All About Beer Beer Travelers: Brooklyn with Courtney Iseman and Chris Maestro (Ep. 4)
In this episode of Beer Travelers, we visit Brooklyn, New York, with its frenetic pace to its quiet neighborhood bars, and all the haze, lager, and sour beers you could ever want.
Brooklyn was once one of the world’s great brewing centers. Home to nearly 50 breweries in 1900, the borough brewed a ton of beer under brands names like Schaefer, Rheingold, and many others lost to history. But that came to an end by the mid-1970s and the borough’s mashtuns went silent for the next 20 years. That was until 1987 when Steve Hindy Tom Potter decided to open up their own brewery in a warehouse district in Williamsburg. Named after the borough it inhabited, Brooklyn Brewery would go on to spread the word of craft beer around the globe and become one of the early pioneers of the resurgent modern American beer scene.
It took a while for brewing to catch on again in Brooklyn but slowly others opened, including Kelso and Sixpoint. And then there was the third wave of craft brewers, with names such as Other Half, Threes, and Finback. Today, Brooklyn's beer scene is top notch and the borough's bars and breweries make for an easy and exciting night out.
After falling in love with it after my first visit, I trek down to Brooklyn a couple times a year including in December for an annual holiday themed pub and brewery crawl. It remains a favorite place to visit and drink and I look forward to exploring it with two great local experts.
Courtney Iseman is a freelance writer who has written engaging pieces for Vinepair, Craft Beer and Brewing, as well as her own newsletter, Hugging the Bar. She's a compelling voice in beer and has written extensively about everything from diversity and inclusion to her favorite local Brooklyn pubs, including about the bar owned by our second guest.
Chris Maestro is a DJ, avid record collector, educator, and also the co-owner with his wife of Bierwax, a beer bar with outposts in both Brooklyn and Queens. The Prospect Heights based bar focuses on great beer and music, played analog style from one of Chris’s thousands of vinyl records that line the back of the bar. He was in the beer business before opening his own shop and is a Brooklyn native.
It’s a big borough and there’s a lot of ground to cover in this episode. So let’s get started with our tour of Brooklyn, New York, with writer Courtney Iseman and publican Chris Maestro.
This Episode is Sponsored by:
Pub Culture Beercations
Stop living vicariously through other people's social media posts and get out and make some memories of your own! Join Pub Culture Beercations for one of our upcoming tours and start exploring the world one pint at a time with us. Visit PubCultureBeercations.com for more information.
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- Host: Andy Crouch
- Guests: Courtney Iseman, Chris Maestro
- Sponsor: Pub Culture Beercations
- Tags: Brooklyn beer, Bierwax, Garrett Oliver, Other Half