Tag: beer

Beer Drama

Crocodile tears about crap US “beer”. this article is of course silly. there wasn’t much left to destroy, commercial beer has been tasting like crap for decades.

“When you try to save money on hops, your beers will have less taste. Eventually, they will realize customers want quality beer.”

Open Source Brewing

If you contribute an idea in the early stages of recipe formulation (e.g. a hop variety to use, an adjustment in a malt bill, changes to water chemistry, etc…) that we end up adopting, we’ll invite you to participate in one of our tasting panels once we’re up and running. If you can’t make it out to the brewery, we’ll acknowledge your contribution for all to world to see in a suitably awesome way.

Once a recipe is in production, we’ll up the ante. If you bring us a homebrewed version of our beer that we like better than our own and provide details of what you did differently, we’ll invite you to brew the beer with us at the brewery. Suffice it to say, we’ll make sure you have a great time and are crowned king of Modern Times for the day.

The regular


Something to aspire to, John Hawkins

Arthur Reid, 90, has popped into The Griffin Pub almost every day at 15:00 since turning 18 to enjoy 1 pint or 2 of his beloved Courage bitter. He has his own special glass behind the bar and now an engraved gold plaque has been placed on the back of his favorite chair to mark his 90th birthday.

ABC beer

My favorite new alphabet city hangout: ABC beer on loisaida and 6th.

2016-03-15: An interview with the founder

EM: How were your first few months of business?
ZM: The first year was definitely our hardest, but far from the reasons you’d expect. Business-wise we hit the ground running and the place was packed every night, way more than we ever anticipated. I was barely 27 years old the day of our grand opening and to say I was naive about business ownership would be an epic understatement. The first 3 weeks of being open were both the most physically exhausted and energized by adrenaline I’ve ever felt in my life. David and I were pulling shifts to let the other nap for 1 hour by the end. It was a solid month before we really got into the stride of bar ownership and sleep schedules could return to normal.

And then, just like that, everything changed. We were 5 and a half months in when we got completely destroyed by Sandy. Going back the next morning was surreal. Water had filled the basement right to the top and had destroyed everything vital to running the business: our compressors, the walk-in fridge, our draft system, our entire inventory of … everything. It was as if someone had shook the room and hit it full blast with a fire hose for a day. I don’t think I’ll ever forget wading in knee-deep water in my basement, wearing a headlamp and hauling heaps of trash and debris to the sidewalk, all while trying to foster every bit of optimism I had while also panicking and proclaiming out loud, “Am I fucking dreaming right now?”

It was also because of this that I experienced firsthand the sense of community that solidified me as a devout New Yorker for life. What started out as neighboring businesses helping each other score gas to run generators turned into complete strangers showing up and asking how they could help out. I still well up sometimes thinking about the support that showed up from friends, family, neighbors and anonymous New Yorkers.

Rebounding from the storm was nothing short of hosting a grand reopening. In a slightly fucked-up way, I am grateful to Sandy for teaching me what it’s like to really dig down and feel ownership over something. I had never had to contemplate my livelihood being taken away from me before, and having gone through the turmoil and stress of it all forged a little something new in me. It taught me to never take a good day for granted, and that even bad days could be worse. It’s one of those clichés that also happens to be true.