Last Wednesday, sitting around a conference room table, going over a friend’s qualifiers presentation:

J: “Hey. Want to get beer tonight?”
Me: “Ok.”

And simple as that, 6pm, we’re strolling out of the UES to the painful transnat corpdom that is Midtown, heading towards the Ginger Man, a Manhattan beer powerhouse with 66 beers on tap and 120+ bottles,
and one of 12 listed bars in NY with Dogfish 60 on tap.

It’s a Wednesday, Midtown’s a wasteland, and it was 6pm. We didn’t expect there to be much of a crowd, but by the time we got there, it was completely packed! This is a huge bar with plenty of seating area, but alas, all seats (and standing room) was taken up by suits loosening their ties. After standing around awkwardly for a bit, waiting for the last member of our party to arrive, we finally procured a table, got our beers, got halfway through the first round, and then realized… the bar was practically empty. Somewhere in that one hour differential, the B&T crowd had finished pounding in that one last drink before catching the PATH back home.

This bar’s location was really a shame, considering the wonderful bounty of beer they had available.

I tried (ever my own or someone else’s glass… no I didn’t drink 4 beers there):

Stoudt’s Blonde Double MaiBock
y’know, i just wasn’t feeling this beer at all. i really wanted to, since double bocks sound like candy on a stick, but while this had alot of different flavours going for it, they didn’t… mix together at all. just ended up being a bit weird and incongruous

Franziskaner Hefe Weisse
typical hefeweizen with a bit more spice/kick than usual. pretty decent, but not too special for a hefe

Victory Storm King Stout
yummy, good stout.
didn’t stand out from other stouts, but had the same texture & nice malty taste of caramel & choco (not sweet). delicioso!

Dogfish Head 60 Minute
Wow. So unlike the Dogfish Head 120 minute, this actually still tastes recognizably like an IPA. However, its also the best IPA i’ve ever had. just the right balance of hops, acidity, flavour… i wouldn’t, however, compare this to the 120, just b/c the 120 really belongs in a dessert beer category, instead of the normal IPA.

One of the best things, however, about 36th st though, is its proximity to K-town. We jetted over there, grabbed some korean bbq & Hite korean beer (which is pretty amazingly mediocre, but hey, every country has their own macrolager), and it was an excellent night.

I’d definitely head over to the ginger man again sometime, just not between 5 to 7:30pm on a workday.

The Ginger Man
11 E. 36th St., New York, NY 10016
nr. Fifth Ave.
212-532-3740

Rejoice, ye humble supplicants kneeling at the foot of the Beer Gods; our prayers have been answered!

Take MenuPages, add beer, you get BeerMenus.com, or a rather comprehensive listing of bars & restaurants and their respective beer menus, currently only available in New York (but of course). A quick browse through the site yielded many fruits; I finally know where I can find that delicious amazing nectar known as Dogfish 120 (and for only $7/bottle? I feel like that’s got to be some kind of typo… maybe a little bit of investigative journalism is at hand? Oh the depths I’d go to for the Truth and a bottle of Dogfish), and there’s apparently a free beer & … oysters? tasting on May 6th at Blind Tiger Ale House. Well sir, you’ve sold me twice - beer & oysters rank right up there with oxygen in my book.
On a more disappointing note, the uptown offerings seems to be fairly meager. A walk through my neighborhood shows 8 restaurants/bars. That’s at least 30x that existing up here. Conspicuously missing is the UES beer mecca of David Copperfield’s (if 30 taps & 100+ bottles doesn’t count, then nothing does).

Still, a solid/clean site that just launched 2 days ago — looking forward to seeing this site become a real go-to spot for beer in the city. In retrospect, it’s quite amazing that this particular Web 2.0 niche took so long before being filled…!

I cannot stand alcopops. I can’t stand the marketing to women (or conversely, the lack of marketing to women for beer, scotches, gins, etc). T00 many college-aged women just give up on beer (well, yes, nobody likes beer initially) and stick to the Smirnoff ices, the wine coolers, the Bacardi breezes and god knows what other . Take high fructose corn syrup, add artificial flavouring and food colouring.

