what beers are you drinking?

[AaronS]

fat orange cat baby kittens hazy new england style india pale ale - brewed at two roads, 6.5% abv. I picked this up because I hadn't had a two roads contract "gypsy" brew in a long time and it's really bad.

[AaronS]

finback smooth beats miami india pale ale with coconut a collaboration with our good friends at j wakefield brewing - 6.2% abv. this is probably the only beer I buy every time it’s available to me. I don’t know what it is about the combination of artificial coconut and a good modern ipa that works so well for me, but this is always enjoyable and I was sad to see this is the last batch of 2022. recommended to morons.

[taion]

Why is beer so expensive in New York? Almost everything else – including wine – is comparably priced to what I can get in Vermont or New Hampshire, but the best options for interesting beers seem to be the specialty shops that charge like 6–10$ a can, which is twice (or more) what I pay in New England. 

Am I shopping at the wrong places? The premium here just for beer specifically is so weird.

[Wilfrid]

Don’t go see a baseball game, it will be $9 for a can of crap, tip expected. 🙂

 Seriously, the prices you mention are the going prices.

[Wilfrid]

Tenement Pilsner from Torch & Crown, apparently brewed in Manhattan.

[taion]

Right but I’d expect bar prices at a ballgame. My question is why specialty beer specifically is conspicuously more expensive at retail in NYC than elsewhere, even though comparable products like wine don’t show this skew.

[Wilfrid]

I can’t make those comparisons, but I can confirm those prices more or less are what you find here, uptown and downtown and in the boros.

That’s what I’ve seen anyway. 

[AaronS]

hard to say without knowing exactly what you’re trying to buy, of course, but the most likely explanation is that you are shopping at the wrong places.

but it’s also probably true that the better places are in neighborhoods you would find inconvenient and places near you are marking stuff up because they can. a few years ago there were lots of breweries that only distributed here and in their home markets because nyc was full of people willing to pay top dollar for beer, and the pandemic made that more true than it was before. expansion by the current wave of breweries has made the first part of that statement less true over the last year or so, but I definitely agree that the markup at a lot of the manhattan specialty stores is absurd.

I’ve often looked at say a $32 bottles of wild ale at brooklyn larder and wondered how many people there were who like beer enough to buy that bottle but don’t know that it was almost certainly available elsewhere for $18.

so where should you shop? if you have the time anything local is going to be much less expensive if you go to the brewery or buy in bulk and have it delivered to you. threes, which is hard to recommend for unspeakable reasons, has other breweries beer at good prices and delivers. the other thing that’s true in brooklyn (and was true in chelsea until 2021 when my drinking buddy moved) is a lot of grocery stores have 85% of what will be in a speciality shop at much better prices. the key foods near me has some really good stuff from time to time, and one of the bodegas near me always has cool stuff at slightly higher prices than a grocery store. if you’re dead set on drinking a specific beer there are quite a few of them that are pretty hard to buy at reasonable prices, but if you’re agnostic as to whether the ipas you’re drinking are from say foam and equilibrium as opposed to finback and other half you don’t need to pay anywhere near $10 a can. (local breweries triple or fruited ipas will be $6 a can at the brewery.)

the fact that the wine markup is the same in vermont and manhattan is more counter intuitive to me, but I guess there are a lot more discerning wine buyers than there are beer buyers.

you can also use beermenus to check prices on specific things.

[Sneakeater]

NYC wine markups tend to be less than most other places.

In other words, wine tends to be cheaper here than elsewhere in the US.  I always assumed that was because we have a bigger market so buyers can buy more aggressively.

I mean, it just makes sense to me that wine would be cheaper in NYC than in Vermont.

[AaronS]

jester king colonel toby a hoppy little farmhouse ale in collaboration with the kernel - batch #4, december 2021, 3.8% abv. the kernel is a london brewery, which is why this features a “sensible english grist” in combination with american hops and a mixture of native and brewers yeast. this has a nice combination of dry brett, a little bit of grain, and what seems like a mixture of noble hop spice and some american hop citrus. this is a really nice quaffer - it’s light and simple, but there’s enough detail that every sip is slightly different and their brett is just as nice here as it was in their bigger beers. recommended.

[taion]

Wow. Yeah, you’re right. So the price difference really is between specialist retailers here and … normal stores that have the same product at half the price. Weird.

[Orik]

Because they can

[taion]

Something to do with perishability and number of SKUs? Or that many of these places double as bars and don’t want to undercut themselves?

In places where both supermarkets and wine stores sell wine, it’s not like the supermarkets are cheaper for apples-to-apples product.

[Orik]

My corner bodega sells craft beer at about 2.2x wholesale. They have no bar aspirations. The place that do will sell retail at a similar price but charge extra to stay (e.g. 6.50 to go, 11 to stay)

 

I guess refrigerated rent and the people who replenish it are expensive, or it is because they can.

[AaronS]

birrificio italiano tipopils the original italian pilsener - bottle bottled in italy, 5.2% abv. this beer, which I think of as one of the all time classics, had shown up in a couple of different forms over the last few years, including a version that was dry hopped by b-united in connecticut that was pretty bad. these bottles, which aren’t dated, are terrific. there’s a nice straw like malt presence and a fair amount of what I think is probably saaz, which is followed a mellow sweetness and a hint of mint. (clone recipes have magnum, heersbrucker, and saaz.) this is fairly hoppy for a pilsner, but not as bitter as the way I remember it or the way that most of the “italian” pilsners made in the are. imaginary hairs aside this is excellent and worth the absurd markup I paid for it. strongly recommended.