GABF versus GBBF

*TICK*

That’s my pencil scratching off a beer-thing that I’ve wanted to do for years: the Great American Beer Festival.

Held in Denver, Colorado, every year, it’s an outrageously big celebration of American brewing. In 2012 the festival numbers were record-breaking: 578breweries pouring 2,700 beers to 49,000 attendees. I was there judging the competition which was also record-breaking: 4,338 beers submitted by 666 breweries and tasted by 185 judges across 84 style categories.

But what’s GABF like compared to GBBF?

GABF runs four four-hour-ish sessions. GBBF runs for five days, 12-10pm.

GABF tickets are $65 a session (there’s a members only session at $55) while GBBF are £10; GABF’s cost includes all the beer you’ll drink whereas you pay for each beer at GBBF.

Measures at GBBF are one-third-pint, half-pint and pint. GABF is a 1oz pour. This is an interesting one as I thought that a 1oz pour would suck, but it doesn’t. Sure, there’s no time to sit back and relax by sipping on a half, but it gives the opportunity to taste a lot of beer and 1oz isn’t really that small when you’re there and doing it. Plus, if you like the beer you can just order another one and another until satisfied. And if you don’t like it then there’s only a mouthful to drink or dump – at GBBF I’ve had many beers which I’ve bought and then dumped because they aren’t what I wanted.

It’s worth lingering on this point because it’s important. I liked being able to taste 50, 70, 100 beers, or whatever it was, in four hours. And it is about tasting, not drinking (though it’s very possible to get very drunk if you go hard). With so many beers being poured, most of which I’d never had or even heard of, I wanted to drink as many as possible, jumping from IPA to pilsner to saison to stout to sour beer to whatever was on the next table. But there is a downside to this: the whole thing feels frantic as if there’s a rush to get the next beer and the next – there’s a casual, sit-down-and-enjoy-it feel to GBBF while GABF feels like a race.

I like the layout of GABF: it’s broken down geographically but then each brewery has their own space, compared to the large regional bars at GBBF (which require cartography lessons to navigate). Brewers can pour their own beers at GABF, which is great, though Andy Crouch would like to see more brewers there and I’d agree. This also means that breweries can put things out on their bars – beer info, POS stuff, whatever. I think brewers pouring their own beer at GBBF would be a great thing, as would more information about the beers we’re drinking, though this would involve a complete change in how things are done (similar to what was achieved at the awesome Independent Manchester Beer Convention).

This layout also creates a situation where drinkers line-up for specific breweries. Over the four sessions, a handful of breweries consistently had lines of people waiting to try their beer – Dogfish Head, Cigar City, Russian River, Crooked Stave. I have never seen a line at GBBF waiting to try the beer from one brewery, instead it becomes a big bundle at the bar as drinkers gun for the Champion Beer of Britain or some geek treat on the foreign bar. The queuing was actually a good thing, I reckon – there’s a buzz that comes with that.

The size of GABF kept on surprising me: it’s huge (just look at the map). Overwhelmingly big, in fact. But at the same time that’s good – it shows the sheer, exciting scale of American craft beer.

Olympia is a nicer place to drink than the Denver Convention Centre.

The beers: 2,700 beers at GABF and around 500 beers at GBBF. When I go to GBBF I spend most of my time at the foreign beer bar. Imagine that multiplied by about 300 and that’s what GABF was like for me. It’s not fair to compare the volume (500 is, after all, more than I could manage over five days anyway), but the range is more relevant to compare: there was simply more variety at GABF – you name it and it was there.

Like at GBBF, at GABF some breweries can choose to take up bigger bars. This gives them more presence, means they can pour more beer and can put more personality into it. At GBBF we get regional breweries and sometimes they excite and surprise with what they pour – this year at GBBF Twaites had a couple of crackers, Fuller’s had the superlative Fuller’s Reserve, Greene King poured 5X. At GABF it was bigger breweries who took these corner plots but still ones which most drinkers want to get to: Odell, Oskar Blues, Dogfish Head, New Belgium, Bear Republic, Anchor, Sierra Nevada...

Food at GBBF is normal stomach-fillers like pies, pasties and burgers, plus the wonderful pork scratchings. I expected good food at GABF but I didn’t see it: pizza was pretty much all you got.

Pretzel necklaces. These are a curiosity. For three days I saw people walking around with a necklace of pretzels hanging on their chest. I’d seen photos of these before and assumed there’d be a stall inside selling them. There isn’t. This surely means that all those thousands of pretzel chains were homemade. How the hell did that craze start?!

