Browsing Tag

brooklyn

Beer

Coney Island Brewing’s "Seas the Day" India Pale Lager

February 27, 2014

India Pale Lager? I’ve long been a fan of India pale ales, or IPAs as they’re usually called. I like their intense hop bitterness balanced, in the best of them, by a rich barley malt flavor. I didn’t know quite what to expect from this lager offering by Coney Island Brewing Company. “India Pale” made me expect big flavor, so I paired it with a Vietnamese bánh mì from Hanco’s, doused with some extra hot sauce.

I poured, and was rewarded with a full, foamy head. The color (photo above) was a golden amber. I took a whiff: the aroma was powerfully hoppy, with some floral notes. My first sip made my taste buds confirm the evidence of my nose. The hops have it! A few bites of the sandwich convinced me it was a good pairing. Still, I thought, while this beer goes well with spicy, flavorful food, is it something I’d want to drink by itself?

After a few minutes, though, the beer started to open up. I began to get some of the “[b]ig citrus and passion fruit aromas” promised on the label and on the brewer’s website. The flavor also became more rounded, with fruit overtones softening the hoppy edge. I realized that I should have taken the beer out of the fridge and poured it a few minutes before tasting.

I checked the ingredients on the website. Five kinds of hops are used: Galena, Warrior, and Simcoe, all of which are considered “bittering” hops; Cascade, which is moderately bitter and gives a floral aroma; and Citra, a fairly new variety that has quickly become popular (with some dissenters) and that accounts for the notes of passion fruit. There are four malts: two row barley (commonly used in the best beers and ales), malted wheat, oats, and biscuit malt (I had to look that up). The last three would, I believe, tone down the flavor of the two row barley, and, set against the assertiveness of the hops, explains the beer’s lack of any noticeable malt flavor or aroma.

On balance, this is a good beer. It would go very well with spicy food like bánh mì, Hunan or Szechuan cuisine, and the more picante of Mexican dishes. At a moderate 4.8 percent alcohol by volume, it shouldn’t get you in trouble too quickly. My preference continues to be for IPAs that balance the hops with malt. Still, I would drink this again, maybe with my next takeout vindaloo curry.

So, what about this Coney Island Brewing Company? Is the beer made on Coney Island? No, it’s brewed upstate, in Clifton Park, just south of Saratoga Springs, by the Shmaltz Brewing Company, makers of He’Brew (“The Chosen Beer”) and other craft beers and ales. In this respect Coney Island Brewing is much like Brooklyn Brewery, which has most of its beer and ale brewed under contract by F.X. Matt in Utica. Coney Island Brewing does have a tiny brewery at 1208 Surf Avenue on Coney Island where small batches of specialty brews are made and sold to the public. The brewing venture is a partnership between Shmaltz and Coney Island USA, a not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to “defending the honor of American popular culture.”

Next on my beer tasting agenda is Coney Island Brewing’s Mermaid Pilsner. I’ll be reporting on it soon.


Source: Self-Absorbed Boomer
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tzVM/~3/YNNwXnnxALY/coney-island-brewings-seas-day-india.html

From the Web

Around Brooklyn, Bloggers

Update on Lou Reed: his Grace Church connection (thanks to Binky Philips).

November 2, 2013

I damn near vandalized my briefs when I read the first sentence of Binky Philips’ Huff Po piece:

I first met Lou Reed at the Holiday Fundraiser Fair at Grace Church in Brooklyn Heights, the day after Thanksgiving, 1967.

Lou at the Grace Church Fair? My wife has been a stalwart Fair worker for maybe the last thirteen years or so. Of course, 1967 was well before our time here in the Heights. I was starting my first year of law school in Cambridge, Massachusetts and she was a sixth grader at a Catholic school in Lynn, a few miles away. Had we been introduced at the time, and told that we would someday be married, we would both have been very surprised, perhaps even (at least in her case) horrified. (I would probably have thought: “Well, she’s not the upper middle class WASP princess of my dreams, but she is pretty.” She might have thought: “What an pretentious, pseudo-intellectual twit.”)

Anyway, Lou was not present in person at the ’67 Fair. Mr. Philips, fourteen at the time, “met” him in the form of a stack of the first Velvet Underground LPs (you can always get some really good stuff at the Grace Church Fair; trust me), one of which he bought, took home, played, and didn’t like. He described Lou’s vocal delivery as “Bob Dylan with a Brooklyn hitter accent.” Two years later, stoned, and with a friend, he pulled the album out, played it, and SHA-ZAM! He was converted.

