Where Brooklyn at!
If you’re an old hip hop head like me, you’ve heard MCs open with that crowd hyper for years.
Well … It’s Brooklyn in da house on the NA craft beer scene now with Brooklyn Brewery dropping its first alcohol-free brew, Special Effects. This is a near beer but you wouldn’t know it by tasting what was initially called a lager. It’s hoppy and rich as a pale ale and delicious as the real thing, but with an ABV of 0.4%.
The Special Effects line was first dropped in Sweden a couple years ago but it’s finally making its way from coast to coast in the U.S.
I’ve been fortunate to travel to the East Coast a ton, attending a number of games at Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden, so while I’m a West Coast guy I appreciate New York, it’s music and entertainment scene, and of course it’s beer.
And this non-alcoholic hoppy “brew” or amber doesn’t disappoint. In fact, if you poured me a pint of this at a Yankee game I probably wouldn’t have known it was alcohol free
It has an unexpectedly piney aroma (a la Sierra Nevada pale) that pours in a rich amber hue thanks to a mesh of pale, caramel and dark-roasted Munich malts. Then it gets a hoppy nose from dry-hopping with Mosaic, Citra and Amarillo hops. Yeah, not your typical craft beer. With a crafty, bitter finish, it makes you wish more breweries would pull off this “Special Effect.”
Here’s hoping there’s more hits coming out of Brooklyn! 🎤🗽🍻
