As a tag line for a beer guide, “Foam is where the heart is” is hard to top.
Where to Drink Beer (Phaidon, $30) is a new handbook that highlights the top places to do just that in more than 1,600 establishments worldwide. The volume includes such idiosyncratic spots as a stall next to the Central Ferry Pier in Hong Kong, a brewery attached to a toy store in Maryland, and a laundromat in Brooklyn. What makes this book notable, though, is the author: Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø, a beer world celebrity, known for his exhilarating Evil Twin brews and for making the concept of gypsy, or nomadic, brewing popular around the globe.
For the inaugural beer guide—an offshoot of the Phaidon guidebook series that includes Where Chefs Eat, now in its third edition having sold more than 250,000 copies—Bjergsø polled 500 of his peers, from Beijing brewers to Brazil beer writers and London pub owners. His thick textbook-style volume doesn’t have compelling pictures of brown ales or bars lined with dozens of taps. It’s geared for geeks: The only decorations are basic maps and quotes where the word “amazing” frequently appears. Instead, the book is dense with the names of places and the categories they fall into (“beer garden,” “local favorite,” and “wish I’d opened” among them).
The Best Beer City in the World
Based on his research, Bjergsø has a surprising pick as the world’s best beer city: It’s not London or Munich or even the craft beer mecca San Diego; it’s New York.
“If you had asked me five years ago, I would never have said New York is the world’s best beer city,” says Bjergsø, although to be fair, he does have a vested interest in that answer. The Danish-born brewer owns Tørst, an acclaimed five-year-old bar in Brooklyn, and he’s in the process of opening a large taproom in Ridgewood, Queens. But Bjergsø notes that the 2014 Craft New York Act, which cut restrictions on producers, facilitated New York’s ascendancy.
“The main reason New York was lagging is that it was too expensive to own a brewery here,” he says. Beer has always been a cheap product compared with other alcoholic beverages. The Craft Act allowed brewers to sell pints, instead of just samples, from their taprooms. Beer also became a luxury item, going from a standard $5 to up to $20 a pint.
“Ten years ago, if you made 2,000 barrels, it was hard to survive. Now you can make pretty good money with that,” says Bjergsø. “The profit goes from about 15 percent to 80 percent if you sell direct at a brewery.” He adds that Evil Twin selections such as Harlan’s Even More Jesus cost more than $40 a bottle on store shelves. “People buy them like crazy.”
Among the 24 New York spots in Where to Drink Beer are the East Village biergarten Zum Schneider and Cannibal, with its encyclopedic selection. Bjergsø calls out two favorites here that show the range of what’s happening in the Big Apple.