Your Favorite Beer
- Thread starter Mr. Wet Wooly
- Start date
Yes and no. Most "Brooklyn" is made in Utica, including everything in a bottle. They do brew actual beer in the little brewery in Williamsburg, though. Their claim was that they supplied many local bars with the seasonal varieties that were too much of a niche market for Genesee (or whoever) made the big batches. You can also get a keg of the local stuff for yourself.
I don't have a problem with the "big guys," anyway. Brewing is very scalable--the size of the tank doesn't really matter as much as what goes into it. Generally, the Macro-Micros source and select the ingredients and, of course, it's their recipe.
The *real* difference with a solely small-batch operation (a "real" microbrewery, if you will) is that you can get the stuff fresh and, in my experience, most of these small brewers have the sense to keep it refrigerated on their premises, further keeping it from degrading. And the same is true of the beer that comes from the small batch part of a hybrid operation. Brooklyn beer at their brewpub is orders of magnitude better than the stuff that you get at your local Korean deli.
All else being equal, the fresher the beer, the better. I don't understand why people prefer European beer--the shit has been unrefrigerated for months between the brewery and the store. The sole exception are IPA's, which were conceived to survive the ****ney from England to India and still be drinkable. The reason that, say, Guinness tastes so much better in the UK or Ireland than here is that the stuff they make for export is designed to taste "acceptable" after it has degraded in transit.
The typical American beer tastes the way it does so it can survive being treated poorly and sitting on the shelf for a long time. Beer and bread are closely related (same main ingredients, similar preparation (mix, ferment, heat)). Bud, PBR. et al. is to a fresh, quality locally made beer as Wonderbread is to a fresh loaf from your local bakery. Many folks will swear that its just not a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the Skippy and the Wonderbread, just like sometimes nothing hits the spot like a Rolling Rock. For me, I'll take something "pretentious" nineteen times out of twenty.
Anyway, here endith the lesson. Set your flamethrowers on maximum
I don't have a problem with the "big guys," anyway. Brewing is very scalable--the size of the tank doesn't really matter as much as what goes into it. Generally, the Macro-Micros source and select the ingredients and, of course, it's their recipe.
The *real* difference with a solely small-batch operation (a "real" microbrewery, if you will) is that you can get the stuff fresh and, in my experience, most of these small brewers have the sense to keep it refrigerated on their premises, further keeping it from degrading. And the same is true of the beer that comes from the small batch part of a hybrid operation. Brooklyn beer at their brewpub is orders of magnitude better than the stuff that you get at your local Korean deli.
All else being equal, the fresher the beer, the better. I don't understand why people prefer European beer--the shit has been unrefrigerated for months between the brewery and the store. The sole exception are IPA's, which were conceived to survive the ****ney from England to India and still be drinkable. The reason that, say, Guinness tastes so much better in the UK or Ireland than here is that the stuff they make for export is designed to taste "acceptable" after it has degraded in transit.
The typical American beer tastes the way it does so it can survive being treated poorly and sitting on the shelf for a long time. Beer and bread are closely related (same main ingredients, similar preparation (mix, ferment, heat)). Bud, PBR. et al. is to a fresh, quality locally made beer as Wonderbread is to a fresh loaf from your local bakery. Many folks will swear that its just not a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the Skippy and the Wonderbread, just like sometimes nothing hits the spot like a Rolling Rock. For me, I'll take something "pretentious" nineteen times out of twenty.
Anyway, here endith the lesson. Set your flamethrowers on maximum