Regardless of the sociological & health-related reasons, this little tidbit provides all rationale needed for disliking Smirnoff Ice & it’s kin…

How many calories are there in a bottle of SMIRNOFF ICE®?
SMIRNOFF ICE® has 228 calories per 12-ounce bottle, that’s about 70 more than a super-premium/imported beer but don’t worry, that difference in calories is about the same as one hot wing, five little pretzel twists OR 3 tortilla chips…with nothing on ‘em.

Smirnoff US Website

What? Who on earth would find that reasoning logical?

Let’s do some bullshit mathematics, why don’t we? First, face value: 228 calories per 12 oz bottle? I’m a smaller than average person — my estimated daily calorie intake is in the 1700-1800 region. 7 bottles of Smirnoff Ice is my entire daily calorie allowance (plus my death by diabetes). Now let’s consider I drank my daily calorie allowance in Guinness instead (150cals/12oz and a 20934802934x better tasting drink)… that becomes 11 bottles, which means I could drink my normal limit of 6-7 beers, and still have room for lunch. Those additional 70 calories per 12 oz-bottle? That is 44% more calories per bottle. Drinking 3 beers is practically the same thing as drinking 2 Smirnoff ices — make it become a habit, sprinkle in a dose of 20-somethin’-year-old binge drinking, and you’ve got a recipe for absolute disaster.

Please, for the love of everything decent in the world, don’t drink alcopops. If you’re just in it to get drunk and you don’t like the taste of beer & wine, then just take shots and cradle a glass of water in between them, and keep on trying beers/wines/cocktail concoctions you enjoy and won’t cause massive obesity with the liver cirrhosis.

If I’m inside, seated, and paying more than $3 for a beer, you had better not serve it to me in a plastic cup. You’re running a restaurant, not a frat party or a music festival. Have some self respect.

Since this is a blog about liquids (as opposed to a blog about expensive food or incredibly crappy service) I’ll call that a good enough reason for me to never go back to Tommy Doyle’s at Kendall Square ever again. Ever. And you shouldn’t either.

[Seriously, boys and girls: if you’re at Kendall Square (which you shouldn’t be without a good reason, by the way — that place is a wasteland), just go to Emma’s if you’re patient or the CBC if you’re not. Emma’s has excellent food and a good selection of beer and wine from two continents, and the CBC is a craft brewery.]

I can’t stand Gristedes. They’re overpriced, underwhelming, and manages to bring grocery shopping to a continual new low with every trip. But they are the closest grocery store to me, and my pets were hungry, so what else could I do? While browsing the frozen fruit section (because buying fresh melons every couple days for my millipedes is getting to be a bit of an annoyance), I noticed – Sierra Nevada’s spring seasonal beer!

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I may just have found my new favourite site.

Doesn’t it just annoy you sometimes when you discovered a wonderful new beer on tap in a bar somewhere, manage to remember the name and trace it to a brewery and maybe an online retailer or so… but then you realize you live in a state where BevMo doesn’t exist and now you’re going to have to call/visit all the local beer caves. Now imagine you live in NYC and there’s a million random grocery stores/delis/etc that randomly stock on craft beers.

Luckily, the Great Brewers’ Alliance, hooks us up with a searchable online database of the 10 nearest retailers, relative to your zip code, that bought a local alliance distributor in the past 90 days. For example, my local distribution turns out to be Union Beer Distributors in Brooklyn (which I have heard much tell of, but still haven’t made the trek out to Brooklyn to visit yet… heck, I haven’t even made it down to LES to see New Beer Distributors).

Check it out here: http://www.greatbrewers.com/union/index.php?option=com_retail&brewery=2

I now know that a grocery store just a couple blocks away from me carries Allagash White. Admittedly, it’ll probably be 200% markup or something, but at least I know I can get Allagash White whenever I feel compelled!

Despite Neil’s ardent protests to the contrary — I like Sam Adams. I enjoy it. It tastes delicious. I would order it at a bar. I would be happy if someone brought it to my place for a party (however, if you bring Heineken and you don’t drink all of it, I’ll have to start thinking of interesting steak marinades for it… and if you bring Bud Lite, that just means you hated me in the first place).

