This One Mentions IPAs

NYC Beer Week goes virtual, a Brooklyn mainstay closes, and a Colorado haze-bro darling hits the Tri-State

Brew York and Beyond 2: The New Batch

We did it, gang! One week of content in the books, and we’re on our way to getting past the average point of Substack abandonment. Thanks for your feedback about last week’s first edition of this. I hope it’s actually useful, or at the very least gives you some entertainment that supplants your usual doomscrolling.

Shortly after I hit “publish” on last week’s email, I realized that the letters I-P-A did not appear in that order and case in the newsletter. Not even once! That was not an intentional omission, and I promptly cracked open a Blue Motel IPA from New Jersey’s Kane Brewing as penance for my sin, then made the trip over to Other Half Domino Park to replenish my haze supply. Forgive me.

I can’t guarantee every edition from here on out will mention an IPA, but I will make a noble attempt not to shower praise on every Czech Pils and English Mild and shit on every Fruited IPA and Imperial Stout with seventeen ingredients… unless one of those ingredients is Tootsie Rolls. Tootsie Rolls are garbage.

NYC Beer Week goes virtual

Last year’s NYC Beer Week Opening Bash at the Brooklyn Expo Center. Remember people? Remember places?

About this time last year, some of us were starting to scrub our hands a little harder and sanitize our high-touch surfaces a little more, but we were still going to beer events. One of the last events New York beer drinkers got to enjoy in before everything went to hell was the NYC Beer Week Opening Bash at the Brooklyn Expo Center, the crowning event of the week and, in my opinion, one of the best beer events in the city each year, featuring nearly every brewery in New York City and high-profile visiting breweries from around the world. At this point, we are nearly 11 months into reading and writing “this annual in-person event is going virtual” articles, and this will probably be the last to jog your memory of the guilt-free gallivanting we enjoyed before we spent months locked in our homes and salivating over every beer delivery. After this, every beer event we skipped in 2020 will feel like ancient history.

Anyway, the NYC Brewers Guild will be doing things a bit differently this year for NYC Beer Week, which runs February 28th through March 7th. As part of the celebration, Beer Boxes of 12 or 24 beers are on sale now, each featuring beers from a selection of 32 different New York City breweries and shippable to 31 different states so you can share the joy of our city’s beer scene nationwide. And while there won’t be an in-person bash this year, a Virtual Gala will be held on Saturday, March 6th, focusing on raising money for the Brewers Guild’s mission at a time when the city’s breweries need support and promotion more than ever.

More Beer Week events are in the works, including a pandemic-friendly scavenger hunt, so stay updated on the NYC Brewers Guild website for all the info.

Brooklyn’s Mission Dolores announces closure

Mission Dolores in September of 2019

This one hurts. After more than ten years serving craft beer on Fourth Avenue, Park Slope fixture Mission Dolores has announced it has closed permanently. The bar opened in April of 2010 to much acclaim. I called it “this year’s summer jam” the day after its grand opening, and it was my summer jam for many summers after that. It was a truly special place with a layout that encouraged social interaction over good beers. And even on days with a cold wind, its protected courtyard made three-season outdoor drinking possible.

Mission Dolores was a major supporter of the beer scene, hosting many brewery launches and beer releases over its history. It’s where I drank my first post-Sandy Barrier beers. It was a stop on what I [vaguely] remember as an epic Park Slope bar crawl with the staff of Green Flash on a sunny April afternoon a few years ago. It’s where I drank Other Half’s first-ever beer, an IPA collab with Peekskill called Nuggy Num Num. It played host to countless get-togethers, birthday parties, and dates.

In the past two years, Mission Dolores got a one-two punch that made a 2021 recovery daunting: the bar was closed for most of the summer of 2019 after scaffolding from nearby construction crashed into its courtyard, and then in 2020, the bar was closed for three months during the first wave of the pandemic, and then closed again in December when indoor dining was halted.

If you’re looking for any good news in this sea of disappointment, nearby sister bar The Owl Farm announced that it will reopen today at 2pm with sidewalk seating and limited indoor seating — the first time it’s opened its doors since a winter hiatus that began in January.

