Spooked by the Season

Dark beer days are upon us and the beer is Pretty Decent

Hey. How’s it going? Anyone else feeling particularly anxious this week, or is it just me? Yeah, there’s a looming election here in twelve days (get out there and vote — for New Yorkers, early voting starts Saturday), but I also have a 11-day trip to Taipei and Hong Kong coming up at the end of next week and even though I’ve carved out about twenty minutes of planning each day for the past month and a half, I still feel woefully unprepared.

Still, in my planning and research related to beer, I find familiarity that makes me feel like I won’t feel totally out of place. Like the brewery in Taipei that posted a photo of one of their founders visiting Finback Queens on Instagram. Or the collab that a Hong Kong brewery did with the brewery I visited in England in June. Or a Mikkeller bar, of course. Or more weirdly, a chain of brewpubs in Taiwan that use the Gordon Biersch trademark. I’ve often said the Beer World is Flat, and this will definitely put that theory to the test.

Anyway, if you have any beer-related suggestions in Taipei and Hong Kong, feel free to share them. I’m already overwhelmed with non-beer activities and especially food suggestions — they may have to roll me to the airport to come home.

Stout Season is Coming

Some bad news for those who are fans of daylight: tomorrow marks the last time the sun will set after 6pm in New York City until March 9th. Indeed, the days are getting darker, and so is the beer. Other Half is celebrating the arrival of Stout Season with third annual event by the same name on Saturday, December 7th from noon to 4pm.

The event, at their Centre Street brewery in Brooklyn, will bring together stouts from some of their favorite breweries around the country in an all-you-care-to-drink ticketed event. The indoor/outdoor event will also have food available for purchase, which is much needed with all the boozy stouts you’d expect to see at an event like this.

Other Half has already announced some of the breweries they’re welcoming this year, with more to come later… stay tuned to their Instagram for the latest. Here’s who they’ve got coming at the moment:

American Solera
Bottle Logic Brewing
Everywhere Beer Co.
Evil Twin Brewing
Great Notion Brewing
HOMES Brewery
Jackie O’s Brewery
Kings Brewing Co.
Mast Landing Brewing Co.
Mikerphone Brewing
Millpond Brewing
Mortalis Brewing Co.
Ology Brewing Co.
Revolution Brewing
Side Project Brewing
Timber Ales Brewery
Trillium Brewing Co.
Tripping Animals Brewing Co.
Vitamin Sea Brewing
WeldWerks Brewing Co.
Xül Beer Co.

Tickets are on sale now, with a VIP option that includes early admission at noon for $100 and a GA option that starts at 1pm for $65.

Beer Events of Note This Week

• Brooklyn: Fourth Avenue Pub 18th Anniversary, Thursday 10/24 from 5pm-close, free entry

• Manhattan: Keg & Lantern West Village Grand Opening, Thursday 10/24 from 5pm, free entry

• Manhattan: Bronx Brewery Tattooed Pumpkin Release, Friday 10/25 from 6pm, free entry

• Queens: Alewife Brewing Halloween Party, Saturday 10/26 from noon, free entry

• Brooklyn: Gathering Day at Grimm Artisanal Ales, Saturday 10/26 from noon, free entry

• Brooklyn: BETTERFEST at Talea Beer Co., Sunday 10/27 from 10am to 6pm, tickets start at $150

Brewery Tracker

Total brewery count: 3,551
Total breweries visited in 2024: 267
Total breweries visited in England: 203

Brewery Visit of the Week

Brewery #3551, Pretty Decent Beer Co, London, England (Visited 19-Oct-2024)

It was just ten years ago when I visited London for the first time in my life. Since then, I’ve made friends and connections there, embraced the ease in which I can get there from New York (seriously — the flight to LAX is longer), and been charmed by the new places I discover every time I visit… including the breweries. And somehow, I have now visited one hundred breweries in London alone. I marked the occasion on a quick trip to London last weekend, where I finally got a chance to visit Pretty Decent’s new facility off of Blackhorse Road, which opened a little less than two years ago.

I had visited their original spot back in 2022 and really enjoyed their approach to beer — “modern, progressive, and seasonal,” which results in a cavalcade of lovely IPAs with cheeky names and playful labels. I sipped on the I Reckon That’s a Banksy, made with Galaxy, Mosaic, Nelson Sauvin, and Simcoe hops, while people-watching in a buzzing taproom on a Saturday night with a crowd that spilled out into the industrial estate that the brewery calls home (you’ll also find several other breweries nearby, which makes it ideal for a crawl from Blackhorse Road on the Victoria Line, if you’re ever in London). The brewery is community-minded, pledging to share profits with charity, and inclusive, fostering a fun, safe environment for its visitors.

Pretty Decent is seemingly thriving at a time when other breweries have not (this week’s Doom and Gloom Tracker features one such example that’s just a quarter-mile away). It’s been a rough couple years for breweries in the UK, as I’ve documented here. And despite having visited a hundred breweries in London, it’s safe to say at least a quarter of those have closed just in the past two years. But I’m glad that places where people can still get excited about beer still exist in London — even if the styles of beer served look far different than the ones that breweries were making here when I first visited a decade ago.

The Doom and Gloom Tracker

At least 2 breweries I’ve visited closed or announced their closure this week:

• Brewery #542, Miner Brewing Company, Hill City, South Dakota (Visited 14-Apr-2016)

• Brewery #1785, Wild Card Brewery, London, England (Visited 14-Dec-2019)

The Weekly Reader

• NBC 4 profiles Back Home Beer [Michelle Park, NBC New York]

• Great South Bay opens third location in Ronkonkoma [Erica Marcus, Newsday]

• New uses for hop plant waste [Stefanie Dazio, AP]

• The intersection of beer and chicha in Ecuador [David Nilsen, Pellicle]

One Last Thing

This past weekend, the North American Guild of Beer Writers hosted their annual awards, honoring beer writers from across the continent and around the world. I’m a perennial judge of the competition, and I love to take part simply for the joy of reading more about beer. Here are some of the articles I read during judging, a couple of which have been shared in this newsletter before:

• A profile of a women-led brewery in Kigali, Rwanda [Lucy Corne, Good Beer Hunting]

• The story of Brouwerij Boon and its famous Mariage Parfait [Claire Bullen, Belgian Smaak]

• How Forest Road Brewing Co. in London took delivery of Russian River’s old brewhouse [Mark Dredge, Punch]

• How a brewery in Iowa defied the odds and thrived [Jacqueline Kehoe, Good Beer Hunting]

• A snapshot of a much-beloved and now-defunct Virginia brewery [Alistair Reece, Pellicle]

Happy reading!

Cheers,
Chris