BRONX ALEHOUSE • KINGSBRIDGE, BRONX
[This is part eight in a series of sneak peeks from the chapters of my book Bars, Taverns and Dives New Yorkers Love, coming out in March 2018 from Rizzoli Publishing.) You can order it online now at Powell’s, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.]
The Bronx Alehouse is what you want in a proper beer bar: lots of wood, a really long bar, some exposed brick, a few TVs, a lively, friendly vibe, tables on the sidewalk out front, and—so importantly—an affable, beer-savvy, competent staff. You walk in and you just know that this place has it together.
The Alehouse manages a kind of old-school beer bar feel with more modern touches like damn fine food and flat-screen beer menus designed by Digital Pour above the bar, with easy-to-read, real-time stats on every beer in house, including price, serving size, glassware, ABV, percentage of each keg remaining, and what’s “tapping soon.” It’s a remarkably clever use of technology, and “much easier and safer than the chalkboard we used to have,” co-founder and -owner James Langstine points out. “Climbing on a busy, often wet back bar right in front of the taps was getting pretty messy.”
For a beer bar, Bronx Alehouse’s 16 draft lines and one cask might seem skimpy, but there’s a well-considered reason for that number. “We thought it was the perfect amount of variety, but small enough to move everything quickly,” Langstine explains. “Nothing is worse than walking into a place, seeing 100 lines and knowing at least half of them barely move. So we try to use about half of our lines to cover the most popular styles and the other half to get things that are often more unique, limited, seasonal, etc. We try to make it so that there’s something for the craft beer novice and the total beer geek, and everybody in between.”
It’s just another one of those touches that shows you somebody really cares, and that gets me back to the basic philosophy behind the Bronx Alehouse. “We wanted to have a place where you could get a great beer,” Langstine says. “Eat great food, watch the game with friends, bring a date, be by yourself, or have a party. So since 2009, this place has become all of those things to the regulars. My two favorite things to hear are ‘The neighborhood really needed a place like this,’ and ‘I moved to this neighborhood because of this place.’”
Next up: the Bronx Beer Hall of the Belmont neighborhood in the Bronx (New York’s “real Little Italy,” as they say), another chapter of my book Bars, Taverns and Dives New Yorkers Love, which you can order right here. Limited-edition signed prints are available here.
