The Crack of the Beer, The Roar of the Crowd
Baseball's back, a Williamsburg stalwart shutters, and beer dads get roasted
Today marks a sure sign of spring: the return of Major League Baseball. It also marks the day that our local breweries celebrate our national pastime.
Torch & Crown Brewing’s Bat Flip Day returns for another year, with baseball on TV all day, plastic bats full of their Bat Flip spring ale, and plenty of hot dogs. The fun gets underway at noon today — snag one of those last $25 tickets while you can, which includes a souvenir baseball bat beer cup filled with beer, a ballpark hot dog, and access to their Bat Flip Central party tent.
Meanwhile, at Other Half Brewing’s Centre Street location, they’ll have an Opening Day Watch Party with the Mets game starting at 4pm, co-hosted with Eno Sarris of The Athletic. They’ll have a special collab beer and sandwich for the event, plus $5 beer specials running all afternoon.
And if you’re in Queens: fear not, both Big aLICe in Long Island City and Alewife in Sunnyside are showing the Mets-Marlins game. Spring is in the air. Have a beer and enjoy.
City brewers excel in state competition
New York City breweries took home 15 medals at this year’s New York State Beer Competition, held last Friday as part of the New York State Brewers Conference in Albany. The competition is open to every brewery in the state, and this year, the entries alone were surprising. IPAs only accounted for one of the five most-entered categories, with Hazy IPAs ranking third, behind the Amber and Dark Lagers category (#1 with 97 entries) and Coffee, Chocolate, Spice, and Other Adjunct beer (non-sour). Sour Fruit and Vegetable Beer and Non-Sour Barrel-Aged Beer rounded out the top five categories entered this year. This represents an interesting profile of what New York’s brewers are most proud of, and how diverse the range of beers brewed here really is.
Brooklyn’s Kings County Brewers Collective had the strongest showing this year among breweries in the five boroughs, with five medals. Grimm Artisanal Ales, who was Brewery of the Year in the competition the past two years, took home three medals, including a gold for their J’Adoube, a blended barrel-aged saison.
Most impressively for New York City’s breweries, they swept the Modern and Contemporary Light Lager category this year. Among the 62 entries, EBBS Brewing Co, Wild East Brewing Co., and KCBC won gold, silver, and bronze with their lagers.
The full list of New York City winners is below. If you want to see the full list from across the state, check the list on the competition website.
Category 3: Golden/Blonde Ales (American, Kolsch, Cream Ales) - 54 entries
Silver: Kolsch No. 2 - EBBS Brewing Co
Category 4: Amber/Red Ales (British, American, Irish, Scottish) - 67 entries
Silver: Sleepy Pants Hoppy Amber - 18th Ward Brewing
Category 6: American IPA – 45 entries
Silver: Venomous Villains - Kings County Brewers Collective
Category 11: Barrel Aged Non-Sour – 77 entries
Silver: Last of the Steam-Powered Trains - Grimm Artisanal Ales
Category 12: Belgian Farmhouse – 34 entries
Silver: Sweet Potato Farmhouse - Big aLICe
Category 15: Fruit & Vegetable (Non-Sour) – 44 entries
Silver: S2 Lemongrass & Ginger Saison - Transmitter Brewing
Category 17: Brown Ale (American & British) – 33 entries
Silver: Brownstone Revival - Sixpoint Brewery
Category 19: Stout (Non-Imperial) – 28 entries
Bronze: Bodega Cat - Kings County Brewers Collective
Category 23: Wild and Sour Ales – 25 entries
Gold: J'adoube - Grimm Artisanal Ales
Category 24: Light Lagers – Modern & Contemporary - 62 entries
Gold: Pilsner No. 2 - EBBS Brewing Co.
Silver: L'ultima Moda - Wild East Brewing Co.
Bronze: 4AM PILS - Kings County Brewers Collective
Category 25: Light Lagers – Traditional - 73 entries
Bronze: Infinite Machine - Kings County Brewers Collective
Category 27: Hazy DIPA – 47 entries
Bronze: Bright Lights, Big Kitty - Kings County Brewers Collective
Category 29: Coffee, Chocolate, Spice & Other Adjunct Beer (sour) – 9 entries
Silver: Super Spruce - Grimm Artisanal Ales
One Stop Beer Shop announces closure
East Williamsburg’s One Stop Beer Shop will close this weekend after twelve years in business on Kingsland Avenue. The bar was an early pioneer of craft beer in this far-off section of the neighborhood just south of the BQE, long before any brewery or concert venue opened nearby. It opened in late 2011 with sixteen draft lines, boastful of its growler fills and beer cocktails. Times have changed, and the bar announced its closure with a parting message on social media:
We want to thank our local community for your support and patronage through these ever changing times. It is because of you that we had so much success in the 12 long years of business. We share an ethereal love for our customers and have memories that we will cherish forever.
One Stop Beer Shop will have two closing parties this weekend on Friday and Saturday, March 31st and April 1st from 4pm-4am, so you still have time to say goodbye to what, by New York City’s standards of bar longevity, had become a neighborhood institution.
Brewery Tracker
Total brewery count: 2,993
Total breweries visited in 2023: 98
Total breweries visited in Ohio: 75
Brewery Visit of the Week
Brewery #2982, Nocterra Brewing Company, Powell, Ohio (Visited 18-Mar-2023)
Sometimes I go into a day in an unfamiliar city without a plan of attack for visiting breweries. I’ll just walk from my hotel to the closest one and start asking, “what’s good in town?” This can guide my day to far-off places deep into the suburbs, as happened to me in Columbus a couple weeks back. The friendly staff at Combustion Brewery, my second stop of the day, insisted that Nocterra was worth the trek into the northern fringes of the Columbus metro area — for both its beer and its space. Admittedly, it was a grey, raw late winter day, so the beautiful, expansive outdoor space that everyone seemed to rave about wasn’t exactly the place I wanted to drink my beer. A shame, too, since the brewery’s entire theme is based around the outdoors — the brewery boasts a run club, mountain bike club, and ski club, and offers an annual whitewater rafting trip.
Thankfully, the interior was plenty welcoming, and after saddling up to the bar, the personality of the staff here was far warmer than the weather outside. They offered recommendations, like their Beta Flash IPA, one of several NEIPAs they serve that seemed to be popular based on the haze in people’s glasses across the taproom. The California Swell Line was a gose bursting with berry flavor. And The Dan, a Munich Dunkel that wasn’t available on draft, was raved about by so many of the folks around me that the bartender cracked open a can to offer me a pour. It lived up to the hype.
I hope I can get back to Nocterra again on a day when the weather’s better. In the mean time, I’ll think of them when I take a hike.
Long Read of the Week
If you don’t have a sense of humor about how stereotypical beer nerds are, I don’t recommend this piece by Aaron Goldfarb at Vinepair on the TikTok trend of kids roasting their craft beer-loving dads. Thankfully, I realize that I’m definitely a walking stereotype at times — the scenes with middle-aged guys taking exterior shots of breweries with their phones hit a bit too close to home.
One Last Thing
As you read this, I’m somewhere over the South Pacific Ocean, hopefully sleeping, as I fly toward Sydney for a three-week tour of Australia and New Zealand. The newsletter will still be out every week I’m away, but expect a lot of Southern Hemisphere beer content, including my visit to brewery #3,000, which will be Wildflower Brewing & Blending this Saturday. Follow along on Instagram.
Cheers,
Chris