Photo from here

The dropped-glass cheer. I figured this was a unique British element of GBBF: the chime of broken glass which sends a wave of cheers through the huge hall. This is not unique to GBBF and it also happens at GABF. Both are funny in their own ways: at GBBF a glass costs £3 so the butter-fingered drinker has to go and buy another one at the expense of three more pounds and the laughter of their mates; at GABF three of the four sessions use plastic glasses which, when dropped, bump around like a rugby ball and bounce in all sorts of different directions as their owner scrambles to catch it while everyone around them cheers. 

Award-winning beers. At GBBF there’s always a hush as the Champion Beer of Britain is announced, this is often followed by some ‘what the fucks’ which is then followed by people casually, but at great speed, heading to find that beer and drink it. After the awards are announced at GABF (which this year happened on Saturday morning before the final two sessions), lines increase to try and find medal-winning beers while brewers walk around with medals hanging proudly from their necks. One interesting distinction is that it feels like the medal winners at GABF are celebrated whereas GBBF winners are denigrated (unless you know the brewery and love the beer). I definitely think there’s a lot of work needed on the competition side of things in Britain with more transparency and information about how these things are decided, perhaps creating a bigger GABF-style competition.

Atmospheres at both are similar. Huge halls of drinkers create their own backing track of humming conversation. At GABF there’s also karaoke and a silent disco sponsored by Oskar Blues – can you imagine if GBBF had a silent disco? I’d love to see that!

There was a much younger demographic at GABF.

And then there’s one final thing: the stuff which happens outside of the festival. Things start on the Monday of GABF and lead around until the Saturday it finishes. Every day there are breakfasts, lunches, evening events and after-parties; there’s beer launches and rare beer tastings; paired beer dinners; you name it, it happens. Plus, all of the many bars and breweries in town are open and packed with drinkers. What’s impressive is that the 49,000 attendees pump $7 million dollars into Denver over the duration of GABF and that’s outside of seven-figure ticket sales. At GBBF there’s so much focus on the festival itself that nothing happens outside of it. Perhaps it’s the fact that drinkers at GBBF can stay all day, I don’t know, but it’d be brilliant if London could embrace the festival and turn it into a city-wide event that can bring in visitors for an extended stay.

I love both festivals and if you love beer and haven’t been to GABF then you must try and go sometime; if you haven’t been to GBBF then you should go to that.

Tastes change and the big breweries follow

When Germans and German-Americans first started brewing in North America in the mid-19th century, they used recipes from their homeland. These would’ve been amber-coloured, flavoursome liquid-bread, matured for months in pitch-lined barrels in cool cellars. They were lagers, opaque, but thanks to the lagering time which allowed the yeast to drop they were brighter and lighter than the muddy, dark, prone-to-sour English-style ales which had been brewed since colonial days.

In Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and especially Milwaukee, lager breweries were started by German émigrés. To begin, their beers were mostly drunk by other Germans in their local areas. These German drinkers, foaming mug of lager in hand, also brought with them their drinking culture of leisurely mugs in beer halls with music, dancing, family and food. This was a stark contrast to the spit, sawdust and smoke of American taverns, where speed and greed were valued over pleasure. Americans were drinking spirits in the dark while the Germans were drinking lager in bright beer halls.

Men with the surnames Anheuser, Busch, Best (to be passed on to Pabst) and Uehlein (Schlitz) had started their breweries. And they grew quickly, re-writing what brewing was in America and creating their own fortunes with ingenuity, determination and ambition. These were the guys who first used refrigeration for beer, who first pasteurised their beer, who built enormous automated bottling lines (in the 1890s, Pabst’s bottling line employed over 900 people and could fill 75,000 bottles an hour per spindle of their line; they had 96 spindles), developed transport networks around America in order to sell more beer and grew local, then national, then international companies.  

As the numbers of German-Americans grew, so their beer spread further and Americans started drinking it. But the American taste for beer was different to that of Europeans: they didn’t want the ‘heavy’ Bavarian beers, they wanted something lighter – it was the German historical nourishment of liquid bread versus the American need for drunken speed. So beers evolved or new brands were released to satisfy the market demand.

In the 1870s, brewers looked back to Europe and saw the bright beers of Bohemia – pale gold, light-bodied, clear and sparkling. This was the style of beer which Americans would like, the sort of beer they could drink lots of. But it proved difficult to brew. Europeans used two-row barley but Americans used six-row barley; six-row is rich in protein and some of that remained in the finished beer, forming a haze or unsightly clumps, as well as reducing shelf-life (this is still pre-pasteurisation). Darker Bavarian lagers could hide this haze but pale Pilsners couldn’t. And this new beer style arrived at the same time as glass became the drinking container of choice: suddenly beer had to look good.

