Every time I stepped into Against the Grain, I was surprised all over again by just how tiny it was. My walk-up studio on the Upper East Side felt downright palatial compared to this shoebox on Sixth Street between Avenues B and C, in the cool-vegan-restaurant-and-punk-bar-studded Alphabet City. I had been warned never to venture to this part of Downtown when I started exploring the city on my own; maybe that’s why it was one of the first places I went upon moving to New York.
Against the Grain was the annex of a bigger wine bar called Grape & Grain. The roomy, warmly lit Grape & Grain felt luxurious by comparison, and I began to see Against the Grain as a tangible expression of how craft beer was viewed—within the New York City bar-and-restaurant industry, but also more widely—next to wine. The wine bar was spacious and well-appointed, the beer bar a tiny cave next door.
It was 2009, and beer still felt like an underdog, something you had to be in-the-know to love and appreciate. At those neighboring bars, a binary soon presented itself: I realized we could keep going to Grape & Grain, indulgently stretching out at tables, or we could pack into cramped spaces and dedicate ourselves to drinking new craft releases and revered imports while getting to know the fellow beer misfits sitting next to us. The choice was obvious.
While we were perched at the bar in the quiet of near-closing one night, Against the Grain’s bartender recommended something from Dogfish Head Brewery, with which I was then only vaguely familiar. As we enjoyed whatever it was, we chatted more; as we paid our tab, he mentioned that a Midtown bar called Rattle N Hum was going to have a Dogfish Head tap takeover that week. In about 20 minutes, I had gained so much: a new brewery to explore, a new beer bar to try, a new event to attend (a “tap takeover?”), and the pleasure of chatting with and learning from another beer geek. That conversation threw open the doors of New York City’s beer scene, leading me down a path I’d still be on 14 years later.
New York City is used to being ahead of the curve, but in regards to craft beer, it was decidedly behind the times. Even as cities on the West Coast and in New England became destinations in the 1990s and 2000s for those seeking hyped breweries and limited-allocation IPAs, and the scenes that bloomed around them, New York remained far from what you’d call a beer town.
That stance was in stark contrast to the city’s brewing history. Thanks to the beer-drinking Europeans who settled it, New York City was home to breweries throughout the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, until factors like expensive real estate, changing consumer preferences, and the consolidation of the beer industry virtually killed the city’s breweries by the start of the 1970s. As craft beer blossomed in the United States beginning in the 1980s, the brewpub trend did take root in New York, but almost as quickly as it rose up, it died out: Thanks to staggering operations costs, competition, and some subpar beer, most of Manhattan’s brewpubs exited stage left with the 20th century.
Instead, there were cocktail culture and nightlife scenes—the clubs and speakeasies, the rooftop bars and lounges; the places New York’s bold-faced names, glitterati, and visitors frequented, and which never had beer at their center. Even if you did have an interest in beer in the early aughts, you couldn’t do more than sip a sample in a taproom in the state of New York before Governor Andrew Cuomo signed The Craft NY Act into effect in 2014.
Those legal limitations severely constrained the city’s breweries. Brooklyn Brewery, established in 1988, was able to offer beer with a workaround: Patrons taking a brewery tour could buy tokens to redeem for pours. Sixpoint Brewery opened in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn in 2004, but only unveiled its first taproom in 2022.
Otherwise, if you were in New York and wanted to find out what existed beyond macro brands before 2014, you went to beer bars. They were the primary places connoisseurs and curious drinkers could taste craft beers from across the country, or Belgian, German, and English imports. And as the scrappy hubs of a nascent scene, they were also where the city’s beer community was built.
I was one of those curious drinkers, trekking all over the city to immerse myself in this fascinating, new-to-me world. There was research involved. Where were the bars that specialized in craft beer? How many trains would I have to take to get there? It was like a treasure hunt, with the added excitement of joining a burgeoning group of fellow geeks.
Only after a couple years did it even occur to me to start seeking out breweries when I traveled. As I began meeting people whose entire beer journeys started and evolved in taprooms, I realized how different that was from what I experienced in New York. Sure, in other places you were drinking from the source. But you were also limited to that brewery’s beers. Even now, with New York’s brewery count hovering around 40, I often prefer to check in with beer at a bar. That the ubiquity of taprooms has presented stiff and sometimes unsurvivable competition to beer bars in recent years only enhances my nostalgia and appreciation for these spaces.
