The Great American Ale Trail - Christian DeBenedetti [125]
Southhampton
SOUTHAMPTON PUBLICK HOUSE
40 Bowden Square • Southampton, NY 11968 (631) 283-2800 • publick.com • Established: 1996
SCENE & STORY
Hitting the Hamptons doesn’t have to mean dodging the tourists getting plowed in cheesy bars. The first and only craft brewery on the East End of Long Island (which once boasted scores of hops farms), Southampton Publick House calls a weathered former juke joint home and has the soulfulness to prove it. Inside a hedge area there’s a bar-serviced patio, and inside, a bar and tables amid wood-paneled Yankee décor and nautical knickknacks. The beer is the main draw. Founding brewer and former engineer Phil Markowski is the author of a seminal 2004 book on farmhouse ales (Farmhouse Ales: Culture and Craftsmanship in the Belgian Tradition) and he excels with the earthy, spicy, and unfiltered end of the spectrum of beer, as evidenced by his tart, award-winning, low-alcohol Berliner Weisse (2% ABV) and a strong (9.5% ABV) Belgian pale ale called Grand Cru, among others. He also experiments with fresh hop ales, made with “wet” hops that are brewed within hours of picking on the same day each fall. With the prefect crop (rain can intervene), these beers are more aromatic and delicate than typical beers using hops that have been dried and stored, exploding with mouthwatering aromas of citrus, pine, and powdery floral notes.
PHILOSOPHY
Farm-to-brewery. “There’s an unfortunate disconnect between brewers and their ingredients,” Markowski said recently as he picked through loaded vines at the hopyard of local farmer Gian Mangiere, located at the western edge of Southold Town on Long Island. One of the few farmers growing hops anywhere in the Northeast, Mangieri says he does it for the love of beer. His tiny patch of Cascade, Nugget, and Fuggles hops—the delicate green flowers that give beer its aroma, bitterness, and aftertaste, sticky with lupulin, a resinous substance resembling pollen—were decimated by over twelve inches of windy rain that June, but they still managed to gather about six pounds of Cascades, which they immediately transported to the brewery and added to a special one-off 330-gallon batch of ESB. Mangieri has plans to double his hopyard.
KEY BEER
A strong Belgian-style Pale Ale, Southampton’s 9.5% ABV Grand Cru is Markowksi’s best beer to date, undlerlining how he’s one of the few Americans that can pull the Belgian game off year after year. With appealing hints of anise, coriander, and orange peel, this is your ultimate special occasion beer at an everyman’s price.
Pleasantville
CAPTAIN LAWRENCE
99 Castleton St. • Pleasantville, NY 10570 • (914) 741-2337 captainlawrencebrewing.com • Established: 2005
SCENE & STORY
Captain Lawrence’s cozy, sage green taproom draws a steady stream of locals and their guests who know that tours and samples are both free. In tony Westchester county, the straight-talking head brewer Scott Vaccaro and his father (often helping out in the taproom) and other crewmembers (many related to the father-son duo) come off as refreshingly down-to-earth. Not so long ago the younger Vaccaro was getting his butt kicked as a freshman in Villanova’s accounting track, largely because he spent all his time home brewing with anything he could get his hands on, even plastic gasoline canisters. He graduated up to junior college in Cupertino, California, his last step before attending the fermentation science program at U.C. Davis, from which he catapulted into externships in Connecticut and England and finally an actual job at Sierra Nevada. The rest is history, and today Captain Lawrence (named for the street the Vaccaros lived on when Scott was a boy) is among the best-known and most accessible New York area breweries. As of late 2011 Vaccaro had planned to move his operation to 444 Saw Mill River Rd., Elmsford, NY 10523.
PHILOSOPHY