Our annual alcohol issue has just finished fermenting, and the print issue will hit the streets imminently, but why wait to uncork it? Download our digital edition free here now.
This year’s vintage is a boozy doozy, brimming with edible-minded tales of beer, wine, cocktails and spirits, all brewed, distilled, shot, shaken and stirred right here in the BK. However you get your hands on it, you’ll savor our stories on:
-Red Hook’s Cacao Prieto and the 007-style founder (seriously) who got a license to distill. Today the genius adventurer-inventor makes serious spirits out of cacao beans.
-the young woman who couldn’t find her ideal vermouth and set about to make it herself, complete with a carload of bittering agents grown in a Fort Greene garden. Just don’t judge this bottle by its label.
-an ancestral fermented drink called Kvass, made from rye bread or beets, long beloved by Eastern Europeans in Brighton Beach, and recently given an artisan makeover by the locavore hipsters at the Clinton Hill–based Gefilteria.
-an upstate orchardist’s son who’s becoming a cider scion. At the Greenmarket, his new “Bad Seed” bottles of hard cider are an easy sell.
–Peter Becraft who went from a weekend job ringing up bottles at Greene Grape to an eventual post as head vintner at Anthony Road Winery up in the Finger Lakes. Jealous? So are we.
-Beautiful bitters made from ingredients foraged right here all summer. By winter they’re ready to deploy by the drop in drinks.
–egg and Parish Hall chef-owner George Weld, who considers his years on and off the wagon and decides that each is half full.
–Allen Katz, the dapper distiller whose year-old Williamsburg liquor factory is tricked out with killer equipment—and one of the best bars we’ve ever been to.
This issue definitely drove our staff to drink—in a good way. We hope you find the results intoxicating. Just don’t spill your drink on your screen. Read it here now.
