"BeerOfTheWeek" news and stories

Last month, I abandoned my Brooklyn apartment to vacation by the ocean. Instead of flying to Florida, I rode the subway to Rockaway Beach, NYC's most affordable Atlantic Ocean escape.

Once the Rockaways were a refuge for middle-class New Yorkers. However, a misguided attempt at 1960s urban renewal sent this wave-kissed peninsula into a tailspin that it's only now escaping from. During my week there I found numerous signs of recovery, from first-rate fish taco shacks to water-hugging bars. As for craft beer, there was nothing but Bud, Coors and Miller by the bucket.

Then I heard word of Barrier Brewing. This summer, former Sixpoint Craft Ales brewer Evan Klein opened his own operation in Long Island's Oceanside -- right near the Rockaways. Craving craft beer, I drove out there and, hidden in a low-slung industrial complex, found Klein toiling in his nanobrewery -- that is, a micro-microbrewery.

"I'm the only employee," Klein said, showing me the high-ceilinged room filled with gleaming brewing equipment. Though his operation is small in scale, Klein's ambition is not. Klein produces about six different beers served across New York and Long Island. Three are currently on tap.

Joshua M. Bernstein has written about brews, bars and booze for New York Magazine, Time Out New York, ForbesTraveler.com and The New York Times.

As far as the boys behind Scotland's rabble-rousing BrewDog are concerned, U.K. beer is as tasty as tepid tea.

Most breweries make "bland, lightly hopped and mildly malty beer," complains Martin Dickie, who co-founded BrewDog in 2007 along with James Watt. Compelled to "make the beers we want to drink ourselves," BrewDog took inspiration from boundary-busting American microbreweries, turning out the hoppy Punk IPA, the whiskey-cask-aged Paradox stout and the Zephyr, a double IPA aged with strawberries in wooden barrels.

"We are raising the bar of beer produced in the U.K.," Dickie explains.

Nowadays, liquor store shelves sag beneath with double IPAs and imperial stouts -- flavorful, potent brews with ABVs that often hit 10 percent and above. But these beers are as innocuous as apple juice when compared with Samuel Adams' Utopias, which clock in at a liquor-like 27 percent ABV, giving the brew an "extreme" label. Thirteen states have banned its sale.

"This is the Starship Enterprise of beers," says Jim Koch, founder of Sam Adams. "We're taking beer where beer has never gone before."

Joshua M. Bernstein has written about brews, bars and booze for New York Magazine, Time Out New York, ForbesTraveler.com and The New York Times.

While cool, blustery fall weather stirs longings for steaming cups of apple cider, beer lovers have a reason to drink to the season: fresh-hop beer, a libation that's as fleeting as it is delicate.

August and September signal harvest season for hops, the flower cones that provide beers' bitter flavors. Generally, plucked hops are dried and sent into storage, losing aromatic oils and resins in the process. But a small portion of fresh hops are hustled to breweries in a race against time -- like grass clippings, the hops quickly degrade and decompose.

"Our hops come in by truck, typically in the middle of the night, and we begin brewing within an hour of arrival," says Bill Manley, communications coordinator for Sierra Nevada. "We don't stop brewing until all of the hops are gone, 24 hours a day -- our kettles actually begin to warp toward the end of the week from the constant heat."

But the potential destruction is worth the payoff: Harvest Wet Hop Ale, now in its 13th year of altering drinkers' perception. "Wet-hopped beers can sometimes take a first-time drinker by surprise," Manley says.

Joshua M. Bernstein has written about brews, bars and booze for New York Magazine, Time Out New York, ForbesTraveler.com and The New York Times.

The average Asian beer is feather-light and forgettable, the equivalent of drinking seltzer doctored with food coloring and a splash of alcohol -- look no further than brews like Vietnam's 33 Export and Singapore's Tiger Beer. But every blue moon, a cookie-cutter lager can shake our belief in mass-produced suds. To wit, Taiwan Beer, brewed by the government-owned and totally totalitarian-sounding Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation.

"The beer is purer and more flavorful than many other Asian beers," says Anna Zhang, operations manager for art-filled Shanghai restaurant TMSK, which sells loads of Taiwan Beer.

We can hear microbrew lovers loudly tsk-ing their disapproval. However, hear us out: While Taiwan Beer may pale in comparison to, say, Full Sail's full-bodied Session Lager, it more than holds its own owing to a recipe incorporating locally grown Ponlai rice, which provides a semi-sweet component.