The Greengrog house held a soiree last night — as previously mentioned — featuring local beers. We’re very lucky, in that Brooklyn has a bunch of good choices and there’s a delightful store down the street (that’d be Bierkraft) that will fill up our growlers, cheap! Can you beat 64 ounces of Sixpoint Apollo Wheat for $12? Nope! You can’t.
Well, for other New Yorkers, we found an enticing service offering from Beer Table, another local joint: Beer catering!
From Beer Table’s site:
Do you wish you could enjoy the pleasures of Beer Table in your own home, office or location of your choosing? Well, now you can have your beer and drink it too! Hire us to cater your next beer-themed bash, meeting, or gathering of any type. We’ll bring Beer Table to you with our new off-site service, Beer Kitchen.
Beer Kitchen is a fully customizable catering service that can provide beer (and food) for your next event or party. Be as creative as you like - just call us and we’ll work with you to make your event great. We can work with any size or budget.
The site goes on to list a few sample catered selections. I wrote to ask if they would be willing to put together a sustainable selection, and their response blew me away — it was “no.” But, hold your horses, it was for a really great reason! From Justin at Beer Table:
Hey Dave,
Thanks for the note! I’d have a hard time feeling super honest about this one since most local breweries are using ingredients from around the world, and are therefore not particularly local. I think if I were to design a sustainable drinking party, it would still be pretty international in scope, but would focus on breweries that had the capability of actually using their regional ingredients - something very possible in Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, and England, but not common at all in the Northeastern USA. It would be interesting to try to open this discussion a little further with a comparative tasting of international styles that do have a sense of terroir.
Whoa! Three cheers for honesty, conscience and… beer!
But for my money, local’s still the best, and here’s why: If everybody’s bringing ingredients from far away (which they’re not, but sure, the vast majority are), then that’s your level playing field. From there on out, you can only really consider the things we keep hammering at here on Greengrog — water, gas and energy. The quickest way to save on those is to use less packaging and less travel. Therefore, local growlers it is!
But thanks to Justin for the swell note, and we’ll be giving beer table’s catering a try before too long, we’re sure.
(Hey, if you’re not living in New York, but know of similar services where you live, post ‘em in the comments!)
