We are extremely excited to learn that brewing beer is making a big comeback to New York City. Call up the brew crew and go have a cold one.

Mmm…beer.

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Many New Yorkers can relate to Homer Simpson, who once said, “I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer.”

Luckily for them, the city’s once-thriving brewing industry, which declined to nothingness in the 1970s, is enjoying a renaissance.

There are about a dozen breweries licensed to operate in the five boroughs, and that number is expected to increase to 20 by the end of the summer, according to Jeremy Cowan, founder of Shmaltz Brewing and president of the New York City Brewers Guild.

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  Suds and the City

“The average New Yorker is more and more interested in these wonderful projects,” Cowan said. “It just makes life better, and it makes the economy more dynamic.”

The breweries are based everywhere from City Island in the Bronx to the Rockaways in Queens.

Some companies such as Shmaltz, which is known for its “He’brew–The Chosen Beer,” contract brew outside of the city limits. Others, like KelSo and 508 GastroBrewery, make all of their beer here.

A third group, consisting of Brooklyn Brewery and Sixpoint Brewing, operate smaller facilities within the city and larger ones outside it.

“It’s a great cross section of all the different brewing models,” Cowan said.

All receive tax incentives for smaller craft brewers, even Brooklyn, which just completed an expansion in Williamsburg and produces more beer than the rest of its New York City competitors combined.

“There are still extremely few breweries (especially per capita) making beer in New York City,” Brooklyn co-owner Robin Ottaway said via email. “And most of those that do are very small.”

Yet Cowan pointed out that momentum is building.

“It’s an alcoholic refreshment, so there’s that element to it, but it’s also a piece of art and culture,” he said in reference to craft brewing. “That’s a very, very different concept than the assembly line, massed produced, widget philosophy that the big brewers have.”

History of New York City brewing

Ale has been brewed in New York City ever since the first Dutch and English settlers arrived in the 17th Century.

Germans immigrating in the mid to late 19th Century then introduced the concept of lager and turned New York into one of the two biggest brew states in the country.

With good tasting water and hops coming in from upstate, at least 100 breweries popped up in the five boroughs, according to Nina Nazionale, co-curator of “Beer Here: Brewing New York’s History,” an exhibit that ran last year at the New York Historical Society.

“It was a big industry here,” Nazionale said. “A big source of revenue, a big employer.”

Things started to turn south when mildew, spider mites and aphids decimated the New York hops crop.

Then came Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, which proved to be “the near death blow,” Nazionale said.

“It was such a long run of not being able to sell their product,” she added. “They were broken by it.”

A few brewers held on, but New York was easily surpassed in terms of production by such cities as St. Louis and Milwaukee.

When Rheingold and Schaefer closed their plants in 1976, New York City lacked a single brewery.

It essentially remained that way until 1987, when a journalist who learned to brew while stationed in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, where alcohol is forbidden, founded Brooklyn Brewery.

Despite originally producing all of its beer upstate, Brooklyn opened a second brewery in Williamsburg in 1996. Since then, it has been joined about a dozen other city brewers, with more on the way.

“Historically, it is really cool to see New York coming back to where it was in the late 19th century,” Nazionale said.

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It’s official: The Red Sox have completed their transformation from the gold standard in the cutthroat sports business to gold standard in bush-league promotional machines.

Perhaps it’s a last-ditch effort to save the fraudulent sell-out streak at Fenway Park or, perhaps, it’s actually (maybe? possibly?) a show of goodwill to a fan base it has bankrupted both literally and figuratively over the past decade. Yup, for the better, the Red Sox are going all San Diego Padres on us. They are slashing food and, most importantly, beer prices at Fenway Park.

That $5 Fenway Frank? Consider it $2.50 because they’re now buy one, get one free. Have a kid who lives on nothing but corn syrup and processed meats? Fenway is the place for you and your boy because he’ll eat free if he’s under 14 (just good luck fitting mini Mo Vaughn into one of those hard red plastic seats).

It’s plain to see that the Red Sox best move of the past year was not bringing in nice-guy Mickeys and Goofys named Victorino and Dempster in order to change the clubhouse atmosphere at the amusement park on Yawkey Way. It wasn’t dumping all that salary and headache last August in the Beckett-Gonzalez-Crawford trade. Nope, their smartest move in quite a while came when they decided to win back the hearts of their fan base with cheap food and booze. That type of strategy is more American than baseball itself.

Grappling with life

Without question, X-Pac’s Bronco Buster was the most crowd-pleasing wrestling move this side of Goldust’s Shattered Dreams production. But as we all know, you can’t keep pulling off the Bronco Buster for two decades and expect to have your anus come away unscathed.

X-Pac, aka Sean Waltman, who is apparently still wrestling in armories and bingo halls across this great land, tore his anus over the weekend while attempting the move on his opponent. His girlfriend tweeted after the injury, “We don’t know if there is a medical term for it…but he did a bronco buster last night that literally ripped his ass apart! :-/ Lost a lot of blood! Had surgery this morning and is on the road to recovery! Believe it or not..this has happened to him once before! #wrestling #seanwaltman #xpac @therealxpac #getwellsoonxpac.”