One of the first places to represent New York City’s modern beer bar scene also happened to be one of the first bars I frequented. Like many beer drinkers in the 2000s, my interest was grounded more in Belgian tradition than American craft. And that’s what was on the menu at the wonderfully named Burp Castle.
The bar was and remains a shrine to Belgian beer, with its church-y lighting, wooden floors creaking under carpet, and hand-painted monk murals covering the walls. To keep with its monastic ambience, quiet is mandated: When the din grows too loud, the bartenders—clad in monk’s robes until more recently—shush the crowd. It’s tongue-in-cheek, yet it effectively fosters a sense of reverence for the beer at hand, in all its tradition and history.
When Jerry Kuziw opened Burp Castle in 1992, it became an anchor for the city’s nascent beer scene. He also owned Brewski’s next door, and the pair of bars leveraged an existing beer history on Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues in the East Village. “In that building, the NYC Homebrewers Guild had their first meetings back in the ’80s,” says Jimmy Carbone, who would later contribute his own beer bar, the now-shuttered Jimmy’s No. 43, to the cluster. “That’s where [Brooklyn Brewery’s brewmaster] Garrett Oliver met [the brewery’s co-founder] Steve Hindy. There’s craft beer history of New York in that building, and no other real history like that noted anywhere except that block.”
In 2005, Gary Gillis took over Burp Castle and Brewski’s; the latter became Standings, a craft beer sports bar. Today, Burp Castle’s tap list remains at least 50% Belgian—expect the likes of Tripel Karmeliet, Westmalle Dubbel, and La Chouffe Blonde—with a few German, English, and American classics. And patrons still respect the quiet, even if they do need to be shushed occasionally.
1992 also saw the opening of another seminal New York beer bar: Mugs Ale House, founded by Ed Berestecki in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Compared to the high camp of Burp Castle, Mugs was a good, old-fashioned tavern that felt like it had been there for a hundred years, with a cast of regulars as firmly rooted as the barstools on which they sat.
“In that building, the NYC Homebrewers Guild had their first meetings back in the ’80s. That’s where Garrett Oliver met Steve Hindy. There’s craft beer history of New York in that building, and no other real history like that noted anywhere except that block.”
As former bartender Hayley Karl recalls, many of those regulars were early beer industry members and craft beer fans. “They’d been selling craft beer since the ’90s … Places like Other Half and Threes, these ‘hot’ breweries, they’d come in and [the regulars] would say, ‘We’ll see!’ They’d seen so much.”
For me, Mugs existed in that liminal space between an explicitly craft-focused beer bar and a divey pub. “It lacked any pretension whatsoever, even though its beer list was actually quite pretentious,” says Chris O’Leary, who’s been chronicling the city’s beer scene since 2007 on his blog (and now newsletter), Brew York. If it introduced many New Yorkers to various beer firsts, Mugs was still just your corner bar, despite the a breadth of its tap list and famous events like Split Thy Skull, an annual Barleywine-and-other-big-beers festival so beloved that Karl remembers a man who flew in from England every year for it.
How could such an understated bar have been so formative for so many? Part of that magic undoubtedly had to do with timing. (The bar closed in 2019, and has since been reopened by new owners.) It doesn’t seem possible for a bar to open now in a neighborhood like Williamsburg—which has become shorthand for gentrification—and serve craft beer without being a craft beer bar, bearded hipster stereotypes and all. For most of the original Mugs’ life, however, Williamsburg was just where real people worked and lived—and, if they had any interest in beer beyond macros, they went to Mugs.
Karl regales me with stories from what she calls the best bartending job she’s ever had, during the last three years of the bar’s run. There was the time a few regulars pulled one of their own out of a fight and into Mugs, only to realize the guy had been knifed. “It was like the HBO version of ‘Cheers.’ Where everybody knows … you got stabbed,” she quips.
I may have headed to Burp Castle for Belgian beers, but it was at the not-quite-divey, resolutely-rock-and-roll d.b.a., which opened in 1994, where I experienced Lindemans Framboise and Kriek for the first time.
