NYC Beer Week is fast approaching. February 21-March 2 will find the city celebrating it's first love, beer. The oldest known brewery in the US was opened in New Amsterdam in 1633. Stone Street was once known as Brewer’s Lane because of a number of beer breweries located there during the New Amsterdam period. The wastewater reduced the dirt lane to mud so the village decided to pave the lane and later it was renamed Stone Street as the only cobbled street at the time. Today, Stone Street is once more a center of beer, though its focus is consumption rather than production.
German immigrants arrived to New York by the thousands in the 1800s and they brought their own beer style with them; Lager Beer. The style, fermented and served cold, became popular with non-German New Yorkers. Giant beer gardens and beer halls opened all over NYC. One, was the Atlantic Gardens located on the Bowery. History is repeating itself again as beer gardens and halls are all the rage in NY right now. For example, some great beer gardens that are around are Loreley, Greenwood Park, and the newly opened Paulaner Brauhaus.
The German immigrants also opened breweries and by the late 1800s, New York City boasted 125 beer breweries. Some of New York’s leading citizens were brewers. Jacob Rupert Jr., in addition to owning a large and successful brewery on the Upper East Side, also purchased a struggling and as yet unknown baseball club, the Yankees. He then used his beer wealth to purchase one Hermann “Babe” Ruth from the Boston Red Sox in 1919 and the rest was history.
Well guess what, it’s happening again as New York jumps into the fast lane on the craft beer boom. 14 breweries are now
Well guess what, it’s happening again as New York jumps into the fast lane on the craft beer boom. 14 breweries are now
producing beer inside NYC’s city limits, 8 of those have opened within the last 2 years and there are 5 more under construction. Learn all about it on our brand new NYC Brewery Tour, which launches in less than 3 weeks! You can also check out the upcoming NYC Beer Week, which will celebrate all the beer of NYC.