Later, Mr. Philips had several in person encounters with Lou, almost all of them in music stores. In one of these, he did manage a brief, inconsequential conversational exchange about a guitar. I was once (apart from the Detroit concert) in Lou’s presence. This was at a party, sometime around the ’70s-’80s cusp, in the then edgy (now touristy) Meat Packing District. My friend Charlie (not to be confused with Binky’s friend Charlie) pointed him out to me, standing maybe twenty feet away. I resisted the temptation to introduce myself, knowing I was not cool enough to merit his attention.

Mr. Philips writes that he was in the Grace Church Choir (by which he presumably means the Youth Choir) for three years. Among his choir mates at that time likely would have been Harry Chapin and Robert Lamm, later keyboardist, vocalist, and songwriter for Chicago.


Source: Self-Absorbed Boomer
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tzVM/~3/FYMWtoJnaRs/update-on-lou-reed-his-grace-church.html

From the Web

Bloggers, DUMBO

Karl Junkersfeld’s "A Tale of Two Bridges"

August 10, 2013


A Tale Of Two Bridges from Karl Junkersfeld on Vimeo.

My Brooklyn Heights Blog colleague made this video. He gave it the title “A Tale of Two Bridges” because it includes scenes of and on both the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, but it concentrates on the latter, lesser known span. Lesser known, that is, until recently, according to this New York Times article. The Times piece attributes its new found popularity on the fact that its Brooklyn anchorage is next to DUMBO (“Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass”), a neighborhood that has undergone roughly the same evolution that SOHO in Manhattan did starting about two decades earlier: from decaying industrial area to place where artists could occupy cheap if not yet quite legal loft spaces to trendy Bohemian neighborhood to pricey place for the rich but hip, combined with office space for tech companies.

I have a particular affection for the Manhattan Bridge: it was my first crossing of any of the East River bridges. This happened in 1954, when I was eight years old.  My parents and I had just returned from England, where my dad, a U.S. Air Force officer, had been stationed for three years. We came by ship, and debarked at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. There we boarded a bus to Penn Station that took us by way of Flatbush Avenue (when we turned onto this broad thoroughfare my dad, an Indiana native who had spent some time in New York City early in World War Two, said “This is Flatbush”: noticing some low-lying shrubbery in a planter box on the median, I thought I knew what he meant) to the Manhattan Bridge, where I was thrilled by the view of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and East River traffic.

The  Manhattan Bridge was the last of four East River bridges–the others, in order of completion, are the Brooklyn (1883), the Williamsburg (1903), the Queensboro (now officially the “Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge”; also known as the 59th Street Bridge and as such immortalized by Simon & Garfunkel; March, 1909)–to be completed. The Manhattan Bridge was partially opened late in 1909, but not fully opened until 1912. It was designed by Leon Moisseiff, who was also involved in the design of the Golden gate Bridge and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, but whose reputation was blotted by his having been the principal designer of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a.k.a. “Galloping Gertie” (caution: the linked video may give you nightmares, though it may also warm the hearts of dog lovers).


Source: Self-Absorbed Boomer
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tzVM/~3/0hiqrSM-UOk/karl-junkersfelds-tale-of-two-bridges.html

From the Web

G Subway Train Returns With Limited Service

November 7, 2012

The MTA announced this morning that the G train has returned, albeit with “with extended waits between trains due to ongoing signal repairs,” according to Curbed. The train will have eight cars, up from its usual four, so it’s actually the size of a regular train. It is running between Court Square and Church Avenue.

City Council Member Steve Levin, whose district includes Greenpoint and parts of the waterfront stretching from Williamsburg to Brooklyn Heights and into Park Slope, raised sand Monday that G and L subway service had not yet returned following Hurricane Sandy. He told The New York Observer, “Commuters along the G-train deserve the same service and respect that other lines get. And the same goes for the L-train.”


Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/51481

From the Web

News

Hurricane Sandy Updates: Keep Up With Storm’s Brooklyn Progress

October 29, 2012

Lots of information about Hurricane Sandy is flowing on the Cobble Hill Blog’s sister Brooklyn Heights Blog. See continuing coverage of storm-related news and local info here and here, including statements from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and borough President Marty Markowitz. Also: lots of local images as the storm progresses.


