Is Riverhead poised to become the craft beer mecca of the East End?
The town boasts an expanding brewery operation, the Long Ireland Beer Company and one of the region’s premier retail beer distributors, Riverhead Beverage. Now three of the Riverhead’s best-known restaurants – Digger’s, the Cooperage Inn, and the Lobster Roll Northside — are working hard and spending plenty, to bring even more great beer to Riverhead.
The Cooperage Inn
A new beer garden is about to open at the Cooperage Inn in Baiting Hollow.
Restaurateur Jonathan Perkins, on the advice of his Manhattan-based nephew, looked hard at the boom in craft beers and how big-city sophisticates are rediscovering the pleasures of sipping suds out-of-doors. With his super-successful Fall Festival as a template, Perkins has transformed the outside of his Sound Avenue restaurant with new landscaping, vastly expanded seating, a new 12-tap, two-sided beer bar, and a new menu.
He’s making his new beer garden a celebration of Long Island craft beers – Riverhead’s own Long Ireland, the Blue Point and Greenport Harbor lines, products of the Great South Bay, Port Jeff, and Spider Bite breweries as well as selections from Brooklyn Brewery. Also offered will be a selection of Cooperage’s famous comfort food with bratwurst and kraut (of course), fire-roasted local corn from Rottkamp’s, soups, salads, and burgers. Contemporary music will keep the mood festive and toes tapping.
“The winery experience is something the North Fork is famous for,” Perkins said. “People come by the thousands to enjoy what they offer. We’re going to expand on that experience and market to our strength — serving up great food, great wine, great music, and now great beer.”
Pointing out that good beer can be ruined by bad delivery, Perkins explained, “We’ve built a huge, walk-in cooler under the main restaurant just for the beer garden. There’s a 12-line set of taps, connecting through a series of pipes, bringing perfectly chilled beer to the customer’s glass.”
Initially scheduled to be open weekends only, Perkins said the beer garden is slated for its debut later this summer.
The Lobster Roll Northside
Craft beers are also the focus a bit further east on Sound Avenue, where the Lobster Roll Northside is nearing completion on an indoor tasting room.
Owner Fred Terry said the new tasting room is designed to provide both an introduction to the region’s local bounty, including fresh fish, vegetables, local wines and craft beers. It will also provide a venue for learning the brewer’s art, he said.
“This will have a completely different feel from our restaurant,” Terry said. “We’re taking the best of the island’s beers, pairing them with cheese and other platters, adding music and creating a comfortable café. It’ll be a great place to hang out,” he said
Marketing director Melissa Martin said “right now craft beer is hot” and seemed just the right thing to help “give customers another side of the Lobster Roll.”
“We’ll have all the wineries represented as well as all the Island’s craft beer brewers,” Martin said. “We’ll work with them to cross-promote. Folks can get samplings here at the Lobster Roll and then we can send them along with special promotions.”
Like Perkins, Terry stressed the need to invest in quality delivery systems.
“We’ve had to put in all new taps and a new refrigerated space to serve from. We’re starting with six new taps and will expand as our business grows.”
Martin said the tasting room’s grand opening is slated for early August, with a soft opening this month.
Digger’s Fine Food & Spirits
With more than 55 craft beers, plus another dozen mass-market brews already in the house, Digger’s owner Steve Wirth and friends began wondering what more they could do to promote good food, good beer, and good times in their saloon. The answer, said Wirth, was adding a micro-brewery, right on premises.
So in the next month or so — now that the State Liquor Authority has given Wirth the go-ahead — expect some heavy demolition on West Main Street to make way for the hardware associated with a seven-barrel brewery (the equivalent of 14 kegs per brew).
Wirth said he plans brew “all kinds” of beer.“We’re not going to get pigeon-holed into one style or another,” he said. “Our plans are to try ’em all, using Digger’s as a ‘test kitchen,’ to see what styles prove most popular. We’ll make porters and stouts, red and browns, Belgian and lagers, plus seasonal beers such as pumpkin ale in the fall,” Wirth said. “We’ll probably narrow our focus down to three different styles in the end, but at first we’re going to give everything a try.”