For beer nostalgists, here’s Mission Dolores’ tap list from opening night on April 1, 2010:

Sly Fox O’Reilly’s Irish Stout
Flying Dog In Heat Wheat
Brooklyn Blast
Reissdorf Kolsch
Genesee Cream Ale
Yuengling
Stoudt’s Pils
Sixpoint Autobahn IPA
Avery Anniversary Ale - Fifteen
Sierra Nevada 30th Anniversary - Fritz & Ken’s Ale
Captain Lawrence Captain’s Kolsch
Founders Dirty Bastard
Dogfish Head Chicory Stout
North Coast Pranqster
Speakeasy Double Daddy
Pretty Things Jack D’Or
Mikkeller Chinook IPA
Schneider Aventinus
Franziskaner Hefeweizen
Rodenbach Grand Cru

CASK: Defiant IPA

A legendary start to what became a legendary bar. Mission Dolores, I’ll miss everything about you.

Colorado’s Weldwerks arrives in New York this week

Here’s one for the IPA lovers out there: a brewery known for its Hazy IPAs has its sights set on the Northeast. WeldWerks Brewing out of Greeley, Colorado debuts its beers in New York and New Jersey starting Friday. The brewery is the darling of Colorado’s haze-bros, who would chase down their flagship Juicy Bits in the brewery’s early days. The six-year old spot matured to broaden their beer offerings, and recently expanded their production space in Greeley, about an hour north of Denver, to meet the rapid demand as word spread about their beers beyond Colorado’s borders. Other Half fans may be familiar with WeldWerks as the two breweries have frequently collaborated, most recently on Triple Juicy Diamonds Imperial IPA last month. WeldWerks will be distributed by Sarene Craft Beer across the Tri-State.

Brewery Tracker

Total brewery count: 2,102
New breweries in 2021: 28
First 2021 brewery, alphabetically: Archetype Brewing, Asheville, NC
Last 2021 brewery, alphabetically: Zillicoah Beer Company, Woodfin, NC

Brewery Visit of the Week

Brewery #2091, Zillicoah Beer Company, Woodfin, North Carolina (Visited 29-Jan-2021)

As I pulled up to Zillicoah in a Lyft, a woman greeted me at the entrance to the parking lot to check my ID and explain the ground rules: “keep your mask on when not seated, stay six feet apart while you wait in line, feel free to spread out on the property, and… hey, wait, is that a KCBC hat?” It was. “I used to live a few blocks from there,” she told me, excitedly, “and I love that place!” At this moment, I knew I was in for a treat. Nearly every time I visit a brewery and someone on staff recognizes the New York City brewery swag I’m wearing, the experience goes well. Maybe good breweries attract staff that used to live in New York City? Maybe people who move from New York City are attracted to good breweries? Either way, the prophecy was fulfilled at Zillicoah.

The brewery sits on four acres of land along the French Broad River north of downtown Asheville, and they’ve use that space to their advantage in the pandemic. Tables are spread out by not six feet, but by thirty feet. I chose a table perched on the top of the slope overlooking the river and settled into a crisp Kellerpils that sparkled in the magic-hour sunlight. I stuffed my face with tacos from their on-site taco truck while I ran down their handwritten list of lovely beers, from their mildly spicy Rye IPA to their bready Helles to an open-fermented Pre-Prohibition Pilsner made with wild maize and aged hops.

The beers I tried were impeccable and nothing was overdone — except me, after several hours of one good beer after another. I caught my ride back to town, but not before realizing that in my pocket, of all things, was a can of KCBC’s Fellowship of the Bling Barleywine that I had planned to hand off at the next brewery I visited. The woman at the gate got that can. She was grateful for the can. I was grateful for a sublime brewery experience.

Agri-Nerdity of the Week

The Kellerpils at Zillicoah was brewed with Michigan-grown Saaz hops, which marks the second week in a row that hops grown in that state have been referenced in this newsletter. Michigan hops aren’t uncommon, you might think. And in the sense that more brewers have been willing to pony up the money to use them, they have gotten a boost in visibility in the last couple years. Michigan’s hop acreage ranks fourth among U.S. states, with the Hop Growers of America reporting that in 2020, the state had seven hundred acres of hop farms. Pretty impressive, right? Except the third-ranking state, Oregon, has ten times more hop acreage. Idaho, ranking second, has thirteen times more hop acreage. And Washington, the largest hop-growing state in the nation, grows hops on more than sixty times Michigan’s acreage. Those three Northwestern states grow more than ninety-nine percent of the country’s entire hop yield. Michigan (ahead of New York, which ranks fifth) is barely a blip on the hop map.