Awww, man. What I would have done for a nice anus hashtag.

Hopefully Vince McMahon will show some sympathy for his former star and throw X-Pac and his anus into some throwaway three-man tag at WrestleMania coming up in a couple of weeks. One can dream.

In the meantime, let’s refresh everyone’s memory on X-Pac’s personal life. He dated Chyna, who once dated his best friend Triple-H (who is now married to McMahon’s daughter, Stephanie). While dating Chyna, the two made a sex tape together. X-Pac now bad-mouths Chyna like nobody’s business, and Chyna is involved in full-fledged porn. Who says the wrestling business is sleazy?

Matt Burke is sports editor and a columnist at Metro Boston. Follow him on Twitter @BurkeMetroBOS

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It’s the news some beer fans have been waiting for: Soon, you’ll be able to crack open a cold can of Sam Adams.

The Boston Beer Company announced Tuesday that cans of the brewery’s flagship Samuel Adams Boston Lager should be on store shelves by early summer.

“In the past, I had my doubts about putting Sam Adams in a can because I wasn’t convinced that Boston Lager would taste as good as it does from a bottle,” founder and brewer Jim Koch said in a statement. “But cans have changed. And I believe we’ve designed a can that provides a slight but noticeably better drinking experience than the standard beer can.”

And it’s not just any old can. The BBC spent two years and $1 million developing the ergonomic “Sam Can,” working with the same company that designed the first Apple computer mouse.

Drinkers should be able to taste the difference, according to “sensory expert” Roy Desrochers.

“Although subtle, this can delivers a more pronounced, more balanced flavor experience – something that was very important to the brewers,” Desrochers said in the BBC statement. “The extended lip of the can also creates a smoother, more comfortable overall drinking experience.”

Craft beer drinkers are reaching for cans more often than they used to. According to industry watcher Brewbound.com, sales of canned craft beer have skyrocketed in the last few years, from $1.2 million in 2008 to $13 million by July 2012.

Follow Metro Boston on Twitter: @MetroBOS

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Pour all ingredients, except beer, into a mixing tin. Add ice and shake. Strain into a tall glass and top with equal parts Cherry Lambic and Hefeweizen. Garnish with a lemon wedge.

Dutch Air Mail
2 oz. Denizen Rum
½ oz. honey syrup*
½ oz. lime juice
Dutch lager beer (Heineken or similar)
Splash of pink grapefruit
 juice
Pour all ingredients, except beer, into mixing tin. Add ice and shake. Strain into a tall glass and top with beer. Garnish with a grapefruit peel  over the glass. (*Cut 2 tbsp. honey with 1 tbsp. hot water and stir or shake.)

Bombs Away
1 oz. Captain Morgan
½ oz. TY KU Sake Black
¼ oz. TY KU Citrus Liqueur
½ oz. simple syrup
4 oz. Hoegaarden

Pour beer into a pint glass. In a separate double shot glass, combine the rest of the ingredients and serve separately. To drink, drop shot glass in beer and drink together. Want to turn your drink into a game? Take a sip whenever a team scores or whenever a quarterback throws a bomb and it’s caught.

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“Beer is essentially liquid bread,” he says. “So when you think of Thanksgiving, the base of stuffing is almost always bread, and then it’s flavored with additional things. Its mirror image is beer.”
We got Schaffner’s top picks for what to serve alongside your turkey.

Must-have

1. Orval: “[It’s] produced by one of the six remaining Trappist breweries of the world — it’s actually made by monks. The beer has a little bit of a wild and funky element to it — they add a type of wild yeast to the bottling in order to achieve a secondary fermentation and the resulting carbonation. Any bottle conditioned beer will have a more effervescent mouthfeel with finer carbonation; but because of the addition of the wild yeast, Orval also has a wonderfully unique flavor accenting the carbonation.”

Big beers

2. Southampton Cuvee des Fleurs:
“Just for the presentation factor, it’s easier if there’s a couple of bigger bottles at the center of the table to pass around, as opposed to everybody having a little bottle next to them. The Southampton Cuvee des Fleurs is made in Long Island, and it is named as such because it uses a selection of different edible flowers as flavoring adjuncts. It’s also one of the drier beers.”

3. Brooklyn Brewery Local 1:
“It’s kind of Brooklyn’s homage to Belgian strong golden ales. It’s very versatile and there’s nothing that it’s really gonna conflict with that would appear on a Thanksgiving table.”


4. Brooklyn Brewery Brooklyn Sorachi Ace:

“If you enjoy a more spiced meal, I feel that [this] beer will stand up to that reasonably well.”

Safe bet

5. Any pumpkin beer:
“Some are sweeter, some are spicier, some are more robust. A lot of people think that would be a better beer to serve with the desserts, but I think it’s even better to have before the meal starts.”