Source: Cobble Hill Blog
http://cobblehillblog.com/archives/7967

From the Web

Around Brooklyn, Bloggers

Live blogging Hurricane Sandy from Brooklyn Heights

October 28, 2012
An encouraging omen? Brooklyn Heights Blog reader Jay took this video from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade of a rainbow appearing to extend from the Statue of Liberty to lower Manhattan.
9:30 a.m., Tuesday, October 30: There’s still a brisk wind but, at the moment, no rain. Lots of people are out, and the flimsy tape barrier across the Promenade entrance is being ignored with impunity. Our building crew are out clearing leaves from the sidewalk.
Damage to the Brooklyn Heights area has been limited to downed trees and limbs and some minor structural damage. Nearby low-lying areas have been flooded–the storm surge was a whopping thirteen feet above normal–and, in a flooding related incident, there was a fire, evidently caused by electrical problems, in the basement of a large co-op apartment building just below the Heights. Fortunately, no one was hurt. 
Other areas of the City were not so fortunate. Probably the worst disaster was a fire that destroyed about eighty houses in the Breezy Point section of Queens. There is extensive damage to shorefront properties throughout the region. As has been widely reported, an explosion destroyed an electrical substation in lower Manhattan, and much of that part of the City, which includes the financial district, will be without power for an indefinite period. A concern for Brooklyn residents like me is that the subway tunnels connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan have been flooded with salt water, which could damage switches and signals and keep trains from running for several days.
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie….
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall (1918). 

It’s dark outside, and there’s a steady rain falling, The wind seems to have abated, but as I type this, there’s a strong gust. I’ll be back in the morning.
4:40 p.m.: Despite the police barrier, and a cruiser occasionally coming by with a loudspeaker imploring people to get off the Promenade, they keep coming. This is confirmed by the video made by my BHB colleague Karl Junkersfeld today, featuring an appearance by our publisher, Homer Fink.
Update: The Daily Beast has this snarky view of what’s going on in the neighborhood.
2:30 p.m.: The wind is stronger and steadier, but there are still people on the sidewalks, some walking dogs.
11:30 a.m.: The wind is picking up again. Tape has been stretched across the entrance to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which is part of the New York City Parks system, and therefore subject to an order closing all NYC parks for the remaining duration of the storm. A civilian leaving the Promenade helpfully lifts the tape for an NYPD car to enter.
10:30 a.m.: I decide to take a walk to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, just across the street from where I live. The wind is minimal, a few desultory drops of rain come down, and lots of people are out. Afterward, I walk back a block and find our local supermarket, Key Food, is open, so I’m able to score two things I forgot yesterday: half-and-half for my coffee and kitty treats.
Fellow Brooklyn Heights Blog contributor Chuck Taylor went out with his camera earlier and got these photos.
8:15 a.m. Monday, October 29. There’s a strong, steady wind, and some rain has fallen during the night. A neighbor is walking his French bulldog.
10:30 p.m.: the Jersey lights are still bright, the wind has settled, and The Weather Channel’s storm tracker shows the center of the storm still a little south and east of Cape Hatteras. The North Carolina Outer Banks must be taking quite a pounding now. TWC’s projected path has it somewhere well east of the Virginia capes tomorrow evening (gad, this thing moves slowly), though we should be feeling its effects pretty strongly by then. Projected landfall is somewhere around the mouth of Delaware Bay Tuesday morning. I hope Cape May’s Victorians emerge unscathed. 
It’s 8:55 p.m. and I can still see New Jersey from my window. The wind seems to have calmed down a bit.
At 6:30 p.m. I realize I’ve forgotten to put Idaho potatoes in the oven prior to my wife’s safe arrival from Boston, so I go on an emergency run for Tater Tots. I find the wind picking up, but still no wet stuff.
At 5:21 p.m., dusk is approaching. The sky is a solid gray overcast. The playground is empty. There is a steady, soft breeze. Sandy, it seems, will arrive after nightfall.
For the duration, I’ll be posting updates, including photos when possible, on the storm’s progress as seen from my window overlooking Pierrepont Place in Brooklyn Heights. If things get exciting enough, I may include some video snippets. This was the scene at 10:20 this (Sunday) morning: some sunshine, a gentle breeze, and kids in the playground. New York City is taking storm preparation very seriously: evacuation orders have been issued for low lying areas as a storm surge that could be as much as eight feet above normal is possible; and the subway system is shutting down starting at 7:00 this evening. Stay tuned.


Source: Self-Absorbed Boomer
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tzVM/~3/FIO-qxbtUB0/live-blogging-hurricane-sandy-from.html

From the Web

Around Brooklyn, Bloggers

Duncan Island departs; Alice Oldendorff returns.

October 1, 2012

Two weekends ago, as I was walking between Piers 5 and 6 in Brooklyn Bridge Park, I saw the refrigerated container ship Duncan Island, of the Ecuadorian Line, departing from the nearby Red Hook container port (despite earlier predictions, it has survived). According to Shiptracking, a most helpful tool for ship buffs, she was bound for Antwerp.

