Globe Corner Blogs

New Yorkers. They love their city, they love their Yankees, and by God, they love their beer. They have German beer bars, Belgian beer bars, American craft beer bars – whatever your thirsty little heart desires.

I wanted to get in on the love fest. Realizing that drinking at all of New York’s beer halls would take weeks and be hazardous to our health, my friend and I tackled a few in Williamsburg over a weekend.

First on the official tour: Spuyten Duyvil. (Don’t ask how it’s pronounced – I forget.) The tag line to the bar’s name is “rare and obscure,” and that it is. While I sipped an Oktoberfest on cask, my friend delicately held a tiny tulip of mead. For as powerful as the honey-heavy drink was, it sure didn’t come in a manly glass. He stuck out a pinky and muscled through.

Earlier we had visited a store owned by the same people. There we grabbed two 22-ouncers and a jar of gourmet, best-I’ve-ever-tasted pickles. You might say it was divine brine.

Fette Sau, a BBQ place inside a renovated auto-repair garage, was the second bar we hit up on our tour.  I grabbed a Righteous Rye by Sixpoint (a Brooklyn craft brewer) that came in a mason jar and made myself comfortable at a picnic table. It was then that I noticed the decor: white-washed walls covered in drawings of every cut of meat imaginable. The vegetarian in me shuddered, the rest of me thought, “cool.”

We swigged the last beer of the night in the Radegast Hall and Biergarten. Much to the beer wench’s surprise, I ordered a Schlenkerla Marzen Rauchbier – apparently these smoke beers are not a popular choice. I drank with a strange pride. My friend tried the dark, almost peaty beer and a silence fell across the table. His first Rauchbier. The perfect beer to sip on a rough-hewn, communal table in a dark and cavernous German and Belgian beer hall.

We finished our tour the next afternoon with a tour at the Brooklyn Brewery. The lecture on brewing was familiar, but then I was singled out for drinking Blast, a 9% abv Imperial IPA. According to the tour guide, IPAs give you the worst hangovers – he said, giving me a watch-what-you’re-doing-little-girl look. I resisted telling him exactly how much I knew about drinking IPAs and had another.

The day was rounded out at a late brunch at Jimmy’s. There’s nothing like grilled cheese with tomato and a mound of fries to soak up a mid-afternoon beer or two.

Read more: Beer, Brooklyn, Food & Wine, New York City, Travel


Llalan specializes in all things Ohio, but has funny stories from all over the US and Canada, plus a few snort-inducing ones from Thailand. And not only does she read books from around the world, she also samples beers in as many languages as possible. Favorite style: the multi-national American Double IPA.

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