This is where adjuncts come in. Brewers needed something with starch and useful sugars to reduce the amount of barley. Corn worked; it absorbed excess protein in the barley and stretched the six-row further (meaning less needed to be used for beer-quality reasons rather than financial ones), but it also added an unpleasant flavour as it contained oil. A better adjunct was rice. This new light, clear lager was now a beer unique to America, used in order to produce a better, brighter beer, not a cheaper one. And this modern beer was exactly to American tastes where quality quickly became associated with pale and sparkling.

Throughout this period, the successful breweries – Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, Schlitz – were focused on quality, consistency and reaching new drinkers, and they brewed, by all accounts, some of the best beers in the world, reaching a notable high in the battle at the World Expo of 1893 which awarded Pabst the medal for which it still wears a blue ribbon today – Budweiser took second place, beating lagers and ales from around the world, including the German beers which inspired the new style of American lager. 

Then came Prohibition. More than a decade dry, America had turned to soda and 13-year habits are hard to kick. Those dry years saw big advancements in life: people now spent time at home where they could listen to the radio or spend time with their family, and if they drank then they did so at home (packaged beer was 10% of the market in 1919; by 1940 it was split 50-50; by 1960 it was 80% packaged), or they’d go to the movies, where they’d watch svelte Hollywood starlets sipping cocktails (post-Prohibition, obviously), a sight far removed from the bouncy Bavarian beer wenches.

Then came recession, the Great Depression, World War II and ingredient rationing. Some brewers changed and cheapened recipes to keep away from bank managers or to keep up with demand; others, including some of the big guys, for whom premium quality was essential, refused to compromise on ingredients and so brewed less. When recession and rationed ended, some breweries just carried on using the adjuncts, liking the savings they made on cheaper ingredients.

Times changed again. The knock-on from Prohibition to war to general technological, commercial and industrial advancement saw a very different America in the 1950s to how it’d been 40 years earlier. The ‘drinking demographic’ of 20-40 year olds was low in the 1950s and spirit sales went up while beer sales went down. Dieting and bad health became part of the public conscience and beer was unable to rid the wench’s fat-fingered grip. The rationed diet of the last two decades also saw a blanket blandness and a palate that wanted sweetness combined with a new desire for convenience, so mass-market beers sat beside sliced white bread and packets of processed cheese.

As had happened in the 1870s, when the amber beers of Bavaria became the pale beers of Bohemia, so in the 1950s Americans wanted less-demanding drinks and beer changed to suit to the tastes of the nation.

Enter lighter beers, drier beers, weaker beers and, in the 1970s, Lite beers. These brewhouse changes happened with a backdrop of mergers, takeovers, buyouts and breweries going bust, as the big boys looked to spread across America while the small breweries just tried to keep going. Survival was made harder as consumers started looking for cheaper beers over premium ones – the big brewers adapted and had the mountainous volumes to push prices lower and lower, forcing the small breweries to fight over dimes, not dollars. Brewing corporations brutally ruled the market.

Then things changed again. The liberal, world-conscious and curious attitude of the 1960s and 70s saw people travelling more and experiencing other cultures, which saw import beers rise in popularity. Then came homebrewing (though still illegal until 1979), an extension of a growing knowledge of food and ingredients, and a way away from the corporations and towards small producers. Changes were happening while the big brewers were still perpetually searching for new markets, still spending millions on advertising and still changing their recipes by reducing rather than adding flavour.

The change started with Anchor, New Albion, Sierra Nevada, Redhook, Boulder Brewing, Mendocino Brewing and others. Then come more and more. Followed by an on-going burst in America since the 1990s. In 1880s, there were over 4,000 breweries in America, which dropped to around 1,500 before Prohibition, of which less than 200 survived to the repeal of the amendment. In the mid-1980s there was only around 80 breweries owned by 60-odd brewing companies. There are now around 2,000 craft breweries in America with over 900 in planning (in the UK, in 1910 there was over 4,500 breweries, dropping to just 191 in 1980; now there are over 1,000). The small guy now had a say.

‘We are the 5%’ has become a proud bumper-sticker-slogan for the craft beer minority of America. Brewing is booming, even if the big companies, which are now really big companies thanks to mergers and takeovers, still hold the huge majority of market share; the monolithic giants are being pushed around by a growing army of little guys.

In the 1870s and again in the 1950s, German-American breweries changed their recipes to suit what the drinkers wanted. Now look at the last 15 years. The main brands rarely change but big brewers are always searching to be at the forefront of things, to position themselves to slot into different markets with different products: Blue Moon, Budweiser American Ale or the Brewmaster’s Private Reserve, Shock Top, Green Valley Brewing or see the list of AB-InBev brands, especially the Michelob brews which includes a lager funked up with brettanomyces and a Rye Pale Ale. The big brewers are now having to seek inspiration from the craft breweries, from the guys who are closer to the drinkers, more able to see how tastes are developing and shape where things go.