My formative bar experiences were tied to punk and metal shows, and d.b.a.’s East Village grit meant I felt comfortable heading there to drink the kind of beers for which I had to carefully budget. I grew up over those visits to the bar, not just in beer knowledge but in life. 2010 was squinting to read the overwhelming number of beer names scrawled in a tiny script on the chalkboard menu, screaming our orders over the roar. 2015 was leisurely afternoons in the backyard with close friends. 2019 was rewarding my dog and me after a trip to the vet, she with her bone and me with my beer.
Any mystery about why d.b.a. felt special disappears when you hear tributes to its co-owner Ray Deter, tragically killed in a bike accident in 2011. Carbone calls Deter “the face of good beer in New York,” recalling how he “knew everyone,” from Trappist beer-brewing monks to early American craft brewers. How he pushed for excellence and variety in the bar’s beer offerings, from Cantillon to cask ale; believed in people’s readiness to drink them before anyone else; and sought to bring that good beer to more people with additional d.b.a. locations in Williamsburg and also New Orleans. How he influenced so many others to subsequently open their own impactful beer bars.
Brew York’s O’Leary calls Deter “such a cool, relaxed, smart person about beer and really spirits, too.” He reminisces about visiting d.b.a.’s now-closed Williamsburg extension, as well as its New Orleans outpost. “There was live jazz going on a Sunday afternoon, and I thought, ‘This is Ray personified.’ It felt like that’s the legacy he wanted to leave.”
Deter’s legacy indeed lives on, through both d.b.a. specifically and the city’s present-day beer scene more generally. He co-hosted early episodes of the podcast Beer Sessions Radio with Carbone, who still hosts the show today, and worked with him to establish The Good Beer Seal, which recognizes independent bars dedicated to both serving and educating drinkers on domestic craft beer and/or imports. The seal was both an honor and a helpful distinguisher for consumers as beer bars proliferated throughout the aughts.
True to his mission, Deter had built more than a good beer bar—he’d helped build a good beer community.
With d.b.a. and Burp Castle in the East Village, some wondered if another downtown beer bar was really necessary when Dave Brodrick revealed his plans for Blind Tiger Ale House in the West Village. It was 1996, and select bars around town, including ones Brodrick worked at, had begun devoting more taps to imports and domestic craft beer. But to anyone outside that small, in-the-know set, three beer bars in Lower Manhattan felt like potential overkill.
When Blind Tiger opened, Brodrick put on beers with “gateway” reputations, including Pete’s Wicked Ale and five different Brooklyn Brewery offerings. Over time, he watched the scene flourish, as craft beer approached ubiquity at non-specialist bars and palates and consumer education subsequently matured. “The first time I put on Cantillon [not long after opening], people were like, ‘Are you insane?’ Then in the early aughts, I’d put it on and it would be gone so fast—things really began to shift.”
Brodrick is modest when it comes to Blind Tiger’s crucial role in that shift. He sees the growth of both appreciation for and access to craft beer in New York City as a sign of teamwork between the city’s beer bars and breweries. Where some beer bar owners might view breweries and their taprooms as competition, Brodrick identifies a partnership with a mutual goal: helping people understand why craft beer is great, and getting that great beer into their hands.
This kind of team effort has always been apparent at Blind Tiger. I discovered so many breweries through its tap takeovers, and the same is true for many members of the local beer scene, including executive director of the New York City Brewers Guild Ann V. Reilly, who counts “the Ghost Bottle special events Garrett Oliver would do and the every-Wednesday tap takeovers” among her favorite memories. For Brodrick, a particular brewer stands out when he looks back on the events.
“The first time I put on Cantillon [not long after opening], people were like, ‘Are you insane?’ Then in the early aughts, I’d put it on and it would be gone so fast—things really began to shift.”
“Sam Calagione is such a promoter,” he says. “When [Dogfish Head] brought out their Pumpkin Beer, he said, ‘I’m going to bring 200 gourds and we’re going to carve them out and serve the beer in those.’ Well, of course, when people finished their beers, they threw them at each other, and it was a massive food fight. It took us two days to clean. It was totally crazy, but it got people really excited. A lot of what brewers were doing to get people’s attention, it was totally different from what corporate brands were doing. Brewers would come up with unique ideas around beers they were pushing, and beer bars like us would showcase it.”
