Tag Archives: history

Singing the Brews: Racism and Craft Beer

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Garrett-Oliver-Fermenter

Garrett Oliver, Brewer, Black Dude

It’s almost February, Black History Month, which means as a beer person it’s time to start saying, Hey, where are all the black people? I went through my internal roster of Beer Folk and found one black dude, who is the same black dude everyone finds: Garrett Oliver. Oliver is the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery and known for his prize-worthy beers and drool-worthy pairings of beer with food. He is also known for being the Black Dude in beer.

I could throw statistics and charts at you if I was industrious enough to find them, but we all know what’s up: there aren’t many black people in the craft beer industry. The enthusiasts are also few and far between, which is what I am primarily concerned with. Just out of personal experience I can say that in my small Ohio town, where almost a quarter of the residents are black, I can remember seeing groups of black people in my local brewery twice. And I’m there a lot. At the closest bodega to my old apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, on the other hand, I was lucky to find some of Oliver’s own Brooklyn brews. Continue reading →

The (Almost) Ageless Tale of the Brooklyn Slice

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Viva-la-Pizza

Scott also holds the Guinness World Record for owning the most pizza boxes. One more reason to be jealous.

There is almost nothing better than a good slice of Brooklyn pizza—the molten cheese, the piquant sauce, the chewy crust. But I would argue that listening to Scott Wiener of Scott’s Pizza Tours talk about pizza might be even better than eating it.

During a recent lecture in the Brooklyn Collection of the public library, Scott won me over, not just because of his enthusiasm for pizza (which is considerable) but also his willingness to forego the easy route of merely touting the merits of various pizza joints and instead diving into the more complex terrain of pizza history. You should have seen the way his face lit up when he pulled up the PowerPoint slide of the preserved communal ovens from 1st century A.D. Pompeii. Or the way he elatedly traced the web of relationships that connected Lombardi’s in Little Italy to Totonno’s on Coney Island. (It’s true that I got a little lost during the part of the talk in which he discussed the physics of coal-burning ovens, but that might have been due to the monster pour of white wine a librarian had given me just prior to sitting down. Man, I love the library.)

Judging from the reaction of the crowd, I wasn’t alone in being wooed by Scott. There was an audible groan when the words “Papa John’s” were uttered, and crows of delight when he revealed a stream of research that hinted that the original Ray’s might well have been in Brooklyn, not Manhattan. I was a little concerned that one peculiar old dude might kidnap Scott just so they discuss the details of oven construction, about which the old dude seemed passionate.

The story of how Scott Wiener became the crowd-pleasing pizza maven he is today turned out to be almost as good as the lecture itself. Continue reading →

Turkey Bones and the March of Time

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McSorley’s Old Ale House, in the East Village, is not my favorite bar. The service is inevitably surly, the place is always in-your-face packed with tourists and frat boys, the smell is a bit on the musky side, and the weird little half-pints of beer only come in two varieties (brace yourself, Llalan), dark and light. They didn’t even let women in the front door until they were forced to do so in 1970. Basically, if the bar itself was a person, I probably wouldn’t like him much.

bones, pre-dusting

A photo of the bones, pre-dusting, from the New York Times

But I can’t help but hanker for an occasional trip to McSorley’s. Established (or at least allegedly established) in 1854, it’s one of the few places where you can still feel how old of a place Manhattan really is. If you could manage to elbow your way to a table and order up one of their cheese plates (The cheddar—so sharp! The onion—so raw! The mustard—so spicy!), you’d have a perfect vantage point of some weird artifacts of Old New York, like photos of long-gone drinking club members and antique fireman helmets and turkey wish bones hanging above the bar covered in decades of dust. You could eye those bones and, depending upon the story you chose to believe, think about the quirky bar owner who’d collected them or the WWI doughboys who never made it back from Europe to take them down. And, a little tipsy, you could have deep thoughts about death and decay and the long slog of time and wash it all down with a gulp of light. You could have, that is, until the health department stepped in last year. Continue reading →