Beer of the Week

Past & Present: London Robust Porter
Other Half Brewing (Bloomfield, NY)
English Porter
6% ABV

I’ll admit it: there have been times when I’ve mocked Other Half for having 17 IPAs on tap out of 20 beers on their taproom menu. I’ve also cracked jokes about how half their IPAs are indistinguishable from each other, even to a trained palate. But I’ve never knocked them for the other styles they make. In fact, in the Before Times, I’d go out of my way to drink small pours of every non-IPA at their Gowanus brewery before I’d even touch an IPA, and the vast majority of them are so good that I’m bothered that they often were ignored by the people around me. So it pleases me that Other Half has launched a new series of beers called Past & Present, which celebrates styles they don’t typically brew and ingredients they don’t typically use. The first beer in this series was a Hazy IPA with Centennial hops, which they admit was “tip-toeing” into it. But the follow-up, this Porter, is less of a tip-toe and more of a full-speed dash into unfamiliar grounds for Other Half. I found this beer to be true-to-style and let the ingredients (malts from England’s Warminster Maltings and East Kent Golding hops) speak for themselves. Behold, an Other Half beer that’s rich without being decadent and smooth without loads of lactose and oats! More of this, please.

Long Read of the Week

Holly Regan at Good Beer Hunting explores the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, meshing the neighborhood and its beer scene in this piece and detailing Ballard’s past and present challenges. While it’s a beer-lovers’ playground, Ballard has a rich maritime history and now struggles with rapid gentrification, something that’s become abundantly clear on my successive visits there over the past twelve years. Somehow, Holly identifies even more new breweries that have opened there since my last trip at the end of 2019. I’ve plotted them on my to-do map for when I’m ready to get back on an airplane again.

Mailbag

Ask a question in the comments, and I might answer you in the newsletter. Here’s one that I thought was worth answering here.

I know you keep track of your brewery visits via Excel, but do you use any beer rating apps to keep track of the beers you've consumed on your visits? If so, which app(s)? And do you rate them as well? Curious if you set any criteria for yourself as to when you can "officially" rate a beer, like food critics, ie. must have the beer at least twice or something like that?
— Allen

Hi Allen,

I was a very early adopter of Untappd (co-founder Greg Avola introduced me to the app at the now-closed Rattle-N-Hum on 33rd Street in 2010), and I’ve been pretty good about using it to keeping tabs on what beers I’ve had at breweries I’ve visited. As a result, it’s got a trove of data that I refer back to often to jog my memory when writing about brewery visits. But I don’t “officially” rate beers. Any rating I give a beer on Untappd is more of a technical rating than a criticism based on my personal tastes. I don’t use the social features of Untappd — opinions are like assholes; everyone’s got one. For me, Untappd is almost exclusively a reference tool for my beer-drinking history.

I’m a strong believer that someone’s opinion of a beer shouldn’t matter to anyone but themselves. You’ll notice in the “Beer of the Week” feature here that I don’t give a rating — simply some basic information about the beer and my tasting notes or reaction. If I use superlatives like “best beer I’ve had in New York this year” or “best beer I had at the brewery,” I’m describing my personal experience with a beer. Your mileage may vary, as everyone’s palate is different. I’m always willing to try anything once and I try not to let other people’s opinions about a brewery cloud my judgement. I’ve had some fantastic beers at breweries that skilled brewers, beer QA technicians, and Certified Cicerones specifically told me to avoid. Does that mean they’re wrong? Does that mean I’m wrong? Neither! Drink what you like! Don’t let me tell you what to drink and what not to drink.

One more thing

Thanks again for reading all the way through! I’ve really been overwhelmed with the positive feedback I got about my first newsletter, and I hope you’ll continue to let me know your thoughts. While I’ve got you here, a question for you, dear reader: what’s your most prized piece of brewery swag that you own? Leave your answer in the comments. I’m going to write about this topic in a future newsletter.

Safe travels and good beer,
Chris O’Leary