Chelsea Now photo by Shoshanna Bettencourt
Head brewer Chris Sheehan pulls a pint at the bar inside Chelsea Brewing Company, located on Pier 59 at Chelsea Piers. Behind him are the bar’s serving tanks, featuring the finished product ready to be served fresh.
Chelsea Brewing Co. to pour pints at first-time fest
Chelsea Now photo by Shoshanna Bettencourt
Copper-clad tanks at the Chelsea Brewing Co., make up the “brew house,” which churns out one of up to 20 of the microbrewery’s original beers.
By Charlotte Cowles
When you picture an avid beer-lover—or, as stated on Alex Hall’s business card, “cask ale consultant, craft beer advocate, author of ‘Beer Demystifier New York’”—Hall fits every inch of the image. British, impish and with a hint of a belly under his T-shirt, Hall slouched casually onto the bar at the Chelsea Brewing Company on Pier 59 on a recent weekday afternoon as he enthusiastically sampled the local brewery’s latest batch and discussed his upcoming brainchild, the Manhattan Cask Ale Festival.
Chris Sheehan, the head brewer at Chelsea Brewing Co.—Manhattan’s largest microbrewery—pulled another pint for Hall as he described the special brew he’s concocted in honor of the festival. The brew, also a celebration of Chelsea Brewing’s 1,000th cask, is called 1,000 Gyle Imperial Mild.
“The name is meant to be sort of a joke. It’s a very strong beer in terms of alcohol content, but mild ale is one of the lowest alcohol versions,” Sheehan said, explaining that its title is a bit of a wink toward breweries crafting higher-alcohol (or “Imperial”) versions, a trend these days. Hall nodded solemnly, swigging a glass of the high-alcohol brew without batting an eyelash—or demonstrating any of its effects.
Sheehan crafted the new concoction with the tastes of his clientele in mind. “New Yorkers, especially, seem to like really strong beer,” he said. “People come in here and really want something that’s going to knock them off their barstools.”
Chelsea Brewing Co. is capable of bottling 100,000 cases annually, building beer from the ground up: The 12,000-sqaure-foot facility features a fully automatic grain-handling system, 46,000-pound grain silos, and an automated bottling system capable of handling 2000 bottles per hour. It has operated at Chelsea Pier since 1995, the only New York brewery located on the waterfront, serving up to 20 original beers to West Side imbibers.
The brewery will play host to Hall’s first-annual Manhattan Cask Ale Festival from March 28-30, an event he and Sheehan discussed spiritedly during their recent exchange.
A wrinkled printout of the festival lineup, which consisted of breweries and the beers they’re bringing, lay on the bar in front of Hall, edited with pen marks and corrections. The number of casks—or different beers—included at the festival now reaches over 35. About 30 cask brewers will be represented, including three from the U.K. The Dark Star Brewery in Brighton, England, where Hall began his career brewing the company’s first batch in a pub basement in the early ’90s, will bring three casks.
So what makes “cask ale” different from what Sheehan refers to as “crappy” beer? Hall explains expertly that cask-conditioned beer, or “real ale,” is unpasteurized, unfiltered and created using traditional brewing technologies. It also must be carbonated strictly through yeast, which means that it cannot be served with any forced carbonation pushing it to a tap. Cask ale is always served either with a gravity-dispensing tap (similar to the kind on a lemonade cooler) or a manual pump, also known as a “beer engine.”
As yeast must be added to every cask to ensure that the beer continues to ferment, bottling becomes complicated. If a cask-conditioned beer is then bottled without additional yeast added to the bottles, it no longer can be defined as such. In order for a beer to be “bottle-conditioned,” a little bit of yeast must be added to each individual bottle. “There are exceptions to the rule,” said Sheehan, naming breweries that add yeast to their bottles to “provide stability to the beer.” But as a general rule, “any beer that has yeast in the bottom of the bottle would be bottle-conditioned.”
Sitting, drinking and talking about the craft of beer-making at the brewery’s polished mahogany bar provided the perfect setting: Tall windows face west to the Hudson River, and the restaurant’s high ceilings, white tablecloths and sunset views set a posh scene. However, brewing is not all pint glasses and scenic vistas, especially when it comes to competing against the sworn enemy of craft beer: large beer corporations.
“The big, terrible brewing corporations have got a stranglehold on the world, basically, with their mass-produced beer,” Hall said. “But people’s tastes are slowly coming around when they experience real beer.”
For the uninitiated, Hall clarified: “By real beer, I mean beer that is not made with rice, as Bud Light is. Some big beer companies make their beer with up to 30 percent rice.”
Sheehan then ticked off the apples-to-oranges differences between his brewing process and other mass-produced brews. “At those big breweries, the brewmaster just sits at a big computer and pushes switches,” he said. “I like to believe that the brewmaster from Anheuser Busch in Newark would be challenged to come in here and brew a batch.” He pointed to the towering vats behind the bar. “We do everything from the start to the finish, from unloading the barley off the truck to pulling a pint of beer. If something goes wrong, we deal with it, whereas if you work at one of those big-time breweries, it’s a factory! You just have a subordinate deal with it.”
The fight against bad beer brings the small breweries together, as evidenced by the upcoming festival. “All these breweries are all friends with each other,” said Hall. “It’s a community, really. We help each other out, for the cause of the beer.”
They appear to be fighting a winning battle, too: Hall explained that cask beer is growing at about 12 percent annually in sales, whereas the growth of sales of industrial beer, such as Budweiser, remains flat. To Sheehan, craft beer surpassing industrial beer makes perfect sense. “Why drink beer if it’s not good?”
Sheehan and Hall said that cask beer is mainly winning hearts and minds of former “bad” beer-drinkers, but they’re also seeing more women step up to the bar as well. “A lot of women enjoy good stouts,” Sheehan said of the darker, fuller-bodied ale. “If you think about it, it makes sense—the coffee and chocolate flavors are what women often like.”
In recent years, Sheehan said, the influx of small craft breweries has inspired more experimental versions of beer, with notes of blueberry, vanilla and cocoa creeping into brew flavors.
“We’ve just got to keep opening people’s eyes to what’s out there,” Hall said. “It’s a revolution, really it is.”
