The Beer Internet is Forever

Beer menus from years gone by and a stunner of a taproom from Philly

Well, I’m heading back on the road tonight after a whopping four days at home, and I’m heading to another beer festival — my third of the month, but the one I’ve been looking forward to by far the most. It’s Beak Brewing’s These Hills Festival in Lewes, England, the culmination of two years of friends telling me how great the festival is and a trek to the brewery during a train strike in September of last year. The weather for the outdoor festival looks iffy, but the brewery lineup looks stellar, and don’t doubt I’ll probably sneak in a pour of American beer even though I’m going to be 3,400 miles from home. I’ll report back next week on how it went — along with a few other adventures from my second trip to England in as many months. Then it’s time to buckle down and visit some beer fests here at home again.

The Internet Beer Bar Archive

Sometimes, a reminder of yesteryear can give you pangs of nostalgia. In a rabbit hole I went down last week, it gave me pangs of drinking East Coast IPAs and American Barleywines at New York City beer bars. I dug into the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to look at the websites of our city’s beer bars past and present, finding a treasure trove of “remember whens” on their menus from days gone by.

Barcade, August 14, 2006

This is truly a step back in time to simpler times at Barcade, when they had just one location in Williamsburg. The beer list was very New Jersey-heavy at the time, with Climax, Cricket Hill, and Heavyweight on the menu (the last of which would close two years later). A cask engine was pouring Captain Lawrence’s Imperial IPA, back in the days when Scott Vaccaro was brewing his beer in Pleasantville. Sixpoint had the only New York City-brewed offerings on the beer menu, had their Black Soul on Nitro and their flagship Sweet Action on draft. Long Island’s Southampton, then beloved among the city’s beer geeks, served their Secret Ale, a Dusseldorf Altbier. This was the height of beer drinkers’ obsession with Vermont’s Magic Hat, and their #9 and Hocus Pocus Summer Ale were both offered. And plenty of small players that grew into big regional outfits are on the list, including Allagash, Dogfish Head, Harpoon, and Victory.

But the one thing about this site that makes it unmistakably 2006: links to Barcade’s MySpace and Friendster pages. What a time to be alive.

The Pony Bar, June 11, 2010

I can hear the bell ringing and the crowd shouting “new beer” at The Pony Bar’s original location in Hell’s Kitchen back in 2010, when it appears they still had the leftovers from an Atwater tap takeover, nearly a decade before the Detroit-based brewery was acquired by Molson Coors. I think I drank my weight in Ithaca Flower Power at The Pony Bar over the years. The abundance of big beers on this list is back from the era when “bigger is better” was a mantra among a lot of craft beer drinkers. That 10.9% Atwater VoodooVator Dopplebock, 11.1% Smuttynose Barley Wine, and 9.7% Lagunitas Undercover Investigation Shut-Down Ale — which commemorates a raid still celebrated on Lagunitas’ website — seemed downright irresponsible, even if they were served in 8-ounce glasses for $5 at the time. Worth noting the two cask engines at The Pony at the time, representative of a time when nearly every good New York City beer bar had one. This one was pouring Chelsea Summer Solstice, an old standby from a brewpub that existed on Chelsea Piers until 2014.

By the way, I was able to confirm that I had become a “Pony All-American” by that time — a title given to patrons who had consumed 100 different beers on their menu. I was number 173 on the list:

d.b.a. Manhattan, July 1, 2012

Not even a year after d.b.a. owner Ray Deter tragically passed away, the torch he lit was still burning strong at their Manhattan location, where his appreciation for European beer still stood out on the beer list, with O’Hara’s, Jever, Mahrs and Chimay all on draft at the time, and a cask engine that was pouring ten to eleven months of the year. This is back when New York City’s brewing industry was just on the cusp of blowing up, but you won’t find anything truly local on draft at this time. We’ve reached the era of $7 pints at this time ($6 at happy hour), and there’s some oddball beers on here, like Full Sail back in the age of their nationwide expansion and stubby bottles, Red Hook when they were just partially-owned by Anheuser-Busch (they’re now owned by Tilray), and Ben’s Brew, a tiny tenant brewing operation that was run by a New Yorker out of Butternuts Brewing, the Upstate outfit best known for their Pork Slap Ale.

