We’ve been busy with new jobs, hence the glut of backlogged posts, but this one is too good to keep from posting any longer.

When we were doing our initial research for Greengrog, we met Mike Cadeaux of Peak Organic Brewing Company. He told us plenty of interesting things, and it was great to meet him because, for me at least, Peak’s nut brown ale was my first organic brew. I had tasted it on a whim at a bar called Redd’s in Williamsburg.

Anyway, he told us that Peak Organic had the only draught beer in the super-exclusive, delegates’ only bar at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. We didn’t quite know what to think (and honestly I still don’t), because Peak isn’t exactly a big name. In fact, they don’t even have their own brewery — they’re contract-brewed.

In the end, we decided that just made the story all the more amazing. I asked Mike for a quick summary of how it came to pass that a tiny organic brew from New England would be at the lips of United Nations delegates, and here’s what he shot over:

Dave,

Here’s what happened. The assistant beverage manager at the UN food service, under Aramark, found Peak at a beer festival in New York. He loved the beer and told us to come in and pitch it to the decision-makers at the UN. (I don’t know the actual name of the bar, nor am I convinced it has a real name). They liked it a lot, took it on in bottles, then decided it was time to do draft there and got a system for Peak to be featured on.

Pretty cool, Mike.

NYT beer feature: it’s against the law to have bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat food. That includes limes for beers.

The first stop was Smith & Wollensky, the revered brass-rail bar and steakhouse in Midtown where the staff wears sharp white coats. Patrick Ford, a bartender for 35 of his 53 years, was standing behind the polished bar amid gleaming bottles on a busy Tuesday night as he considered how to legally garnish a beer.

“I won’t wear gloves,” he said, his tall frame so thin it seemed his white coat was still on a hanger. “It’s not a doctor’s office. It’s a saloon.”

He fished out a Corona and looked around. “We don’t have tongs,” he said. “I’ll use a fork.”

He speared a little wedge of lime and walked past several amused regular customers, toward a waiting Corona. In his coat, holding the fruit before him, he looked like a mad scientist with a laboratory specimen. The lime addressed the lip of the beer bottle with uncertainty, but when Mr. Ford removed the fork, it stuck there. Men cheered.

“Hey, Patty,” one man bellowed. “Give me a Corona over here! Be sure to use a fork!”

Kevin Hooshangi, beer sommelier and owner of the Village Pourhouse, recently spoke with us about organic beer.

We knew the Village Pourhouse served Peak Organic, but we didn’t know they had the two Anheuser-Busch organic beers: Stone Mill Ale and Wild Hop Lager. We asked Hooshangi how he thought they fared against other organic beers.

“Well, Anheuser-Busch are like the New York Yankees. They have scouts that can go out and buy up any player,” he said. “Before, these were just craft brews. But now that association can give them a bad reputation.”

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