loosie: words: 140 Beers on the Wall

140 Beers on the Wall

Loosie takes you inside the First New York City Brewtopia Craft Beer Festival.

by grimy | 2004.06.23

This past Saturday afternoon all of Manhattan gleefully roasted underneath a golden sun and balmy Hudson River wind. With the scent of summer sex hanging from every tree branch and bodega awning, inspired city residents smugly popped on their jumbo Lenny Kravitz shades and yanked on their asscrack-flashing slacks. In Spanish Harlem, Puerto Rican girls commanding thick cabooses sauntered the streets and down on Seventh Avenue and 21st Street shirtless Chelsea boys glided around on rollerblades flexing their limber groins. But at the Metropolitan Pavilion at 125 West 18th Street, a squadron of bearded men had shunned the sun in favor of milling around a dark and sterile room. These men, birthed by a ménage e trois of Trekies, lumberjacks and jovial seal clubbers, were driven by a passion greater than even the lust for sweat-dripping booty clapping: Beer.

Forty brewers hailing from classic rugby-wearing Northeastern towns poured into the city this past weekend to dole out their swill at the first New York City Brewtopia Craft Beer Festival. The red-faced and full-of-beans brew masters -- the majority equipped with only a collapsible table, a tap, and several kegs -- stood ready to pump out pints and speak in the tongues of hops, bocks, wheats, yeasts, double fermented strains and the brewing industry’s own daisy cutter, the Barley Wine.

We were registered for the six-to-ten evening session and staggered through the door late, still doggedly faded from Friday night. Inside about four hundred men wrapped in flannel scurried around the efficient looking venue. At the ticket counter, a sweet collection of women, all of whom appeared to have been suckling on stout since infancy, tossed us our four taste glasses and festival maps. The convention center was lined with dozens of booths for the breweries. We slid by a booth populated by the night’s lone team of Hicksville guidos and made a b-line right for Three Floyd’s Brewing Company. With glasses raised high, we formed a tight cipher and sucked back four ounces of Gumballhead Wheat Beer and Rabbid Rabbit Saison.

Over the next three hours, we quaffed back a circus of brews: Stone Brewing Company’s Arrogant Bastard Ale, Wagner Valley Brewing Company’s Sled Dog Dopplebock, Specialty Beers’ Nostradamus, Shelton Brothers Importers’ Wee Beast, North Coast Brewing Company’s Old Rasputin, Black Forest Brew Haus’ Endgame Scotch Ale. We even sniffed out Cooperstown’s cave dwelling brewery, Ommegang – undoubtedly what Osama would sip on due to the beverage being stored in Upstate caves.

At every keg, brew masters and company spokesmen beamed like shimmy-playing Canadians and zealously launched into exhaustive explanations on why a specific India Pale Ale might taste like a ground up spice cabinet or why a stout might reek of a Turkish soldier’s arm pit.

By nine the bathroom lines were thick and agitated. The mixture of stouts, ales, ciders, barley wines and lagers had set off a 1980 Beirut-esque civil war within partygoers’ beer guts. Deep in their bowels, ales erected checkpoints, bocks heaved flash grenades, and the stouts were dirty bombing the entire spleen. But the night’s merriment continued to snowball into a Treckie rampage of hop shit talking and glass breaking. The Bagel Brewery plastered the event’s few attractive girls with alcohol tattoos and the hulking salesman hawking his wares at the Ale Street News booth kept crowning beer gods and beer goddesses. Across the room, the event’s only jam seller did brisk business with drunken jam lovers.

As ten o'clock neared, a rush was made on all remaining beers -- and it looked like the He’Brew brewery booth might fall victim to incoming Molotov cocktails from the Ommegang cave dwellers. Meanwhile, certain so-called brew aficionados manning booths were exposed as merely temp workers. When questioned by Loosie.com, one agitated drunk temp responsed “get your shit out of here.”

Overall, the First New York City Brewtopia Craft Beer Festival was a raging success and well worth the $40 admission fee. It would be a shame if it did not return in some form next year. The entire audience stumbled out the front door grinning like a pack of hyenas, satisfied at the fact that they just got drunk off 140 beers while Trevor Dorfmann down the street at The Village Idiot was getting smashed off thirty-two Aspen Extremes. Welcome additions for next year’s festival would be a beer pong tournament refereed by a covenant of monks, a DJ to spin Tha Alcoholics greatest hits and an occasional Sunset Park stripper.