabis company based in the city that has a growing craft beer portfolio. Montauk Brewing Company, whose aggressive expansion in the past few years, has made their beer nearly impossible to avoid in the city’s bars, restaurants, supermarkets, and bodegas, was announced earlier this week by Tilray, though the terms of the sale were not disclosed.
Tilray has been acquiring craft beer to diversify their portfolio of consumer-based cannibis products, and this is the third craft beer brand they’ve purchased in the past two years. The company purchased Atlanta-based Sweetwater in late 2020 and California’s Green Flash and Alpine brands in 2021. A press release about the acquisition suggests they’ll leverage those brands to further expand Montauk beyond the New York market, stating the company plans to “leverage SweetWater’s existing nationwide infrastructure to accelerate Montauk Brewing’s distribution network and revenue growth.”
Montauk was the Brewers Association’s 49th largest craft brewery by production volume in 2021, producing about 47,000 barrels of beer — most of that not in New York, but as a tenant brewer at Wachusett Brewing in Massachusetts and Two Roads Brewing in Connecticut.
Brewery Tracker
Total brewery count: 2,834
Total breweries visited in 2022: 305
Total breweries visited in Maine: 40
Total breweries visited that have closed: 270
Brewery Visit of the Week
Brewery #2366, YES Brewing, Westbrook, Maine (Visited 24-Sep-2021)
About a tenth of all of the breweries I’ve visited have moved or closed their doors. There are plenty of noteworthy places that had great beer, great atmosphere, great service that have shuttered over the years, and sometimes I struggle to wonder why. But this isn’t about one of those places. This is just acknowledging that plenty of breweries are far from perfect and just never hit their stride. When my friend and I walked into this brewery last fall, something about it just felt off. There was a deafeningly loud guy freestyle rapping outside. The interior of the taproom seemed unfinished, painted in bright, loud colors, but the bathrooms feeling like they had been left untouched in this industrial building since the 1980s. The beers on tap were mostly fruited sours the day we went, plus a jalapeno pale ale and a single IPA weighing in at 10%.
My friend and I left after each having a beer (we were actually in a rush to leave because of a wedding rehearsal dinner, not because of the brewery), and walked out saying, “well, that was weird.” But the whole place was self-financed, perhaps intentionally weird, and it was somebody’s pride and joy. So when it closed in December of last year after four years in business, I was unsurprised. Still, no closed brewery I’ve visited is just a tick-mark on the board, and I’m sympathetic to anyone who puts their heart and soul into a business and is forced to close up shop. Raise a glass to honor those closed breweries — especially the ones that had life-size Larry Bird cutouts:
Long Read of the Week
If you’ve wondered where the marshmallow that’s in a lot of pastry stouts and fruited sours these days comes from, Aaron Goldfarb at Vinepair has the story of the California company that started with the intention of making truffles and pivoted into the lucrative business of selling flavors and extracts to small breweries.
One Last Thing
Shout out to Other Half Brewing, who hosted a lineup of breweries from my home state of Rhode Island at their Gowanus taproom last Saturday. It was something to have a Narragansett beer at Other Half, but it was really something that it was a dry-hopped DIPA called I Am Providence that could’ve easily been something from OH. Don’t skip their taproom next time you pass through the Ocean State.
Speaking of Rhode Island / New York City collaborations, Finback Brewery has announced the dates for their second iteration of Whale Watching, their invitational beer festival in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Save the date for May 20, 2023.
Cheers,
Chris