The restaurateur hopes to help put Riverhead on the map as a regional source of great beers, much as the Guinness Brewery has helped make Dublin’s reputation as a great beer town.
“When we applied for our brewery license, our choice was between a ‘brew pub,’ which is limited to outside sales of 250 barrels a year, and a ‘micro brewery’ with an upper limit of 2 million barrels a year,” Wirth said. “We chose the micro-brewery license.”
In practical terms, that means that someday soon, Wirth’s “Crooked Ladder” beer (the brewery’s current working name) could be available not just in Riverhead, but up and down the East Coast.
“Craft beer sales are increasing at 10 to 12 percent a year,” he said, “while mass market beers are seeing 2 and 3 percent annual declines. Craft beers are here to stay and we want to be part of it.”
Wirth expects the first pints to be drawn this October and Digger’s will kick off the new brewery with a gala OctoberFest celebration.
Long Ireland Beer Company
For 10 years Greg Martin and Dan Burke kept warm keeping things cool, working together in the heating/air conditioning business and brewing beer as a hobby. But a few years ago they took the plunge full-time into the brewing business, founding the Long Ireland Beer Company, brewers of Celtic Ale, Breakfast Stout, Pale Ale, and a half-dozen specialty and seasonal brews.
Last year, they opened a brewery in the long building on Pulaski Street that for many years was the home of the Riverhead Agway.
Long Ireland’s brews can be found in nearly 400 restaurants, pubs, and retail storres from Montauk to Manhattan.
“Drinking good beer, locally made good beer,” Martin said, “is one of life’s little affordable pleasures, like taking your wife out for a nice restaurant dinner or buying a better bottle of wine.”
Locally, Long Ireland beer can be found in most area restaurants. But the real treat, and a big part of the town’s new claim to brewing fame, is Long Ireland’s tasting room.
“There’s no bar stools, no big screen TVs, just tasting samples of all the beer we make,” Martin said.
People come to the tasting room from all over, he said.
“Some folks drive out towards Orient, start at the Greenport Harbor brewery and work their way back west, coming to Riverhead, where they often stop for lunch, and then on to Patchogue for tastings at the Blue Point and Brickhouse breweries. It’s a brewery tour, in the same vein as touring wine country.”
“Craft beer is doing great,” Martin said. “We welcome everyone into the business, the more the merrier. We’ve had great community support and we’re trying to give back as much to Riverhead as we can. We’re all in this together.”
Riverhead Discount Beverage
With more than 500 beers on the floor there’s no lack of choice at Riverhead Discount Beverage, said owner Kevin McKillop.
“We’ve got every type of beer you can imagine,” he said. “Whether you want bottles, cans, or kegs, it’s here. Plus we have a six-tap growler station featuring craft beers from Long Island and across the country.” Growlers, he added, are a throw-back to the days before beer was bottled. “A growler was a bucket o’ beer that could be carried around … a pail people used to bring beer home.” Today, he added, folks like ’em because they’re economical and environmentally friendly and it’s the best way to enjoy fresh tap beer without having a keg in the kitchen.
As a full service beverage center, McKillop says he’s perfectly positioned to take advantage of the upsurge in the craft beer market.
“There’s been double-digit increases in craft beer sales. The trend started on the West Coast and come east,” he said. McKillop observed that this is the third wave of craft beer popularity. “It began in the 80s with Sam Adams, sort of died out, came back again in the 90s and then really took off in the past few years.”
While there’s no sure forecasting the continuation of the craft beer phenomenon, with some beer experts saying the market is saturated and others saying there’s still a lot of room for growth, McKillop is enthusiastic about the trend here in Riverhead.
“Craft beer is a great idea. The train’s in the station and now’s the time to jump aboard before it leaves. No one wants to miss out,” he said.
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