Blind Tiger fostered a palpable thrill around craft beer—its newness, its creativity, its variety, its potential—and surfed that wave right into a new era of ubiquity.
The vibe was different at The Ginger Man, opened on 36th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, also in 1996. It was a sprawling pub, part of a micro-chain founded by Bob Precious with locations in Houston, Texas and Greenwich, Connecticut. It was ideally situated near Grand Central Station—perfect for white-collar commuters—and Madison Square Garden, and within the general vicinity of Manhattan’s tourist-dense center. “The common complaint from people who wanted to drink beer there was that the crowd sucked,” O’Leary says. “From 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. every day it was standing room only and half the people didn’t give a shit about the beer at all, the other half were beer nerds but struggled to be able to ask the bartenders questions.”
On weekends, with much of the bar’s clientele home in the ’burbs, you could actually get a table and enjoy your Chimay Blue or Tröegs Nugget Nectar with a giant pretzel. On weeknights, though, I remember trying to focus on the book-length menu among what felt like a music festival sponsored by Brooks Brothers. Here was a bar with an overwhelming tap-and-bottle list, and instead of beer geeks, the place was packed with Knicks fans, finance bros, and lawyers with Connecticut zip codes.
Ash Croce, a Brooklyn-based writer who worked in beer bars and taprooms for seven years, bartended at The Ginger Man from August 2016 until March 2020, a little more than a year before the bar closed for good. The weekday crowd may not have noticed, but the bar took beer seriously: Croce says staff had to finish beer training, and pass a written test, to get on the schedule; most became Cicerone Certified Beer Servers. “Happy hour was our bread and butter, it was a flood of Patagonia-vested businessmen indistinguishable from each other,” she remembers. “This crowd didn’t really care about beer.”
Outside happy hour was different, though. Friday was a “big regular day,” Croce recalls. “These were the days we had our customers whose preferences we knew. Like my regular who was loyal to authentic European Lagers and insisted American attempts were always too hoppy.”
Croce credits a tight-knit staff for support, and was able to continue her beer education amid chaotic shifts. That kind of crowd posed a challenge for bartenders, though, and in a lower-stakes way, did the same for beer-dedicated patrons. For much of The Ginger Man’s run, its beer menu was enough of a draw for beer fans to fight the throngs. But by its last year in 2021? It was hard to imagine compromising so much on atmosphere to drink good beer.
Crowds pouring into your bar with little interest in your beer programming wasn’t a problem for Bobby Gagnon. After years of working with imported beer and early craft, the Boston native moved from Los Angeles to New York, waded into the city’s beer scene, met Brodrick, and bartended at Blind Tiger before deciding to open his place, The Gate, in Park Slope in 1997.
“It was a pretty tough slog in the beginning,” he says. “This end of the neighborhood is much different now. Then, it wasn’t a high-traffic area, so people who found us were looking for us because they’d found out what we were doing.” And what The Gate was doing was helping the community of beer lovers in New York expand. “We were putting beer in people’s hands and explaining why this was the direction you should be going,” he says.
If the early days were about education, The Gate’s focus has shifted during its 25 years of existence. Now, customers walk in “completely educated, they know styles and what they’re looking for down to hop profiles.” Gagnon adds that The Gate’s survival over the course of that evolution is a testimony to how far the beer scene in New York has come. People once figured out how to find a bar like The Gate in order to explore beer, then knew what beer they wanted and that they’d find it at The Gate. Today, even the most casual drinker might just happen into The Gate and not bat an eye at the extensive variety.
The Gate has long felt special in the sense that it’s a welcoming, pubby hang for fellow industry folks. O’Leary cites the chili cook-offs the bar hosted over the years, the competitors representing different breweries, and connects this specific event to an overall knack The Gate has for making industry members feel at home. “There hasn’t been a time I’ve walked into The Gate and there wasn’t someone from the industry sitting at the bar, or even behind the bar,” he says.
I can attest to being made to feel at home in this bar. I discovered The Gate at a time in my life where I needed a place that was quiet and welcoming on a weekday afternoon so I could be comfortable alone and distracted by good beer. I had just moved to Park Slope in 2018, weeks after my mom had died, and I felt completely unmoored. The Gate was a port in the storm. Nine years earlier, though, I had a comparatively more adventurous approach to finding and choosing beer destinations.
