Barrier And Bluepoint At Brewer's Choice

WFMU's Beer Hear! Blue Point and Barrier podcast

The Brewer's Choice event of Craft Beer Week was a boon for Beer Hear -- with all the breweries and their brewers on hand, we could have done a year's worth of shows! One of the breweries we spoke to was BLUE POINT of Patchouge, Long Island, NY.

Steve of Blueweiser... I mean BLUE POINT!

Blue Point was founded in 1998. At the time it was the only microbrewery on Long Island. Their original 25-barrel brewhouse produced the well known Toasted Lager (their #1 seller) and Hoptical Illusion (#2 seller) with a collection of equipment bought from a variety of other breweries, including a gorgeous direct-fire brick-encased kettle.

She's a brick (brau) haus.

They've since upgraded to a modern, more efficient custom-made system, on which they brewed the beers featured at the Brewers' Choice: a Sour Cherry Imperial Stout (10%abv) and a White IPA (6%abv) made with wheat malt, considered by some to be a Wit/American IPA hybrid.


Steve, a sales manager overseeing sales in five states, said that their beer is available from Florida to New England, in Pennsylvania and, just recently, as far west as Michigan. I think that it's somewhat available "from Montauk to Manhattan" as well!

 
Another Long Island craft brewery on hand was Barrier Brewing, of Oceanside, NY. Barrier is a fairly young enterprise, having been founded in 2009. Craig said that while there are about 9 breweries on Long Island, Barrier is the only one in Nassau County. (In consideration of that, I wonder if they'll brew a Dutch beer...)

BR, Craig of Barrier, Bob, and Bob's new haircut.

Both Craig and founder Evan worked at Sixpoint Brewing before Barrier, where they gained valuable brewing knowledge and experience. Prior to that, it was homebrewing, as is so often the case with craft brewers.

One of the beers that they featured at the Brewers' Choice was a delicious German style Rauchbier/Smoke Beer (5.4%abv) that they call Frau Blücher. 65% of the malt bill for the brew is imported German Rauchmalt (from Bamberg, we presume).

What better to go with LI oysters than LI beer?

He said that the brewery currently brews 27 different beers! We'd imagine that at least one of them would go well with some L.I. oysters -- though perhaps Naked Cowboy, Peconic Bay or Tomahawk oysters, more so than Blue Points!

Garrett Describes A Return To Normality

Garrett Describes A Return To Normality podcast

Brooklyn Brewery's Garrett Oliver was the keynote speaker at this year's New York City Craft Beer Week -- the Brewers' Choice event at the City Winery on Sept. 22, 2011. He addressed a very enthusiastic crowd of the vanguard of the craft beer scene in NYC and reminded them that things were not always so beery even just 15 years ago.

What happened to beer in NYC between 1920 and 1980? Surely something horrible, something that had brought low the once vibrant beer culture that flourished in our fine city. When beer was outlawed, only outlaws had beer, and it's been a long, hard, difficult journey back from the beerless abyss since the repeal of the Volstead Act.

What was lost was more than just suds and saloons. The social fabric of the city, which incorporated immigrants from beer-centric (and wine-centric) locales such as Germany, Ireland, Italy, Eastern Europe, etc., had been upended. Spirits, which were an important part of early American culture, were banned which, in effect, made culture itself illegal! And as went the beer, it could be argued, so went other aspects of social culture, both of the homegrown American sort and that of the Old Country, too. We entered an era of factory food, mass production/mass consumption, television zombies and a general disregard for and apathy about the very things that make life worth living: good food, good company and good beer.

Garrett sounded nearly triumphant in his assertion that good beer, good food and more meaningful social interaction had returned to New York City -- not as a bold, new age of enlightenment, but, rather, simply as a return to the way it was, the way it should be and the way we like it. Real. Natural. Honest. Healthy. Fun.

By the way, if you've never heard Garrett croon before, you'll be treated to a bit of his mellifluous, dulcet tones at the beginning of the podcast! In closing Garrett promises: "We're going to live well!"