But this isn’t about the big brewers any more. While it’s interesting to see what they do, they are being reactive instead of proactive. The forefront of the industry is now taking place in small mash tuns around the world by brewers who are creative and passionate and dedicated to making great-tasting beers with personality and character and flavour.

The current trend is towards big flavour in beer. It’s the antithesis of the light/lite lagers which dominate bar tops and home fridges. These beers show you how different beer can be, how varied, how exciting. Not long ago, the beers of Belgium would’ve converted new drinkers but now it’s more likely they’ll have a double IPA than an abbey dubbel, and we have American brewers to thank for that, but we can also look at New Zealand, Sweden, Italy and the UK as countries who are taking beer further, doing new things, giving drinkers more and better choices.

And choice is what’s great about beer right now. It’s hard to introspect what’s happening in terms of changing tastes but we can anecdotally see that more hops are being added to beers, different hop varieties are being used, strong beers are no longer fearsome, breweries are experimenting with different styles, ingredients and yeasts, sour beers are a big thing in America, barrel-aging isn’t slowing down, old recipes are being recreated and new ones are changing what we thought we knew about beer.

Before travel networks were laid across America all beer was local. This allowed for those 4,000 breweries to operate in the 1880s as each had their own market. With roads, trains, ships and planes, plus pasteurisation, bottling, canning and refrigeration, breweries were able to ship beer further and look nationally instead of just nearby. Now provenance is back. There’s an interest in where things are from and there’s a parochial pride in supporting local businesses and community. And that’s making room for more new breweries to start filling their fermenters all over the world.   

Tastes change. The big brewers have always had to react to the tastes of their drinkers: opaque, heavy amber lager became pale and sparkling pilsners which then became lighter, drier lagers. Now flavour is back and drinkers are more knowledgeable and curious than ever. The full-on aroma of American hops is an exciting change to the tastebuds, a rich stout is deeply satisfying, a sharp sour is refreshing and complex and lagers have their flavour back. 

Tastes change and who knows what’s next. Who knows how the big brewers will react to it – maybe it’ll be buying more craft breweries, maybe building new breweries of their own and backing it up with advertising spend, maybe we’ll see them recreate their pre-Prohibition lagers. Who cares how they’ll react; there are a handful of them and thousands of us now. As knowledge grows, as people experience different beers, as the thousands become tens-of-thousands and the mash tuns go from 5 barrels to 50, so tastes will change and drinkers will want different things. The past is fascinating; the present is exciting; the future is going to taste even better.  

Sources

A lot of the history stuff comes from reading Maureen Ogle’s excellent Ambitious Brew. If you haven’t read it then you must. The whole story of American beer is deeply fascinating and was the inspiration for writing this.

Ken Wells’s Travels With Barley also helped form my knowledge of American beer.

Randy Mosher filled in some gaps on the history of American beer in Tasting Beer.

The Oxford Companion to Beer is always a great resource to dip into.

Stats and figures come from The 2011-2012 Cask Report, the British Beer and Pub Association’s Statistical Handbook 2011 and via pages linked above.

Images from here, here, here, here, here and here.

Katz’s Deli, Burgers, Pizza and Fried Chicken: New York Feasting

New York wasn’t just about getting drunk and watching baseball. We were also there to eat as much as possible.

Burgers were the early focus and Shake Shack, 5Napkin and Burger Joint were the top three targets.

Shake Shack at Citi Field

Shake Shack came at the baseball, a soft and cakey bun and a succulent slab of meat. The experience of having it with a great beer in a ballpark made it even better.

5Napkin: Great burger, crap photo

5Napkin came at the end of a long drinking day as we hustled to order before they shut. The fattest hunk of beef, a round and glazed bun, basket of fries and a bottle of Racer 5 (Matt had Racer 5 anyway; I made the mistake of not ordering it). I almost fell asleep on the pillowy bun, the lull of a lupulin haze and the hit of jet lag taking their toll, but it was still brilliant.

Burger Joint

Then there’s Burger Joint. What a place. It’s one of those used-to-be-secret hangouts, hidden inside the plush hotel lobby of Le Parker Meridien (you can tell how fancy it is by the use of ‘Le’ instead of ‘The’). We swish through the revolving doors to see nothing but a reception desk and a sweeping red curtain, but look a little closer and there’s a small, dark alley between the desk and curtain and inside that alley is a sign: an illuminated burger and an arrow. That’s all you get.

