Beer Hear!: Good Beer Seal 2013

Good Beer Seal -- full podcast (segments are offered below)

The Good Beer Seal was started in 2009, one year after the founding of NY Craft Beer Week. It's comprised of a committee of local craft beer professionals, including bar owners, brewery reps, and writers, who meet each year to nominate and vote on adding bars to the now 52 craft beer outlets in the metro NYC area that sport the Good Beer Seal in their windows.

Josh Bernstein, Jimmy, Cory of Proletariat, B.R., Jen of The Queens Kickshaw.

The idea behind it is to support the bars that are supporting the craft beer scene, and to give people looking for a good beer bar an easy way to identify them. In the words of Jimmy Carbone, the founder of the Seal, "If you see the Good Beer Seal in the window, you're gunna find good beer inside."

Jimmy, the proprietor of Jimmy's No. 43 bistro located at 43 E. 7th St. in the East Village, is one of the busiest people in the NYC craft beer scene, organizing countless events, like last week's NY State Craft Beer fest in Williamsburg, and hosting a weekly live podcast on beer called Beer Sessions Radio each Tuesday at 5pm.

Here are this year's Good Beer Seal inductees:

The Owl Farm 297 9th Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn
Proletariat 102 St. Marks Place, East Village
The Pony Bar UES 1444 First Avenue – at 75th Street
Alewife 5-14 51st Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
The Queens Kickshaw 40-17 Broadway, Astoria, Queens
Black Sheep Ale House 78 2nd Street, Mineola, NY – Long Island
Tap and Barrel 558 Smithtown Bypass, Smithtown, NY – Long Island
T.J. Finley’s 42 E. Main Street, Bay Shore, NY – Long Island
Barcade Jersey City 163 Newark Avenue, Jersey City, NJ
Pint 34 Wayne Street, Jersey City, NJ
Cannibal 113 E. 29th St., Manhattan

You can find a list and map of all the Good Beer bars here.

Bob and Jimmy.

This year the Good Beer induction party took place at Edible Manhattan's incredible food and beer pairing event, Good Beer, which is also in its fifth year. Two enormous rooms were filled with gourmet offerings from reputed establishments including Gramercy Tavern, The Vanderbilt, Lukes Lobster, Fort Defiance and many more. The delectable dishes were paired with choice offerings from a slew of fantastic breweries. Brooklyn Brewery poured their Scorcher #366 and Greenmarket Wheat saison. Kelso had a deliciously sour barrel aged ale. Dogfish Head poured Nobel Rot and Theobroma. Beers flowed from Allagash, Smuttynose, Sixpoint, Greenport Harbor, Blue Point and many, many others. For the new Good Beer Sealers, it made for quite an induction party!