This weekend we visited Gastro Market, a new sandwich shop / bar in Chelsea. The bar specializes in cask-conditioned beer, which makes it a bit of a rarity in NYC. They also have about a dozen well-selected taps, and a pretty decent wine menu as well.
The bar is beautiful – it’s all exposed brick and metal – and there’s a very large courtyard in back. The music and background noise level was perfect, fun but good for conversation, which is also becoming a bit of a rarity in NYC (Valhalla, I’m looking in your direction. Love your beer selection, but we clocked you at a sustained 100+ dB on an average night. I like beer but I also would like to keep my hearing). The service was friendly and pub-ish.
As for the cask beer, they have twelve firkins with gravity taps and cask breathers behind the bar. As a result, they were serving at room temperature rather than cellar temperature, which made the carbonation pop and quickly fizzle a touch more than if the casks were kept a few degrees cooler.
The cask variety was nice- a few pales, an amber, an IPA, and a few porters- and some beers definitely worked better in the cask than others. The pale and the amber I tried were both very nice and smooth, but the smoked vanilla porter was far too sweet and would work much better with a higher level of carbonation (the carbolic “bite” effectively increases bitterness a bit, which would balance out the excess sweetness).
This is definitely an American beer bar, and all of the beers, cask and keg, were of excellent U.S. craft pedigree. Unfair though it may be, I cannot help but compare them to the cask-conditioned Real Ale I got to experience when we were in Great Britain earlier this summer (unfair because the British brewing industry got a long, long head start, not to mention it wasn’t decimated by prohibition). The English and Scottish bitters I inhaled over there had an effervescence that is missing from these American casks. I’m not sure how of even if that can be recreated over here, with our beer distribution system being what it is. And shipping casks across the ocean wouldn’t really work; a cask of real ale is a living ecosystem, very sensitive to changes in movement, temperature, and pressure.
That said, more American brewers are exploring cask conditioning as a new (albeit paradoxically old) direction to head in. The quality of most of these beers was very good, and it only stands to get better. Cask conditioning is yet another way that craft brewers can distinguish themselves from BMC (and from each other), so I expect more and more craft breweries to produce cask-conditioned beers.
It may take a bit of experimentation and education to get into cask beer, and a bar like Gastro Market is an excellent way to sample and learn- they even offer a 4+4 cask+tap sampler tray. A short walk from Penn Station, Gastro Market is an excellent pint-and-a-bite spot before grabbing the train home. We’ll definitely be back.