Inside it’s small, busy and warm, with walls lined with photos. The servers are squeezed into a small space, running as fast as they can when you can only jump forward or back two steps. Ordering is easy: do you want cheese or not; how do you want it cooked; do you want onions, gherkins and sauce (go Fully Loaded); do you want fries, soft drink or a beer.

Burger Joint burger with Sam Adams

The burger is excellent – no frills bun, oozing cheese, a stack of tomato and onions struggling to stay in place, and a great piece of meat. The Sam Adams Lager we have with it is the best we’ve ever tasted it.

Burgered out, we moved on to pizza. Just down the street from Mugs Ale House in Brooklyn is a by-the-slice place cutting floppy, hot triangles from huge rounds of pizza. It was so good I had to order another. The top of our pizza hit-list was Artichoke Pizza but when we were researching it the website didn’t work so we gave up hope and forgot about it, only reminded of its existence when we walked past one on the way to Chelsea Piers. Still stuffering from a massive lunch we shared a slice but probably could’ve forced ourselves to eat a whole pizza it was so good – we went for the eponymous choice, a creamy white-sauce base topped with artichoke and cheese. It was amazing (and the first ‘white’ pizza I’ve had – I’ll definitely be having more).

Matt wanted chicken and waffles (no idea why – the idea of fried chicken served with waffles and maple syrup is beyond me but I think he wanted some culture or something) so we headed to Amy Ruth’s in Harlem for some soul food. I ordered Nandos-style: chicken wings, fries, coleslaw. It was the best chicken and coleslaw I’ve ever had. Like normal fried chicken and coleslaw but about 100-times better - highly recommended.

And then there’s Katz’s Deli. An NYC food attraction in its own right, complete with a queue to get in, door men and tickets. Most famous for selling ridiculously big sandwiches, it was also where the ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ scene from ‘When Harry Met Sally’ was filmed.

Walking in you are given a ticket as you hit a humming wall of noise and excitement. This place is like no other deli. It’s huge, it’s completely packed with people eating and there’s a five-deep queue to get served at each of the six serving points where enormous men wearing blood- and meat-juice-stained aprons wield giant knives and slice massive hunks of meat before organising (stacking – the meat comes about two inches thick) them on top of impossibly thin (comparatively speaking, anyway) pieces of bread.

The hunger builds as you see the people in front of you turn excitedly with their skyscraper sandwiches as they look to seat and eat. And this place is all about the sandwiches. They also serve a few Jewish classics, and then sodas, fries and sides from a second serving area a little beyond the unending line of sandwich making, but it’s mostly about the meat and bread.

We order a pastrami on rye and a Reuben and it’s made fresh in front of you with the maker taking boulders of beef and slicing a few pieces off for you to try while they work. The meat is just about the best we’ve ever tasted – impossibly tender and full of flavour. When the sandwich is ready it’s passed over with a pile of pickles on the side and we turn excitedly and begin the hunt for somewhere to sit.

It’s really busy so spare seats are a premium, even if this place can fit around 300 people in, and you have to fight through a queue of people just to get into the dining ‘space’ (space isn’t the right word as there is none of it...). We find a spot, sit and prepare ourselves for the meat mountain. The Reuben is corned beef (not like the stuff in tins), Russian dressing and cheese, somehow held together by the bread which is really just a form of transport for the meat. The pastrami is thin slivers of fragrant pink meat served with lots of mustard and piled between rye bread.

Brace yourself for meat sweats...

The sandwiches are insane. They are so big, so juicy, so meaty and so good. It’s hard to not be impressed just by the volume of food you are getting, but it tastes great too. The pickles on the side provide a bolt of sharpness to cut the richness while the fries (we couldn’t not order them once we’d seen how good they looked!) are chipped perfection.

Katz’ Deli is the Globe of sandwich-making; food theatre from beginning to end, with excitement (look at that sandwich!), fear (how am I going to eat this sandwich?!), suspense (can I finish this sandwich?!), a chase for seats, the gut-wrenching choice of what to order, the sounds and sights of the people in the dining audience. It’s an amazing experience.

We ate and drank far too much in New York and it was brilliant.

Brooklyn Beer Bars

Brooklyn is a very cool place to drink beer, eat and hang out. Manhattan is big and busy and tall; Brooklyn is its relaxed, quieter neighbour; chilled out, interesting, charming, cool.

Both of our ventures across East River from Manhattan were to meet up with Lee from Hoptopia and Stevie from all sorts of beer things. Our first trip was Mugs Ale House, Barcade, Fette Sau and Spuyten Duyvil. The second trip was Brooklyn Brewery, Mugs Ale House and Barcade. This post squashes everything together into one round-up.

