Eat the City(63)

The German neighborhood faded away as its children assimilated and moved on, and the old Yankee Stadium has been destroyed. But the Colonel also left behind a cultural shift, an idea so natural that it now feels inevitable: it can be argued that it was Jacob Ruppert who married beer and baseball as the most American of pastimes. He certainly tried.

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JUST past nine a.m. on a Friday in June finds Josh Fields and Jon Conner and two friends pushing stainless steel containers up a ramp into a twenty-six-foot yellow Penske truck. They move the boil kettle, and then comes the biggest 535-gallon mash tun. The task is to lower each beer vessel into the next largest, the 108-gallon hot liquor tank inside the 360-gallon boil kettle inside the 535-gallon mash tun, protecting each layer with moving blankets and custom-made foam—and to do it all by hand. “We’re gonna make a Russian doll of beer,” says Jon. Every time they nudge it, the largest vessel emits a deep clang like a steel drum, or some hulking, metal-voiced beast. “Geronimo!” Jon calls as the men slide the two inside the third with a hiss. The next question is whether the ramp to the truck can support the weight of all the vessels at once. Three men push and one pulls. “This is so dangerous, and they’re so fearless,” says Gilda, Josh’s soft-eyed girlfriend, a graphic designer. When the vessel-encrusted vessel is safely stowed in the truck, the rest follows: a capper machine to lid beer bottles, big plastic tubs of grain, boxes of empty bottles, a vacuum pack machine for preserving hops, a handful of kegs. I help load in mini kegs—dozens of them, still smelling of beer. Some of the kegs are positioned a bit precariously, but Jon shrugs it off. “If it breaks, we can fix it,” he says—he’s packing the welding equipment. Passing cars slow down so the drivers can stare at the unusual contents of the moving truck. “You guys starting a f*cking brewery or something?” someone calls out.

In fact, they’re moving one, to Oregon, that promised land of brewers. Of course, they’re not the first to give up on New York City. In 1966, the Jacob Ruppert Brewery shut down. In the next decade, all the other local brewers closed too; it had become too expensive to produce beer in New York City.

In Portland, Josh and Jon will find cheap space, that most important and difficult commodity for a person interested in brewing beer. They’ve taken up the offer from Jon’s dad to use his big rural property, where they can live in a trailer in a field and incubate their brewery in the barn until they can rent a permanent space in Portland. Equipment is cheaper. Things are easier to transport. There’s parking.

As they pause to gulp water, a man asks Josh to move the truck so he can get his car out of his garage, but as soon as there’s room, the UPS guy slips into the open spot. “It’s so aggro here,” says Jon. “Everything’s a think.”

Jon and Josh, sweating through their T-shirts, hug good-bye. Josh will go first with Gilda in this truck, and Jon will follow in a few weeks with his brother in a convoy of two more twenty-six-footers full of brewery equipment. Jon slaps Josh’s back: “I’ll see you on the other side.” Gilda’s waiting in the cab of the truck. Josh scrambles up into the high seat and starts the engine, and the yellow Penske pulls out of the parking space into traffic.





FISH


THERE’S MAR GONZALEZ, throwing a spider crab through the air so that it arcs against the blue sky, its eight black, silty legs kicking all the way until it lands from whence it came, in the salt surf off Coney Island. “Wow,” says a woman nearby, watching the soaring crab. “I play football, that’s why,” Mar says, shrugging off the compliment. You’ve got to return the rejects.

Back at her bucket, she pokes through her cache. A half dozen blue crabs, pincering each other, and two meaty-looking fish, all of them floating in seawater. “What she’s got here is rare,” says a shirtless man with a concave belly and slicked-back hair, peering into the pail. In fact, what she’s got here is her standard take, good when boiled with a little salt and some Old Bay seasoning, and enough to last until the next Saturday finds her back on the pier.

“How old are you?” another kid asks. “Twelve,” says Mar. “No way!” says the kid. She looks bigger and older, and it’s just not that common to see a twelve-year-old city girl, hair braided off her face, skin the color of sand, wearing a white T-shirt, orange shorts, and soaked red socks, sinking raw-chicken-baited crab traps thirty feet off a pier.

“I’ve been fishing since I was one month old,” she says. “My dad had me in one hand and the fishing rod in the other.” Like centuries of fishers in New York City, she knows how to read the water and anticipate her prey. To her right is a sign that says, PREGNANT WOMEN, WOMEN OF CHILDBEARING AGE, AND CHILDREN UNDER 15 YEARS OLD SHOULD NOT EAT FISH OR EELS CAUGHT IN THESE WATERS. Mar pays no attention.

“Fishing is free,” she says. “It’s the only thing in the city you can eat for free.”

New York is full of people like Mar, fishing because they like to and they need to, because fish are free and gear is cheap and every day you have to eat. In the far East Village, a couple of boys sit in a bus shelter on Avenue D, holding heavy, wet plastic bags shifting with pincers, waiting for the bus to take them to Chinatown markets to sell crabs they just raised up from the East River. Along the banks of the Harlem River, homeless guys have set up tarp tents as shelter for their fishing. “I don’t have time to fool around,” says Philip Frabosilo, a taxi driver who keeps three rods “pre-rigged” in his trunk—loaded with pale, stinking bunker fish—so that when a fare takes him toward the waterfront, he can set up in less than two minutes, fish for half an hour, and get back in his cab.