In 2009, I was living at home in the suburbs between graduating college and moving into Manhattan. My quest for Belgian beer had begun, and after finding Spuyten Duyvil in an issue of “Time Out New York,” I was convinced it was worth the trip into Williamsburg. It was a thrilling discovery, walking through the bar’s red door and into what I’d later recognize as the atmosphere of an old Belgian beer café—thoughtfully mixed-and-matched furniture in a compact, creaky-wood space that felt like it had been there for ages, sunlight shining in through windows like Vermeer painted it—and tasting beers that felt downright extravagant, but never frivolous, to splurge on.
Tuned into beer since he caught an episode of Michael Jackson’s “Beer Hunter” when he was around 17, Spuyten Duyvil’s founder, Joe Carroll, arrived in Manhattan at an early inflection point for the city’s growing beer scene. By the time he opened the bar in 2003, though, the fervor had fizzled—temporarily. There were barely enough local breweries to make a dent on Spuyten Duyvil’s menu in the beginning, so most of the bar’s six taps and bottle list focused on beers from Belgium, Germany, and England, consistently stocking enough rare gems that Carroll says people from other states and countries knew to visit Spuyten Duyvil when seeking out rarities.
“It truly formed how I saw and thought about the beer world back then. Not only in being exposed to different brewers, styles, and regional scenes, but also in events held, which helped connect me with other people in the industry locally.”
B.R. Rolya, a brewery consultant and importer who worked for the now-shuttered Shelton Brothers, remembers how exciting Spuyten Duyvil’s opening was for her homebrew club. “The idea that [Carroll] was not only focused on Belgian beers but split them into regional selections of Flanders and Wallonia was mind-blowing,” she says.
Within a few years, American craft beer had exploded, and there were more than enough local craft options to share the menu with imports. As the New York beer scene grew, so did Spuyten Duyvil’s following. It became a favorite stop for industry members visiting town, and for beer launches and events. For beer writer Niko Krommydas, like so many members of the city’s beer industry, Spuyten Duyvil played a formative role in his developing education and interest—he calls the bar “home to some of my earliest experiences with ‘good’ beer, both craft and international.”
“It truly formed how I saw and thought about the beer world back then,” says Krommydas. “Not only in being exposed to different brewers, styles, and regional scenes, but also in events held, which helped connect me with other people in the industry locally.”
While he would never take this credit himself, Jimmy Carbone could easily be mistaken for the unofficial mayor of New York City’s beer bar scene.
On a phone call to discuss his former bar, Jimmy’s No. 43, the conversation ends on the importance of other bars and their owners. Perhaps that’s no surprise considering that Carbone is behind foundational moves that organized the city’s beer bars into a community in the first place. There was the Good Beer Seal, as well as NYC Good Beer Month, which laid the groundwork for NYC Beer Week (later taken over by the NYC Brewers Guild). He also keeps beer bar owners and staff at the center of the local industry conversation with his Beer Sessions podcast. It can’t be forgotten, though, that from 2005 to 2015, Carbone was a beer bar owner himself.
Jimmy’s No. 43 opened below Standings, making its own mark on that stretch of East Seventh Street. Carbone came to beer bar ownership through having cooked professionally, worked with wine, and owned a restaurant, which had started to stock imports, then American craft beer. When the restaurant closed in 2005, he leveraged his beer interest, knowledge, and relationships with distributors to open Jimmy’s No. 43. Carbone was hands-on every step of the way, cooking every meal served at the bar and writing every beer list. Local beer lovers noticed, and quickly developed an affection for Carbone’s dedication and the resulting stellar tap and bottle list.
“[The bar] was haphazard and cramped and smelled kind of damp and the backroom with all the events was really small—and I loved everything about it,” O’Leary says. “It was one of those places where none of these things on their own should work but all together, it just somehow does.” I can still conjure up that smell and the bar’s dim lighting. I recall feeling older than my years as I used my cell phone light to study the menu. Maybe it all harkens back to that punk rock spirit, the beer geek’s love of being pushed into dark little caves where they’re free to fixate on every sip, because beer industry and community members couldn’t get enough of Jimmy’s.
