New York, NY: Late-Night Blurriness with Dogfish Head at Eataly [Post-Grad Boozin’]
The last foggy stop of the night was Eataly. Well, it was supposed to be the roof-top beer garden Birreria, but they were too busy to let us up there and took our names and number instead. Or we were just visibly drunk and they didn’t want us up there. I’m going to go with the former.
Right around the corner was the beer section of the Market. Not surprisingly there was a fair selection of Dogfish Head beers, some easy to get a hold of, some rather difficult. The one that stood out the most was Urkcontinent, the DFH /Google collaboration beer that hit DFH’s brewpub last fall but hasn’t made it to bottles until recently. After purchasing it, we asked if there was a place where we could crack it open and we were told we could grab some glasses and shop around, but tables were for eating guests. Totally fine with us.
We “found” some wine glasses and a table in the market by La Pizza and started pouring. This beer was fantastic. The past couple of new DFH beers I’ve tried have been kinda let downs (ta henket, Tweason’ale), and this one completely blew my mind. the coffee and chocolate notes are outstanding. I’ll admit that at this point I was three sheets to the wind, but we still all collectively enjoyed this beer. Definitely picking one of these up when it hits the Capital Region.
We still had some time to kill so we grabbed another two bottles from the fridge: Black & Blue and Sah’tea. We drank these and bullshitted and chatted with guests and shopped. It was an amazing time, probably better than actually making it up to Birreria. I picked up some pasta, some of “the stinkiest, nastiest, smelliest, feetiest” cheeses they had available, along with some aged prosciutto and some dessert to go. In my drunken stupor, NONE of this made it home on the train with me, which is a huge disappointment.
So Eataly was a great time. But I didn’t really get to experience Eataly since we kinda took an unconventional approach to enjoying our time there. I will be back (with Elise in tow next time) to enjoy all of the delicious beer and Italian food to the fullest.
matthew 'fuj' scher 