Mugs Ale House is an open two-room corner boozer with drinking in the front and dining in the back. The bar is lined with colourful beer taps and the ever-present chalkboard listing all the day’s choices.

It’s here that we had the best beer of the trip (and possibly the best, most perfect beer I’ve ever drunk) – Ithaca’s Flower Power. A juicy tropical fruit punch, a mix of mandarins (from the tin), peaches, mango; a smooth and gluggable beer with a bitterness that teases but never terrorises. We returned later in the week and drank more of it. And I’d fly straight back to New York in a heartbeat to get another pint of it.

We also had pints of Captain Lawrence Pale Ale, Bear Republic’s Apex 7, an experimental IPA series which allows the brewers to play around with hop combinations, and Smuttynose IPA, so it was all about the hops.

Jumping on the subway we went to Barcade. It mixes great craft beer with 80s arcade machines in a wide open space with a few pub benches in the corner. It’s a real hipster hangout with people clutching a pint in one hand and a pile of quarters in the other while tattoos wrap up their forearms. If ever there was a bar I wanted to franchise and open in London, this is it...

The beers were really good, too. Victory Prima Pils was excellent, although I didn’t like the Schwarz Pils so much – it was also more like a hoppy brown ale to me and I didn’t want a hoppy brown ale otherwise I would’ve ordered one. Sixpoint’s Bengali Tiger, a local beer, was the spiciest IPA I’ve ever drunk, with some tea flavours, herbs and spices and lots of tannic, oily hops. Founder’s Centennial IPA was exactly what I wanted: a fresh kiss of Centennial hops and a hug of booze. Sixpoint’s Diesel stout was the winner though: intense, oily, rich, roasty and bitter. A super stout.

We finished our first visit (we went twice we liked it so much) by stepping things up and ordering Hudson 4-Grain Bourbon and some of Rogue’s whiskey (because Barcade also has a good spirit list, including those made by breweries – although not Dogfish Head’s, which I was looking for). The bourbon was rich and smooth but hot as hell and the whiskey was delicate and fruity. We washed these down with a magnificent monster imperial stout, as one does when he’s drinking terribly irresponsibly – Black Xantus.

Wobbly legged and in need of a late meal, we stumbled around the corner to Fette Sau just as they finished serving dinner… which, luckily for us, coincides with when they start serving their evening menu. Five minutes later we were sipping beer and stuffing our faces with pork and burnt end beans (the beans were so incredibly delicious!).

Fette Sau is pretty much my dream place: a BBQ joint which sells great beer and bourbon. Set back from the street, its bare-brick walls are warm and filled with the aromas of cooking meat, while a few benches are lined with diners. The beers are poured from the best tap handles I’ve seen – butcher’s knives and utensils. We had an Arcadia Sky High Rye and a Sixpoint Vienna Pale, but all I remember is how good the beans were, how awesome the bourbon bottles looked, how cool the cleaver tap handles were and how much the Vienna Pale tasted like biscuits. My memory turns to a meat-filled, booze-fuelled fug around about here...

More bourbon next. Not knowing what the hell we were ordering we gave the barman a mission: up to $10 each, we want two very different bourbons to try. We got Eagle Rare 10 year old bourbon and Elmer Tree Single Barrel. One was rich and sweet, the other was light and floral; both were fantastic. I think we could’ve hung out in Fette Sau all day and night without getting bored.

Stumbling and bumbling more than we were an hour before, we crossed the street to Spuyten Duyvil. All I remember is being too drunk to know what was going on and that the beer I ordered wasn’t all that. I did, however, have the journalistic foresight to write down what were ordered. Apparently we had Two Brothers IPA and Smuttynose Single Star. I don’t think I did the place justice on my visit…

Then, thinking we knew where we were, over-confident from over-consuming, we decided to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and get a night sight of Manhattan. About 45 minutes later, and still drunk, we were halfway over Williamsburg Bridge, which has no good views of the city and is just noisy and nasty. We then had to find a subway and schlep our way home. I don’t remember what time we got in but we climbed up the stairwell and out the fire exit of our hotel to see what the view was like from the roof. It was pretty damn awesome (I remember that part!).

And then there’s Brooklyn Brewery (visited on day two, not at 4am). The open-to-public part is an expansive beer-filled warehouse, lively with a cool mix of drinkers in their twenties and thirties. All the beers were on tap, served in half-pint pours, plus some bottles of the Locals in the fridge: the Weiss was excellent, all creamy and bananary with just a little clove, and the EIPA was delicious, the only thing I didn’t drink... Lager. And I don’t know why I overlooked it. Silly me. They put on a tour which is fun and simple, just a discussion of the history and the present expansions, which is really interesting and free.

