Chelsea brewmaster brewmaster Mark Szmaida. Photo: Scott Gordon Bleicher

* Note: This story was originally published in the January/February issue of Edible Manhattan.

If you liked mediocre craft beer, the mid ’90s were a marvelous time in Manhattan. Caught up in the brewpub craze then sweeping the country, there was SoHo’s Nacho Mama’s Brewery, the British-inspired Commonwealth Brewing Company in Rockefeller Plaza and, in Midtown, the pseudo-Asian Typhoon, to name just a few—all serving New Yorkers so-so housemade suds.

Like many fads of the time—Riot Grrrls, pagers—brewpubs quickly passed. Due to poor-quality ales, poor ownership and outlandish rents—or a combination of all three—tap lines went dry, one by one. Admittedly, these early pints poured the foundation for our current craft coming-of-age—back then most city drinkers still preferred Miller, Coors or Bud—but no self-respecting contemporary brew hound would be caught dead with one of those amber ales in hand. When the foam finally subsided at the end of the decade, only a single brewery still made beer on the Island. “We’ve survived it all,” says Mark Szmaida, 57, the head brewer at Chelsea Brewing Company, which opened on the Hudson River-hugging Chelsea Piers at 18th Street in 1996. Szmaida is referring not just to the movement’s demise, but also to his own brand’s expensive misstep into bottling beers (more on that later); the post–9/11 days when the piers were used as a staging ground by the city; and Arctic winter weeks on the waterfront when both the temperature and customers slip into the single digits. Perhaps the place still exists because, unlike most other brewpubs, at Chelsea the focus was always on the beer: quality Manhattan-made craft ales like the thirst-quenching, easy-drinking Checker Cab Blonde—now seen on draft menus citywide—or the caramel-licked Sunset Red, a brew so good it won a gold medal in 1997 at Denver’s prestigious Great American Beer Festival. Continue reading →