Ahhhh Global Entry, what a beautiful thing I somehow just managed to discover despite years of international travel…
Applying for Global Entry was probably the easiest thing I have ever done in my life. Fill out an obnoxious application online, wait a few days to get your conditional approval email…and then comes the hard part if you live in New England: finding an open interview time that isn’t 39372629 months away.
I feel like one could say that Logan Airport in Boston is one of the busiest airports on the east coast….but for some reason they only offer interviews on the weekdays and at less than ideal times. What’s up with that??? A few blogs I read suggested trying to find times at smaller places so I thought “surely Rhode Island has some open times before my trip to Europe in October”. WRONG! They’re even worse; Providence only offers interviews about 4 hours a day, Tuesday – Thursday. I work in Boston so clearly that wasn’t going to work.
My only remaining option was JFK Airport in New York. Ugh. Darn. I have to go to the capital of the world that happens to have super delicious food, a pretty good beer scene, & a good friend that I haven’t seen in a few months?
What. A. Bummer.
I’ve never been to JFK before & I was pretty nervous for this whole experience. Would I get lost at JFK? What if I was late for my interview? How long would it take?
I am here to tell you that that was legitimately the most painless thing I have ever experienced in my entire life. JFK’s directions are fantastic. People at the airport aren’t necessarily nice (are they at any airport though?) but they are helpful when needed. And the total time I spent parking my car, doing the interview, & exiting the parking garage took a grand total of 31 minutes.
You know what that calls for?
A quick brewery crawl in Brooklyn!!!
To start, my fiancé, a good friend of ours, and I headed to Radegast Hall & Biergarten in Brooklyn for brunch.
This place looked super cool from the outside, but I honestly wasn’t sure if they would have anything I like. As you learned from my last post, I am pretty picky when it comes to beer. I also don’t particularly like pork or bratwurst type foods, which apparently this place is known for. German beer garden specializing in brats….my fiancé must have wanted to see how I react to getting set up for failure.
Well guess what? It was AWESOME! (And not just because it had really good lighting to practice my photography skills with…#DoItForTheGram)
Almost none of the beers sounded like anything I would like, except for the Blanches de Bruxelles. A quick Google search reminds me that it was described as a “Belgian White Witbier”. It was basically a fancy, more refined Blue Moon. I did not hate it and would definitely have another one.
The best part of Stop #1 though was the food. Oh. My. God. I was going to attempt to be brave and try steak tartare for the first time, but I figured that that would not be the best time to try it considering we were planning on hitting up at least two more breweries. Instead I opted for the perfect pre-game meal: steak and eggs.
The steak was fine, it honestly wasn’t anything special but the portion size was wonderful. The eggs were cooked to pure over-easy perfection. Slightly soft egg whites, runny yolk that soaked into the steak…YUM!
But the real showstopper? Those damn french fries. I was expecting hash browns, this was brunch after all, and when my plate arrived with these thin fried pieces of potato I was planning on just skipping them altogether. Thank God I didn’t! These fries were essentially perfectly crispy shoestring fries with this unique seasoning on them that I can’t even begin to accurately describe. It was almost a bolder version of the spice that Red Robin puts on their steak fries. Literal heaven in my mouth. If you’re ever in Brooklyn on a Saturday morning, you should definitely make it a point to stop by Radegast! (Especially if you’re a fan of German beer. My fiancé loved it.)
Stop #2 was Interboro and it gets only two compliments:
1.) It had a cool vibe going on inside.
2.) The names of their beers were cool.
Other than that it gets no compliments from me. Sorry, guys.
They seem to specialize in double IPA’s and bad service. No one working there seemed to be nice even by New York standards, and as a girl that does not like IPA’s it definitely was not the place for me. I did try their Juice of Zeus because it had a cool name and it sounded citrusy so I figured I was most likely to somewhat enjoy that. I was wrong. At first glance I thought the color was pretty…then after tasting it it reminded me of the color of your throw up in college when you thought it would be cool to drink hard liquor all day without eating anything. Why did it remind me of something so specific, you ask? Because it honestly tasted like vomit. Fiance and friend agree.
K, enough of that. Onto Stop #3: Grimm Artisinal Ales.
At first glance, Grimm was everything I could have ever asked a Brooklyn brewery to be. It had an airy feel, a young crowd, the beer labels had stunning artwork…it was all wonderful.
A little background:
At first, I was technically given false information and was told that Grimm was a female owned and run brewery. That got my feminist hippie soul super excited! However, a trip to their website tells me that that is only half true and that it is owned by a male and a female (although maybe I’m just assuming that…if you know one way or another please feel free to tell me so I can correct this!). Grimm was started by a couple of artists originally as a “nomadic brewery” in 2013. For those that don’t know, because I didn’t until last week, a nomadic brewery is essentially when people experiment and create a brew in their own homes. When they find something that they like and want to distribute, they sort of rent out tanks at big breweries to create large commercial quantities.
Their Brooklyn location is their first permanent spot and it just opened this past June. I have been to a lot of breweries, small and large alike, but I have never seen one as slammed as this one. I honestly cannot wait to see where Grimm goes in the future now that it has (semi) permanent and visible roots.
Now on to the beer!
Truthfully, I only tried one….and then I had about three more of that one…because it was freaking awesome!
This beautiful pink-hued beer was called Lilt (or as my ridiculous male travel companions felt the need to call “Lil T”) and it is a golden sour made with tart cherries. I’m normally pretty iffy with sour beers; I like them, but it’s normally a one and done type of situation. The sweetness from the cherries balanced the sourness just enough that it made me keep going back for more. This beer is also a barrel-aged beer (something else I have a weakness for) so the 6% alcohol content certainly helped me put these back as well…
I truthfully couldn’t tell you what my drinking buddies had, but I know they enjoyed it. My fiancé enjoyed his so much so that he bought a growler of whatever it was that he was drinking (sadly for me they were only doing pours of Lilt…so until next time my beautiful pink friend…)
Disclaimer: Mark & I collect growlers and the growlers at Grimm were the most stunning I’ve ever seen in my life so even if we hated the beer, that little piece of art was coming back home with us regardless…
I’m sorry this post wasn’t as detailed as the last, but sometimes the best adventures are the ones without a history lesson attached.
Here are some of my favorite random pictures for your entertainment 🙂