Off Licence - NY Style

We flew into JFK Terminal 8 and made our first schoolboy error almost immediately. One of my wife's colleagues had told her to get an airport shuttle into town from the transport information desk as it was cheaper. Bad move. It took us an hour an a half to get to our hotel on the Upper West Side. A taxi would have been more direct and cost approx. The same price as they have a fixed cost between JFK and Manhattan. Anyhow, putting this aside we arrived at our digs in the mid afternoon and promptly headed out exploring the Upper West Side (UWS) and Midtown areas before jet lag put my wife out of service. On the way back to the hotel I popped into the NY equivalent of an off licence to pick up some booze. This was a funny experience as I was carded by a kid who must not have been a day over 16. The fact that I have a large proportion of gray hair and I am on the wrong side of 30 should have been enough, but obviously they roll a little bit differently in the States. So the missus went to sleep and I watched a 'Rock of Love, with Bret Michaels omnibus whilst drinking my purchase.

First up was Magic Hat #9 which is a not quite pale ale. Basically it tastes like your typical west coast US pale ale (Columbus and Cascade) but has an apricot like twang. My guess is that they add apricots to the boil and this adds some flavour to the beer. It's odd and takes a bit of time to get used to, but it's not unpleasant either. I followed this up with a bottle of Blue Point Hoptical Illusion, which is a 6.8% IPA that tasted like bitter pine cones and not much else. It was OK, but not really all that balanced. Blue Point is a small micro based on Long Island New York. Apparently their beers are hard to come by even in NYC, so I guess I was lucky to stumble upon them. I also had a bottle of Blue Point Spring Fling (6.0% abv) which tasted like a balanced and toned down version of the Hoptical Illusion. It had very little aroma and a slightly astringent grass like taste but I guess this is par of the course with these US pale ales. To top off the evening (I was pretty tired at this stage, even though it was probably only 9pm) I had a bottle of Sierra Nevada ESB (5.9% abv). The ESB stands for early spring beer and it's a US interpretation of the English ESB style. It's OK and it tastes like pine cones. I think every beer I had in the US tasted like pine cones! Not necessarily a bad thing, but it gets a bit boring after a while. Anyhow by this stage the hop demon and the alcohol was amplifying my jet lag and I wandered off to bed, but I did manage to see Bret Michaels choose his final two 'love matches'. If only off licences were this good in the UK!

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BTW - Bret Michaels is the former lead singer from '80s hair band Poison. He looks old and hagged and now wears makeup. He is also bald, but uses strategically placed bandanna's and hats to hide the fact that he is wearing a wig. A true hero for all you aging Generation X rockers.