So, when Freshdirect offered a chance to sample 6 Sam Adams in one convenient 12pack for $16.99 of course I took it!

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Echoing Neil — there is paradise on earth. It’s called 112 beers on tap. And we have notes to prove it!

Suffering slightly from beer ADHD, we figured we’d go with 2 tasting flights to start the night. Which lead to another flight. Which lead to two very happy liquid bloggers. The following notes are in chronological order and are exactly what we wrote down in the bar — meaning you probably shouldn’t take the last couple seriously. (Also, we need to figure out a better notes taking system that doesn’t look like I’m listening to an organic chemistry lecture in the middle of a bar).

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My dad is, to first approximation, a gun-owning construction worker from a red state. To the same degree of accuracy, I’m a tree-hugging socialist who spends most of my day in a box with climate control and fluorescent lighting. We get along — we are still family, after all — but there still exists something of a divide.

When I was growing up, there was always a case of Budweiser in the garage fridge. Never Bud Lite, never MGD, and never anything in a glass bottle. My dad didn’t brag about it — he didn’t call it “Bud Heavy” like a tool — it’s just what he drank.

I think there are cultural reasons for that. There aren’t a whole lot of nice things about Bud that I can say, but this much is self-evident: it’s cheap, it contains alcohol, and it’s easy to down three after sweating your ass off all day. In other words, he drinks Budweiser like I drink Corona.

He said once that when he was younger, he drank Michelob, but after a point he decided it wasn’t worth the extra money. This is telling; though I’m way too young to actually know this for sure, I have my suspicions that back when my dad became a Budweiser drinker, the beer options in his part of the United States were pretty bleak indeed. If all you’ve got is shitty beer, you might as well drink Bud.

But of course, this isn’t the Seventies, this is the — I dunno — the Noughties? I don’t think there’s a liquor store in the country that doesn’t have at least two different really awesome beers. And here my dad was drinking Bud.

Due to a weird confluence of circumstances, I was halfway through college before I started drinking (what’s the statute of limitations on underage alcohol consumption?), around the same time as my big political awakening. Because my relationship with my parents isn’t predicated upon me sharing the details of my personal life with them, and because drinking with your parents when you’re underage is, generally, kinda weird, the first thing my dad learned about my drinking habits was when I showed up a week after I turned 21 with a Costco case of Mike’s Hard Lemonade.

Okay, yeah. I know. It’s not Bud, but it still kinda sucks. I could defend that action, but instead I’ll just call it a novice mistake and take a mulligan. It’s the equivalent of reading Chris Hitchens; you live, you learn, and you put it behind you.

Anyway, he thought that Mike’s was okay, albeit too expensive. Once I started learning about what beer really was, that notion stuck with me: my dad’s tastes were malleable.

In hindsight it’s obvious. I mean, he’s not stupid by any stretch. He makes a living with his hands; I only vaguely know which way to turn a wrench. He has some entrenched habits, but, if he’s exposed to conflicting evidence, he is willing to think about them. Sort of like voting Republican - he did it for a long time, but he stopped once all the bodies started coming home from Iraq.

I developed an abiding love for Sierra Nevada that year, and next time I went home, it was with a couple six-packs of that stuff. He hated it — “How do you drink something that bitter?” — and was totally unreceptive to my argument that beer was supposed to be bitter. No way; that’s crazy. Sort of like arguing about gay marriage; just no way to get any traction, because there’s no fundamental agreement of any sort.

I spent the next few months experimenting with different beers, as any nascent beer-drinker might, and stumbled upon the magic bullet: Newcastle Brown. Now, Newcastle is not the perfect beer, but it isn’t at all bitter, and it does have a good flavor to it. Next time I was home, I brought some.

He liked it, no reservations. Victory. “Hey dad, wouldn’t it be cool if you had healthcare?” Why yes, yes it would be.

Next time I went home, there was a case of Newcastle in the fridge. Next to the Budweiser, but still. That was a while ago, but I was home last month, and along with the Newcastle and the Bud, there was a six-pack of some really tasty local nut ale.

There’s hope.