In the early 2000s of Manhattan’s post-millennium beer movement, “there weren’t many beer bars,” says Donagher, a fourth-generation bar owner who immigrated from Ireland in 2002 and has opened four beer bars since 2012. “I remember one time we had six Cantillons on tap for two weeks. Now, I can’t even have it on for two hours. Nobody knew about sour beer back then. I couldn’t sell it. I ended up selling growlers of Cantillon. We [had] a lambic festival, and nobody came.”
Beer in the Big Apple today looks a bit different. “The sheer number of bars that focus just on craft and take care of their draft lines has exponentially increased,” says Mary Izett, author of Speed Brewing: Techniques and Recipes for Fast-Fermenting Beers, Ciders, Meads, and More, who is also secretary of the New York City Brewers Guild, past president of both the New York City Homebrewers Guild and Malted Barley Appreciation Society, and current co-host of the Heritage Radio Network’s Fuhmentaboudit! podcast. “We used to do pub crawls and have places on the list that had only a few bottles of craft. Today, those options have exploded. A pub crawl would take you five days or multiple weeks at this point!”
This explosion hasn’t exactly supported brewery openings. Though Manhattan had multiple heydays of breweries, first in the mid-to-late 1800s and then again in the 1980s and 1990s, today, issues such as zoning laws, real estate costs, and availability of space make opening a brewery prohibitive at best. However, where breweries on the island itself may be lacking, access to amazing beer—both locally produced in the outer boroughs and around the country and the world—has skyrocketed in recent years.