Beer Geek Heaven

1 of 2 NEXT

No blasphemy intended, but an old friend recently rose from the dead.

An old beer friend is what I mean—the Blind Tiger Ale House, which, for a decade, had carried on as one of New York City’s preeminent bars dedicated to serving handcrafted American beer. But in late December 2005, the Blind Tiger, a shamelessly cramped and scruffy dive at West 10th and Hudson streets in the heart of Greenwich Village, lost its lease to (what else?) a Starbucks, and that seemed to be that.

Of course, there are a million bars in Manhattan, so what’s the loss of one of them?

Well, to beer geeks, the Tiger was special. It was among only a dozen or so bars in the City that Never Sleeps that carried a prodigious and ever-changing selection of craft brews (also called microbrews, in the old parlance). New York may be on the cutting edge of finance, art, and highbrow eateries, but as a beer town, it’s way behind the urban curve.

Consider that in microbrew-crazed precincts like Seattle and Portland, Oregon, you can probably find a dozen craft-beer bars within a few blocks of one another. In Portland, craft brew represents 40 to 50 percent of all beer sold. In the five boroughs of New York, craft beer has about only 4.5 percent penetration. So the closing of the Tiger was indeed a blow, especially to the downtown hip-beer crowd, but also to the hordes of beer travelers from out of town who made the Tiger a regular stop on East Coast beer pilgrimages.

The world was righted, however, on April 2, when the Tiger had its grand reopening about five blocks away, at 281 Bleecker Street, in a space that was not terribly bigger than the one it had left. But this place had definitely been spruced up; it sported a small outdoor dining space covered by a jaunty blue awning, and its oaken floors, beams, and bar were lifted from a demolished 19th-century farmhouse. (The Tiger also opened a restaurant serving fancy sandwiches.)

All very well and good, but the burning question that night was, What about the beer?

I knew right away the Tiger hadn’t lost its experimental verve when I glanced at the chalkboard menu above the bar and saw a new beer by one of my favorite craft brewers, Dogfish Head of Milton, Delaware. Called Black & Blue, it turned out to be a Belgian-style golden ale fermented with blueberries and blackberries. It seemed as good a way as any to initiate my reentry, so I ordered one.

The brew arrived in a 12-ounce stem glass, and it was beautiful—tawny with a hint of the deep blue sea (a color you might get if you mixed gold and navy Easter-egg dye). The berries were present in the flavor, all right, but their taste was more subtle than profound. I was thinking, before I tasted it, that this might be a dessert beer. But though there was a hint of sweetness, I found the Black & Blue to be on the dry side.

I learned later that the name is a bit of a double entendre. Since the ale contains 10 percent alcohol by volume (Budweiser, by comparison, has 5 percent A.B.V.), a couple of pints of Black & Blue could leave you black-and-blue in the morning.

Next, I chose the brew that was the talk of the room (at least for the moment): Captain Lawrence Smoked Porter—it isn’t every day you get to sample a smoked porter.

For starters, porters are rare. The medium-bodied, medium-dark ale is essentially the original stout, or dark ale. (A version of Guinness, at one point, was called Extra Superior Porter.) Porter originated in 18th-century London and was England’s most popular beer for decades. But porter fell out of favor in the early 20th century and has all but disappeared from the British beer landscape. Some American craft brewers, however, have taken to reinvigorating the form.

1 of 2 NEXT