Alewife Queens, February 22, 2014

Before Alewife Brewing, there was Alewife the bar, a high-ceilinged space in Long Island City that closed in 2020. It’s no wonder what was happening here when this tap list was captured in 2014 — Bell’s Brewery launched in New York City in February of that year, and Alewife had a massive list of beers to celebrate. I still remember loving that Smitten Golden Rye, a beer that it appears the brewery still makes in small batches at their Eccentric Cafe. I might need to finally journey out to Kalamazoo and visit just for that. The tide was finally turning for local beer in 2014, and options from The Bronx Brewery, Empire (their Cream Ale was brewed in Brooklyn at the time), Port Jeff, Captain Lawrence, and Barrier were all on the list. Most noticeably, this was around the peak of Black IPA, a style that never really took off, but never really died — Captain Lawrence’s Black IPA was on tap and Barrier’s Oil City Black IPA was on cask.

Bar Great Harry, May 8, 2016

What a difference two years and a dozen new breweries in New York City makes. It really shows how in a very short time just how much more our beer bars were focusing on local beer — often stuff made just blocks away from Bar Great Harry, like Threes Vliet and Other Half Forever Ever. Finback and Gun Hill were also still relative newcomers to the scene, and Grimm was still contract brewing in Northern Virginia at the time. This is the first list in this feature without a brewery that has closed down. Bar Great Harry really knows how to pick ‘em. One notable point not pictured here: it’s hard to believe that as recently as eight years ago, canned beer hadn’t really hit the mainstream. The early adopters of cans — Anderson Valley and Westbrook — were on the menu, but we had not reached the age of mass acceptance of hazy IPAs in 16-ounce cans.

Brewery Tracker

Total brewery count: 3,435
Total breweries visited in 2024: 151
Total breweries visited in Pennsylvania: 92

Brewery Visit of the Week

Brewery #3433, Sacred Vice Brewing, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Visited 2-Jun-2024)

“You need to go to Sacred Vice,” several New York friends said when I told them I was going to Philly for Logjammin, Human Robot’s annual lager festival. These were friends whose opinions I trusted, so I heeded their advice and took the Market-Frankford Line to their taproom on Berks Street, which just opened earlier this Spring.

I was charmed on the second I walked in. The decor is very much mid-century modern, with a wall of vinyl behind the bar and a record player spinning the bartenders’ records of choice. The design was clean and very much intentional — and it seemed in keeping with the beer list. That beer list was very much restrained — just one IPA, a 5% Citra and Cascade Pale Ale, a Pub Ale, a Cream Ale, and a Brown Ale. The Pub Ale, called Pocket Size Rhino, was the highlight of the bunch, with a biscuit and nut malt character and some lovely floral hops. This New Yorker will never say no to a Cream Ale, and theirs is called Special Enough, a “beer-flavored beer” that’s incredibly crush-worthy at 3.6%, but worth savoring.

I’m putting Sacred Vice into my regular Philadelphia rotation. And you can add me to the New Yorkers that will tell you to go here when you visit Philly.

The Doom and Gloom Tracker

At least 1 brewery I’ve visited closed or announced their closure this week:

• Brewery #2503, Tetrad Brewing Company, Greenville, South Carolina (Visited 18-Dec-2021)

The Weekly Reader

• American chooses violence in critiquing cask ale’s biggest cheerleaders [Jeff Alworth, Beervana]

• On odd humor in the beer industry [Phil Cook, Beer Diary]

• What happened to Chicago’s 5 Rabbit Cerveceria? [Kate Bernot, Good Beer Hunting]

• Beer in the Middle Ages was weird [Olivia White, VinePair]

One Last Thing

A reminder of two more big beer festivals coming up on Saturdays in June: Other Half’s Green City, on Saturday, the 22nd at their brewery in Gowanus, still has some tickets available. And the following Saturday, the 29th, Threes Brewing will host Pils & Love at their brewery in Gowanus. Choose your weapon: IPA or Pils? Or just choose both; you’ve got a whole week to recover in between.

See you at either one… or both!

Cheers,
Chris