Brooklyn is an amazing place to drink and eat. Barcade is very cool, Mugs Ale House has a wide choice of beers and the best beer we drank in the week. Fette Sau is unmissable if you like meat. Brooklyn Brewery is must-see for the beer geek. There’s also a really nice feel about Brooklyn as you walk around. We only wished we could’ve seen more of it because there’s so much we didn’t see.

Manhattan Beer Bars

Rattle N Hum is easy to find as long as you can get to the Empire State Building, which can be a little like finding the end of a rainbow given how frequently it appears on the skyline from wherever you are in New York City... Once you get to the Empire State you’re only a block away.

Long and narrow as you pass the bar, it opens out into tables and benches at the back, with TV screens showing sport and bright beer signs hanging all around like trophies of conquered victims – it’s busy, lively, colourful and there’s a great atmosphere. The beer list is chalked onto a large blackboard with a selection of 40 to choose from, almost entirely American.

Our first visit was fresh off the plane, complete with luggage and that dizzy haze of what-time-is-it jetlag, so that chalkboard had our heads spinning. Freaking out with excitement at the number of beers on offer we each start with a flight of four 4oz pours before moving onto a couple of pints. Troegs Dreamweaver Wheat, Pretty Thing’s Jack D’Or Saison and Coney Island’s Mermaid Pils were all good. Stone’s Ruination IPA smelt amazing and was super fruity, then the kickass bitterness pummelled in; they call it Ruination for a reason. Founder’s Double Trouble was the standout choice, with oranges, peaches, apricots and tropical fruit before a lingering bitterness.

Later in the week we timed our visit perfectly to get a great seat right by the TV showing baseball. A Cigar City Maduro Brown and an Oskar Blues Dale’s Pale Ale were both good and then another flight between us to try a few different brews. An OK Dogfish Head 60 Minute, an excellent black IPA from Barrier called Oil City, Pretty Things Once Upon a Time Porter, which Ron Pattinson helped out on, was dry, roasty and smoky with lots of hops, but they were all overshadowed by Avery’s Maharajah IPA which was so good Matt and I both ordered a pint of it (at 10.5%) and enjoyed every last gulp – amazingly good.

The Ginger Man is a short walk from Rattle N Hum and it’d be silly not to visit one without the other. An English-style pub inside with dark wood all around, complete with tables scratched with the names of past drinkers adding a hidden texture and story, there’s a long bar lined with bar stools and a lounge area out the back.

The beer choice is excellent in range and quality. Crossroads Outrage IPA was that desired smack of citrus we’d flown 3000 miles to get while Lake Placid IPA was the weirdest IPA I’ve ever tasted, being more like a beer made with berry syrup added... Odd but strangely good. Later in the week Anderson Valley Oatmeal Stout was super and Matt said Oskar Blues Gubna IIPA was one of his top beers.

Pony Bar is a fun place to drink. It’s a few blocks over from Times Square and you pass the excellent 5Napkin Burger and Shake Shack if you get hungry on the way. ‘All American Craft Beer’ is the banner you walk beneath to get in and they list the beers on two large blackboards. Wooden floors inside, old barrels as tables, benches and bar stools – it’s like an old Western tavern uprooted and brought forward to NYC 2011.

It’s busy when we get there, standing room only, and we squeeze to the bar to order. Ithaca Cascazilla was a big, red, hop monster and Ballast Point Sculpin IPA was all juicy tropical fruits and delicious with a bitterness to keep it interesting. Another Ithaca beer was the worst of the week – Apricot Wheat. Why the hell did I order an apricot wheat beer?! Probably because it was the only thing under 5% but I should’ve known better; it tasted like yogurt. Captain Lawrence’s Captain’s Reserve DIPA restored the balance back towards awesome. Matt had Sixpoint Sweet Triple Action and Left Hand Warrior which were both really good. All beers are $5, which is great value.

We left a little lightheaded and decided to walk to Blind Tiger, figuring it wouldn’t be that far... it was pretty far. Hugging the bright lights of Broadway, we crossed through the city seeing a few sights on the way, gawping at the Empire State Building by night, marvelling at the Flatiron and stopping to ride the wooden escalators in Macy’s (in desperate search of a toilet pit stop).

Blind Tiger is in a cool area of town and there’s a village feel to the place. It’s packed when we arrive, lit by candlelight and a few uplights at the bar. It’s a saison showcase the day we go, with almost half the beers being of that style. The Bruery’s Seven Grain Saison was spectacular; stunning to look at as a hazy lemon colour with a thick foam, it was dry and clean and a little spicy; perfect after that long walk. Lagunitas Pils was equally good to refresh.