Indeed, Jimmy’s No. 43 was at the center of the community, often supporting local breweries before anyone else. “For five years, we did Jimmy’s Homebrew Jamboree,” says beer journalist and author Joshua M. Bernstein, who’s been running local homebrew tours for over 13 years. “People from Finback, Strong Rope, KCBC, and beyond poured at the tours and the jamboree,” he adds, emphasizing how the homebrew scene and places like Jimmy’s were the only places to embrace this good beer movement pre-taprooms.
Jimmy’s closed in 2017, the same year as Against the Grain’s demise and that of Paloma Rocket, a pour-your-own beer bar on Clinton Street on the Lower East Side that had only been open a little over a year. 2018 saw the closing of Rattle N Hum, a sportier and beer-geekier Midtown answer to The Ginger Man that had been popular with breweries launching New York City distribution with tap takeovers and meet-and-greets. In 2019, Mugs shuttered before its eventual change in ownership.
This ever-shifting cycle of openings and closings feels emblematic of the difficulty of running a small business in New York City, where greedy landlords jacking up the rent can mean the end for a beloved neighborhood bar or restaurant. But as New York belatedly becomes a brewery-led scene, it’s hard to ignore that bars have declined as taprooms have finally begun proliferating. Where New York City’s specialty bars were, less than a decade ago, the city’s beer scene in its entirety, now they are a complement to its breweries, no longer the gravitational center.
Following conversations with my fellow New York beer enthusiasts, my nostalgia surges, and I can’t help but wonder if they also got off the phone to marinate for a minute in the memories of those early days, of chasing Belgian rarities and new craft releases from borough to borough. It’s immediately clear we share many of the same affections, even while having our own journeys into the scene.
Some people couldn’t believe I wasn’t discussing Bierkraft, a now-shuttered Park Slope spot with staff that carried on to brew at some of the city’s best-known breweries, but I’d never been there. Only Dan Lamonaca, owner of Williamsburg bottle shop Beer Karma, remembered frequenting an Upper East Side bar I loved called David Copperfield’s, while owner of the East Village’s ABC Beer Co. Zach Mack was one of the few with memories of Against the Grain. Lamonaca shares some of my fondness for Spitzer’s Corner on the Lower East Side, while others I spoke with viewed it as a death knell for authenticity among beer bars because it was opened by a slick team of restaurateurs.
Plenty has changed in the nearly 13 years since I moved to New York and became a regular at the city’s beer bars. Exploring beer in the city undoubtedly looks different now, and this evolution isn’t the only lens through which I’ve been looking back at these spaces. After living here for so long, I’ve finally started to plan a new course—one that will take me to other cities to explore what it’s like to live there, and, inevitably, immerse myself in those beer scenes. Knowing now that my New York days are finite has introduced preemptive nostalgia for a moment that hasn’t even passed yet.
For now, I drink in every last drop—not just of my beer, but of the atmosphere, the people, the music, and the conversations. It’s in doing so that I’m reminded: As much as this little New York City beer world looks different, and as many special places as we’ve lost, our beer bars are alive and well, still offering unique experiences in the way my admittedly biased heart believes creative, resourceful New Yorkers do best.
Burp Castle, The Gate, d.b.a.—these neighborhood staples still pour stellar beer alongside fellow stalwarts like George Keeley on the Upper West Side, Fourth Avenue Pub in Park Slope, and the now 14-year-old Double Windsor near Prospect Park. Bar-bottle-shop hybrids like Beer Culture, Top Hops, ABC Beer Co., Beer Karma, Covenhoven, and Beer Witch offer still more options for locals to engage with good beer, and a newer generation of beer bars with openings spanning the last decade like Gold Star Beer Counter, BierWax, Beer Street, Glorietta Baldy, Bondurants, and Hops Hill attract fresh crowds alongside people like me, who have been stalking local beer destinations since the late aughts.
I love New York City’s breweries, but I owe the will to frequent them in the first place to the city’s beer bars. It’s a vibrant scene I’m grateful to discuss with fellow New Yorkers, recommend to travelers, and will look forward to revisiting long after I’ve left town.
Words by Courtney IsemanIllustrations by Colette Holston