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His latest book wants to make a similarly educated, open-minded beer-lover out of you before the hops snobs ruin your fun. Written under his pen name Joe Sixpack, “What the Hell am I?Drinking?” is a collection of 50 essays designed to shed some light on the gigantic draft list now available at your corner bar.

We caught up with him because, well, we never know what we’re drinking over here.

Do even you wonder what the hell you’re drinking?

It’s gotten to the point that yes, sometimes. I remember when you just asked for a beer and that was it. It was just beer. I think today, beer drinkers are confronted with thousands of different styles and might not be completely sure what they’re ordering.

Is that a good thing?

I think it’s a good thing — I’ll never complain about more beer. I’ve thought for some time now that we’re living in the best time ever to be drinking beer. Pretty much anyone can find a beer that they’ll really enjoy the flavor of. But an educated consumer is a good consumer.

It’s almost as intimidating as ordering wine.

I’ve described it as the wine-ification of beer. Beer, in many ways, has done things that are very wine-like. A good example is the price of beer. It’s inching upward and upward all the time. And I think that’s a bad thing — beer should be accessible, and it has to be careful about turning off consumers because it’s too expensive or too special. What beer has always done well is that it is the everyman drink — you shouldn’t have to worry about how to pronounce it.

Is part of this because we’re in beer-crazed Philly?

Philly is leaps and bounds beyond almost every other city in the country, but it is happening everywhere. When we started Philly Beer Week in 2008, it was the first one in the country. Now there are over 75 of them. And it’s not just big cities — I saw one the other day in Huntsville, Ala. I don’t think there’s much of a beer culture down there besides Bud, but they got it together.

So, what the hell are you drinking for Thanksgiving?
   
You would think that there would be a lot of fall beers out right now, but unfortunately most of the pumpkin beers are off the shelves. Right now, you’re apt to find the first of the Christmas beers coming in — some of the outstanding beers from Belgium and some of the American craft beers.

What’s on Joe Sixpack’s Christmas list?

Here are his three picks for seasonal brews this year:

1. Anchor’s 2011 Christmas Ale

2. Troeg’s Mad Elf Ale

3. Lion Brewery’s Stegmaier Winter Warmer

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Columbus Tavern
Columbus Tavern is
getting into the Oktoberfest spirit not with sauerkraut or schnitzel,
but with a specialty cocktail called the Orange Autumn. The drink, $12,
is made with Grey Goose Citron, lemon thyme, ginger syrup and wheat
beer. The drink is available through the end of the month.
269 Columbus Ave.
212-873-9400
www.columbustavern.com

508 Gastro Brewery
This SoHo brewery is
serving up a series of celebratory beers brewed and served on the
premises, including a new 508 Oktoberfest Marzen, created by brewmaster
Andrew Sant’anna De Lima. It tastes best with dishes such as their goat
ragu and wild boar. Enjoy now through the end of October.
508 Greenwich St.
212-219-2444
www.508nyc.com

Blaue Gans
Experience a traditional
Oktoberfest at Blaue Gans with live music on the weekends and specialty
dishes every night through the end of the month. Dishes include roasted
pork shoulder, a selection of pretzels and, of course,  authentic German
and Austrian beers.
139 Duane St.
212-571-8880
www.kg-ny.com

Guilty Goose
What says Oktoberfest more
than a dinner featuring pints and pints of beer? Enjoy a special beer
pairing dinner that features Six Point’s entire “Mad Scientist Ale”
series on Oct. 10 at Guilty Goose. The dinner is from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30
p.m. and is $75 per person. Reservations required. Can’t make it?
Luckily, other Oktoberfest specials will run until the end of the month.

131 W. 23rd St.
212-255-3727
www.guiltygoose.com

Pilsener Haus & Biergarten
This year, chef Thomas
Ferlesch will be serving up Austro-Hungarian food, such as cod filet
schnitzel and beef goulash. Specialty beer is on tap to pair with your
meals, including the U.S. exclusive of Paulaner Oktoberfest Weissen.
Live music, mug-holding contests and more Oktoberfest fun will be held
through Oct. 22.  
1422 Grand St., Hoboken
201-683-5465
www.pilsenerhaus.com

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The brewery, which calls itself the “world’s smallest brewery,” appropriately hosted the “world’s smallest ribbon cutting ceremony” Wednesday. The event drew representatives from Ripley’s Believe or Not.

CIBC boasts exclusively released beers that officials say are inspired by the local artistic and gastronomical landscape. Brew enthusiasts can pick from varieties like pumpernickel bagel and caramel apple ale.

The brewery also features Shmaltz’s Brewing’s Coney Island Craft Lagers and HE’BREW Beers.

Mini-cheers!

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Until now, beer was classified as a foodstuff.

But a new law changed that as part of a crackdown on alcohol advertising and nighttime booze sales.

The new law would also restrict the size of alcohol servings.

Vodka remains Russia’s most popular drink, but beer sales have tripled in the last 15 years. 

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