We liked Blind Tiger a lot. There’s a cool atmosphere to it with groups of friends chatting animatedly or people on dates chatting intimately; it’s the sort of bar where everything works together. And the beer list is fantastic. Stillwater’s Cellar Door, Southern Tier IPA and Blue Point Rastafa Rye were all good.

And then there’s Heartland Brewery, which have a few places around Manhattan. Walking through Times Square in the rain, one light shone brighter than any others: Brewery. We took shelter from the constant shower (which thankfully stopped when we left the bar) and ordered a flight of the beers. All of them were weird and none made us want to order a pint. It’s worth stopping in and trying the beers, especially in a flight to get through them all, but I was expecting better things.

That’s our beer drinking in Manhattan. The main four bars are all great places to hang out, to drink and to try lots of really good beer.

Here's a map of all the bars, which I'll update with other places as I blog abuot them. These are just the places we drank at on Manhattan and I'm sure there are other great places. We also spent lots of time in Brooklyn; that post is coming soon. I’ve put some photos from the trip on the Pencil&Spoon Facebook page.

FABPOW! Jambalaya

I video blogged! Below is the written version which doesn’t show me doing the eating and drinking and is hopefully more coherent.

Jambalaya: a jumble of French, Spanish and Creole in the southern states of America; a jumble of meat, vegetables and fish; a jumble of rich and spicy, smoky, meaty and savoury with bursts of sweet prawns or tomatoes. It’s a paella or pilau which has been uprooted and fallen down near the Gulf of Mexico.

I used Jamie Oliver’s recipe and it was great. If recipe reading is too strenuous then do this, with some stirring in between: chicken, smoked sausage; onion, pepper, celery; garlic, chilli (I used scotch bonnet), bay leaves, thyme; stock; rice; prawns. 

It’s a great dish for a beer, with tastes and textures calling out for the cooling cut of carbonation, and so with it I wanted to try a few different ones, to try and see what worked best and why. I like dark beers with spicy food as the chocolatey, roasty depth acts like a Scoville sponge, rounding out flavours, while there’s a smoky/savoury bridge in them which can bring flavours together. Many people like pale ales with spices, something I’m more wary of because hops and chilli tend to fight rather than play and like two naughty kids when you put them together they get naughtier and noisier rather than quieter and calmer. I also couldn’t resist trying it with a lager. If someone in a Southern US state was going to have a beer with their dinner then chances are they’d have something like Bud. Jaipur was there because I was drinking it while cooking dinner.

Smuttynose Robust Porter. Chocolate, smoke, a savoury depth and a long-lasting roasty finish which develops as it warms. With the dinner it worked really well to begin, being a cooling sensation against the fiery scotch bonnets, but when the long finish came out from its six degree slumber it rubbed against the spice and intensified it - imagine a cup of coffee when all you really want is a glass of lemonade.

Caldera Pale Ale. What a nice beer. A noseful of Cascades, smooth and crisp without the bitter hit I was expecting but enough to make you go straight back for more, making it very drinkable. The underlying sweetness in it made it work really well with the richly savoury dish, slicing through the chorizo smokiness, but the hops at the end, rather than rounding it off, add a little jagged edge. Still a nice match up though and something I’d have again.

Thornbridge Jaipur. A glass of Centennials, fruity, floral, a spectrum of oranges and a long-lasting bitterness. It’s the first bottle of Jaipur I’ve had in ages and I enjoyed it. However, it didn’t like the jambalaya. The bitterness in there became harsh with the spices, earthy and tangy.

Budweiser. I’ve got no problems drinking Budweiser and as a beer it fascinates me, particularly its history. It’s very pale, doesn’t bellow out a huge aroma (most people drink it straight from the bottle so forget late hops), but has that classic bite of apple. It’s clean and crisp, cold from the fridge it’s uncomplicated and easy to drink: it is what it is. With jambalaya... it was perfect. I wanted it to just be ok, but it was spot on. With the spice a little lemon character came through which cut through everything, an unexpected burst of sweetness was enough to fight off the saltiness and it cooled everything down and balanced it out, making it the beer I wanted to drink more of.

The jambalaya was delicious. It’s also a dish which throws out different challenges to finding a good beer to go with it – chilli heat, smoke, delicate prawns, rich rice, a heavy and sticky texture, tomato. I tried all the beers over and over (until at the end of dinner I couldn’t move for an hour) and Bud was the one I kept going back to: it just worked. It was uncomplicated and improved the flavours in both the food and the beer. Next time I should try it with Dixie, a New Orleans lager for that local flavour. Until then, Budweiser gets FABPOW’d.