Yesterday morning I looked out my kitchen window and saw an old friend heading into the Governors Island Channel toward the East River and her customary dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I quickly changed from PJs to exercise clothes and ran out to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade where I got this photo of Alice Oldendorff, accompanied by a McAllister tug. Alice is a particular favorite of Will Van Dorp, publisher of Tugster: a Waterblog, where he once posted another photo I took of Alice heading up the East River. For some reason Shiptracking gives no information about where she came from; I can only surmise that she’s bringing her usual cargo of crushed stone from Canada, likely loaded at Halifax.


Source: Self-Absorbed Boomer
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tzVM/~3/4429BvRbwyQ/duncan-island-departs-alice-oldendorff.html

From the Web

Brooklyn Heights, Real Estate

It Pays To Live In Brooklyn: We’re The Second Most-Expensive City In The Nation

September 6, 2012

This isn’t necessarily the kind of statistic that fosters a giddy smile. According to a story in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Brooklyn is the second most expensive city in the nation, topped only by our sister to the west: Manhattan. The Washington-based Council for Community & Economic Research based its survey primarily on housing. There is no neighborhood breakdown, but past studies would obviously place Brooklyn Heights, DUMBO and Williamsburg at the peak of the borough’s hierarchy.

Behind Brooklyn are: Honolulu, San Francisco, San Jose, Queens and Stamford. Conn. The Council’s evaluation ranked 300 American cities based on other factors, as well, including utilities, transportation, grocery prices (damn you, Gristedes!) and prescription drug prices.

Using the number 100 to represent the national average, Brooklyn ranked at 183.4 overall: 129.9 in groceries, 126.4 in utilities, 104 in transportation costs and 111.1 in healthcare—along with a whopping 344.7 in housing. Manhattan’s average was 233.5. The Eagle points out that this means housing costs in Brooklyn are more than three times the average American city, like Erie, Pa., or Charlottesville, Va.

Borough President Marty Markowitz told the Eagle, “Brooklyn is thrilled that so many successful men and women, particularly in professional fields, have chosen to live here, adding to our economic diversity and making it one of the most desirable places on the planet to live, work and play. But we are also mindful that Brooklyn must never be a place of only the very rich or the very poor.”

Carlo Scissura, president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, added, “As Brooklynites, we want to be No. 1 in everything, but I don’t think we want to be Number 1 or 2 in this survey. We want to keep the middle class here. We don’t want them to leave.”

(Graphic: Chuck Taylor)


Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/47235

From the Web

Brooklyn Heights, News

Brooklyn Leads NYC Population Growth Since 2010 Census

June 30, 2012

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, New York City’s population increased from 8,175,133 in April 2010 to 8,244,910 in July 2011, up 0.85 percent over the 2010 mark. The largest change in the city’s population occurred here in Brooklyn, increasing by almost 28,000 persons or 1.12%.

That was followed by Manhattan (up 1.01%), Queens (up 0.77%), the Bronx (up 0.50%) and Staten Island (up 0.37%) over the 15 month period. NYC’s increase since April 2010 represents 80% of the total rise in New York State’s population, which, in turn, raised New York’s City’s population percentage of the state from 42.2% to 42.4%.

New York City’s growth spurt added more people than any other city in the nation for those 15 months ending July 1, 2011. Kenneth M. Johnson, a senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire, said a number of other large cities have also grown faster since 2010 than during the first decade of the century. The combination of people arriving and fewer leaving contributed to their growth. “Fewer people are moving out of the big urban cores because the recession has tended to freeze people in place,” he said.

In addition, “A number of studies have found that there’s a stronger preference for walkable neighborhoods that are close to transit and the younger population is driving less than they used to,” said Christopher Jones, VP of research for the Regional Plan Association. “All of that favors cities, and New York City in particular has become a more desirable place to live over the past 15 years because of everything from reduction of crime to improved subway service.”


Source: Brooklyn Heights Blog
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/43252

From the Web

Events

Coney Island Boobies: The Mermaid Parade 2012

June 24, 2012

A half million folks crowded Coney Island today for the 30th annual Mermaid Parade. The beloved march of self expression is a rite of summer in Brooklyn and this year was no exception. Check out reactions from around the Twittersphere or whatever the kids today are calling it as well as Brooklyn Bugle photos by Tim Schreier.

(Featured photo by Tim Schreier)

Created with flickr slideshow.