Bomb Lager - NYC, NY

To kick off the first beer review in close to five years, I figured what better way to go than with something new and local. That, and Bomb Lager was also the cheapest 6-pack available at the overpriced organic market on my block when I was headed back home from Pearl's Social and Billy Club at 2 AM.

New York City isn't exactly a mecca for locally-produced craft beer like the cities of the Pacific Northwest. So whenever something new pops up on the local market, I'm sure to seek and destroy with a vengeance. Many parts of2009 and 2010 are but a faded memory, a blame I place solely on Sixpoint....and maybe Kelso. The point is, a new local brew doesn't escape me for very long. It only took me four days to procure a sixer of Bomb Lager after reading about it in this article.

A few questions still remains though....Can the beer really be called "local" and "craft"? Bomb Beer Company is a NYC-based business but contract Lion Brewery in PA to produce it. If I'm correct, Lion Brewery is hardly a local craft brewery. Regional favorite(for some) yes, but more on the macro side of the American brewing world. I guess I would have to have a better understanding of the contracted terms to see which company actually designed the recipe.

For a $6 six-pack at an overpriced gentro-bodega, I can actually forget about those questions in a timely fashion. Not so quickly to forget I'm drinking something that is no more than a couple steps away from a shitty American Macro Lager. Bomb Lager pours a bright amber, with a fair-sized white head that will stick around for the duration of drinking. As far as duration is concerned, it really shouldn't take you more than 10 minutes to knock this session beer back. Like most American Lagers, opening a cold one and taking an instant sip is sure to produce gasface from the bitterness. That's why I have found it best to wait a few minutes after pouring before knocking it back. I have also found the drinking it at a warmer temperature is a more pleasurable experience. Drinking it at 45-50 degrees brings out more of the Helles style that Bomb is supposed to be modeled after.

Now we get to the artwork...blarggh! I love street art just as much as the next bearded fucker who calls Bushwick home, but I am of the opinion it doesn't belong on a beer can. I like my label art to to have elks and drunk monks, even images of Lucifer. The current label makes me think I'm drinking alcoholic Kool-Aid like FourLoco and all the other ghetto shit that mocks it. Street art belongs on brick walls, not a can of craft beer.

Despite my hatred of the can art, I can't really go wrong with the price point. It's the best party/session beer that I'm going to find in these parts. It's even cheaper than getting a sixer of PBR, and much better in taste and quality. It couldn't have come at a better time. I've been disgusted with my old friend the Blue Ribbon lately, and was on the verge of never touching it again. Bomb Lager just gave me a good reason not to.

Old Blog, New Face..Get Straight to the Pint

I can't believe it's been almost 5 years since the last time I updated this fucking thing.

I first moved to Brooklyn over 5 years ago from a quaint town on the New Hampshire seacoast. Before the move, I had been a bit familiar with the blogosphere, having been a member of Livejournal since 2002. Like most people who used LJ though, I didn't really consider it as much of a platform to get my thoughts and ideas out to the public as a whole as I do now. The early days of LJ were more of a diary I could share with my friends, utilized in the same way that the Facebook wall is today. It wasn't until further down the road when I started using blogs to develop more of my internet identity for the world to see. Instead of being some dude from the burbs who left status updates about the day-to-day of a slacker twentysomething, I started participating on political and art forums as a form of reaching out to people I would never meet in real life. This eventually lead to using early social media to reach out to bands I wanted to book. By the time I left Portsmouth, I was no longer just Steve the drunk proto-hipster who worked at a tobacco store for years. To me and my internet presence, I was Steve the Anarchist stencil artist who booked shows for touring bands. How cool was I?

Not very, as I soon learned upon my arrival to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Going straight from suburban social butterfly to alone in the big city was quite a culture shock to me, and gave me a sense of perspective. I might have thought I was cool before, but it didn't take long for me to realize how much of minnow I really was. So for the first 6 months of living in the city I didn't really do much socializing. I did do quite a bit of drinking at home. New York had 1000 times the beers that were available back home, so for a self-proclaimed connoisseur of fine beers back home, I had a lot of learning to do. Since I still felt the need to shake my internet tail-feathers, I created this blog shortly after I moved here. Not necessarily as a medium to flaunt my expertise in alcohol, but more of a learning and growing process with both my love of beer and creating a more suitable web presence. Instead of continuing the "look-at-me, look-at-me" persona that currently plagues the urban areas of America, I could be a semi-anonymous critic of the finer things in life. It was a much more fitting path for an aging hipster such as myself.

But over the months, my dedication to my beer blog waned almost overnight. I can't quite put my finger on exactly what happened, but it did. Even after five years of no entries, I never lost interest. Instead of sharing my opinions about beer with the world, I kept my findings more to myself and concentrated on other interests of mine, like trashy cinema and a social life. Over this time, I've learned how to market my opinion better with social media so my musings have a much larger audience than before, but I still don't feel as if I shake too many feathers. Since then, I have attached myself romantically to a fine specimen of a beer lover such as myself, and stopped being such a drunk socialite. My knowledge and excitement about beer has also increased tenfold since I've lived here, to the point where I'm in the process of brewing my own. Since I spend more time at home with the girl, and being a seasoned blogger, I figure now is as good of a time as any to jump start the first blog and add a a few new elements, namely a female perspective. So I've added a better name and design to the primitive blog I kept before and hopefully, a continued written word on one of my favorite things in life.....Beer.