snack: landjäger / strudel
drink: harpoon island creek oyster stout / sixpoint sweet action
guess what time it is? it's NEW COLUMN TIME! since i live in nyc & a good percentage of you DEVOTED eat!drink!snack! readers are also here in the city, i'm introducing "only in ny," a column devoted to establishments here in the city that i've stopped in for a snack & a drink. enjoy...
i'm a beer snob connoisseur. fuck wine. fuck hard liquor. i drink beer. i drink it for the taste. i drink it for the funny things it does to my brain. it's good like that.
a formative moment in my beer drinking history:
back in college, i was in a non-sexual assault ridden frat & when we threw parties it was all shite keg beer & "punch" served in a dark basement. i was all "fuck basement beer." it's a scientific fact that milwaukee's beast tastes like ass, so i decided that if i was going to get wasted on copious amounts of beer & mack on chicks, i was going to at least enjoy getting wasted.
my solution: i carried around newcastle in a backpack, which, as a phish phan, was a staple of my outfit anyhow & helped solidify my reputation as "the hippie brother."
these days, i'm just as snobby. sure i'll drink bud light or PBR with the best of em, but that's only out of convenience or lack of funds and i'm TOTALLY being ironic whilst doing so. if i have a choice, i'm drinking some shit brewed with coffee or juniper or triple hops or something.
ever since i moved to the park slope area a few years back, 90% of my snooty beer purchasing has taken place at bierkraft, with their store-length coolers filled with hundreds of bottles of beer from around the U.S. and the world. my brain LITERALLY explodes with joy every time i enter the store.
they also offer growlers, a system where you're able to bring home a big jug o' beer fresh from one of their taps, but after years of frat keg-purchasing gone horribly wrong, i never felt like i could handle the responsibility of a jug deposit, so i've yet to take part in the growler system.
last year, they added in-store pints straight from the tap to the equation & ever since, i've thought to myself "i should actually grab a beer and sit one day." i don't though. i'm in there a few times a week & every time, instead of buying a beer from the tap & chilling, i end up buying beers & retreating to my apartment, where i don't have to worry about things like "pants."
...then everything changed last week, when i caught word via the twitters that bierkraft was extending their friday and saturday hours to 11pm and adding a SNACK MENU. since i'm a certified, professional snacker, i figured it was not only my duty but my destiny to go & sample said snack menu. that was the thing that would get me to actually sit down at bierkraft & have a beer...at picnic tables...amongst strangers...a snack menu.
my first attempt at sampling the snack menu was two saturdays ago, when i went there with a friend in the early evening only to discover that the menu was only available during the extended hours (9-11pm). to that, i gave a hearty "balls!" but since i'm a man who looks discouragement straight in the eyes & hurls feces in its general direction, this past friday i decided to make a second attempt at the snack menu and met a friend/certified female there a little before 9pm.
while we waited for the snack menu to kick in, we started off with harpoon island creek oyster stouts straight from the tap and were lucky enough to be able to grab a seat. pretty much every time i go there, the tables are filled with beer snobs eating $10 sandwiches, but the first two times i've stayed for a beer, they've been nice enough to slide the fuck over & share their table space.
the oyster stout...it's the newest of harpoon's "100 barrel series," a series of beers that features a new release every couple months. usually i'm all "fuck harpoon," but i liked this stuff, with its dark, toasty, chocolate flavor. between this beer and the harpoon chocolate stout, i've come to the conclusion that the only thing harpoon does right is a stout. other than that, they suck.
once 9pm came, we were already ready for a second beer & the snack menu. my certified female friend stuck with the harpoon for her second beer, a decision which i thought was pretty awesome. you hear that ladies? chicks who dig stouts rule.
since i'm flighty, i decided to switch it up for my second beer and went with the sixpoint sweet action, brewed right here in red hook. it was pretty aight. i could see drinking a ton of these, since it's not too hoppy or fruity. to boot, it went quite well with the snacks.
our first snack was landjäger, a dried sausage rocking an umlaut. it came with two sausages still attached at the end of the casings & in trying to divvy them up, we actually had to each grab a sausage & pull in opposite directions with some amount of force to separate them...just two friends out drinking beers & yanking on sausage.
...& then biting into said sausage. given the difficulty of separating the sausages, we were a bit worried that they were going to be a bitch to bite through, but they totally weren't & to be honest, the most satisfying thing i took away from it was the idea that i was drinking a beer whilst eating the best slim jim i've ever encountered...a HIGH CLASS slim jim. my trusty companion noted that the landjäger "tasted like a campfire."
we also got strudel, which on that evening was filled with hot soppresata, buffalo mozzarella, caramelized onions, fresh oregano & sun dried tomato. they gave us the option of cold strudel or warmed-up strudel & since i'm a fan of both billy wilder & robert palmer, i had them warm it up. i'm not sure it made that much of a difference though. basically, the strudel was like eating a tiny tubelike calzone. after snacking on the meaty landjäeger, the soppresata was almost non-existent, but the sun-dried tomato & onions peeked through.
both snacks went for $5, which might seem a bit steep for a strudel or a fancy slim jim, but when you think about what you'd pay for those tiny-ass sandwiches down at reis 100, it's not that unreasonable.
of the snacks we tried, the meatstick is definitely worth getting again, but i'd probably pass on the strudel. not because it was bad but because i was just like "meh." they occasionally have bratwurst on the menu, but they didn't on friday night. to that, I give a hearty "balls!" i would've totally got the brat. the rest of the stuff on the snack menu was a bunch of pickled stuff--pickled celery, pickled egg & pickled asparagus. we weren't in a pickled mood though.
...& with that, i'd like to end with a question a friend posed to me today:
why is it that of all the vegetables that get pickled, the cucumber got to be the vegetable that became the pickle?
lucky cucumber.
bierkraft, 191 5th ave, brooklyn, 718-230-7600
this column originally appeared in almost the same format on the delicate cyberpages of fuckedinparkslope.com.