Web sites don’t get any more useful than this. Beer drinkers, add beermapping.com to your bookmarks. This clean-looking blog uses Google Mapping API (that’s “application programming interface” if you’re wondering) to pinpoint every brewery, brewpub, beer bar and beer store in 23 (and counting) U.S. cities. Here’s the Boston Beer Map.
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Established: 1987
Specialty: Beer
Prices: Low to moderate
Atmosphere: The Sunset Grill & Tap is to beer as the DSW Shoe Warehouse is to footwear. Big place, huge beer selection, weekly deals, and a well lit, friendly but somewhat impersonal vibe.
See Best Boston bars (Honorable mention) for address and contact info.
If you’re the type of person who likes a mammoth beer menu — a multi-page tome with fine print that categorizes beers according to style and has separate sections for draught beers and specialties like mead and “beertails” — the Sunset Grill & Tap is calling your name.
This casual dining establishment in the heavily student-populated Boston neighborhood of Allston features 380 kinds of beer, including a whopping 112 taps, plus plenty of bar surface area at which to sample them. The Sunset doesn’t just stock a bunch of random beers from every two-bit microbrewery and global-conglomerate-owned brand in order to throw big numbers around. No, the 380 beers here are, in large part, quality offerings (don’t worry, your ignorant roommate can still get a Corona) that include the full spectrum of Belgian beers (Trappist ales, gueuze, etc.) and beers from geek-approved U.S. craft breweries like Allagash (ME), Avery (CO), Dogfish Head (DE), Founder’s (MI), Moylan’s (CA), and Victory (PA).
The food menu’s also huge, with all manner of Appeteasers, Dippers & Poppers, Nacho Mamas, Salada Salads, Meltdowns and, on Sundays, the Super Sunrise Sunday Brewers Brunch. The grub is decent, the service is competent, and there’s lots of colorful breweriana (real word) on the walls. Luckily, the staff is not required to wear pieces of flair, or the Sunset might come across as a little too Bennigan’s-esque. The beer is what it’s all about for us, and we’ll stop in whenever we’re in Allston.
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Established: 1987
Specialty: Beer
Prices: Low to moderate
Atmosphere: A friendly combination of beer enthusiasts, neighborhood barflies, and hungry carnivores eat barbecue and drink beer in a setting that’s part down-home, part gritty-urban, and part artsy. Probably the Boston area’s best combination of really good food, great beer selection, and reasonable prices.
See Best Boston bars for address and contact info.
Redbones gets it right, and that’s why it has been around for almost 20 years. Consistently good barbecue, a selection of craft beers that focuses as much on quality as quantity, efficient service, and fair prices draw us back there again and again. That and the fact that there are two bars: one upstairs, one down (known as Underbones).
In addition to being a barbecue restaurant, Redbones was also one of greater Boston’s first beer bars (a bar that specializes in a wide selection of craft beer), along with the Sunset Grill & Tap in Allston, which also opened in ’87. Owner Robert Gregory has supported craft brewers from day one. He was one of the founders of the New England Real Ale Exhibition held every year in Redbones’ neighborhood of Davis Square. He was the first bar owner in Boston to regularly bring in draught beer from the brewing mecca of the Northwest. And he regularly invites some of the country’s best craft brewers (Bill Covaleski of Victory in PA, Garrett Oliver of the Brooklyn Brewery in NY, Will Meyers of our own Cambridge Brewing Co., Tod Mott of the Portsmouth Brewery in NH) in to pour and talk about their beer. Bar manager Chris Bol does the crucial job of making sure that kegs are rotated and draught lines are clean — you don’t want to be in a beer bar where this doesn’t happen, because craft beer’s shelf life is way shorter than Bud’s.
On the flipside of the beer equation, Gregory deserves credit for putting Schlitz and PBR on the menu way before they became the favored brands of bike messengers and twenty-something hipsters. Redbones’ Dial-a-Beer wheel also started a trend picked up by another Boston beer bar, Bukowski Tavern, and its sibling in Cambridge. Finally, Redbones’ deserves special praise for keeping its beer prices lower than those of any other beer bar in greater Boston. Example: on a recent visit, a pint of Southern Tier IPA (NY) was $4.25 (compared to $4.50-$5.50 elsewhere for a small-batch U.S. craft beer), and a 10-oz draught of De Ranke XX Bitter from Belgium was a bargain-basement $5 (this would easily have been $7 elsewhere). Liquor and wine are available if beer’s not your thing. May Redbones be around for another 20 years.
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Established: 2003
Specialty: Beer
Prices: Moderate to high for beer, low for food
Atmosphere: Pierced and tattooed modern literature-loving ironists meet beer geeks in this multi-tap shrine to the late Beat poet and legendary boozehound Charles Bukowski.
See Best Boston bars – honorable mention for address and contact info.
Bukowski opened up in the Inman Square neighborhood of Cambridge to the delight of people who yearned for more than one choice of a neighborhood bar, that choice being the decent enough, non-cartoonish but small Irish pub the Druid. Bukowski took over the fairly spacious, dark, rectangular room once occupied by the Korean restaurant Jae’s. A large mural of Bukowski and his drunken jottings on one wall, red vinyl booths, glass doors that open onto the sidewalk in summer, and a nice, long bar with round swivel stools invite you to stop in whenever you’re hit with the urge to eat a cheeseburger and drink a double IPA.
The tavern features 130 beers (15 on draught), very few of which are mere menu dressing. And there’s always some interesting item on tap or in the cooler, be it a Belgian-influenced ale from some little boutique brewery like Hair of the Dog in Portland, OR, or the surplus of Lion Stout that one manager shrewdly stockpiled just after the ’04 tsunami temporarily shut down the Sri Lankan brewery that makes the beer.
Brisk beer turnover is also aided by the fact that most of the tavern’s selection appears on the Dead Author’s Club card — a list of over 100 beers that you have to work your way through in six months in order to earn a 25-ounce mug (priced the same as a pint) etched with the name of your favorite dead author, provided he or she doesn’t already appear on someone else’s mug. (Note: the term “author” is treated loosely here, as mugs etched with the names Johnny Cash and Tupac attest.) And if you’re stumped by the sheer number of beers available, ask your server to spin the “dial-a-beer” wheel for you. Just remember: you spin it, you own it.
The food here is casual, reasonably priced and consistently decent. Burgers and hotdogs (big, all-beef ones with chili or sauerkraut) rule the day, but vegetarian offerings are worth ordering, especially the White Trash Cheese Dip, a warm, gooey mixture of American cheese, jalapenos, onions and tomatoes served with fresh-fried tortilla chips.
The only drawback to the Cambridge Bukowski and its older sibling in Boston is that when it comes to beer, the good stuff ain’t cheap. Draft pints range from $5-$7, and bottles can cost, say, $7 for a standard import like Paulaner Hefe-Weizen, all the way up to $15 and beyond for specialty Belgian ales and rare, small-batch American craft beers. A can of Schlitz or Schaefer is a somewhat more economical $3. Commercial rent prices in Boston and Cambridge must be steep indeed.
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"Lauren Clark takes readers on a supremely sudsy tour of New England ales, lagers, pilsners, and porters. This is the New England the Puritans warned everybody about, but few have chronicled."
– Wayne Curtis, And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in 10 Cocktails
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Old Mr. Boston Deluxe Bartender’s Guide (6th edition, 1946. Could be in earlier ones; 1st ed. is 1935)
2 or 3 oz rum
1/4 oz simple syrup
1/2 oz lemon juice
soda water or ginger ale
Shake first three ingredients with ice and pour into 12-oz collins glass. Fill with club soda or ginger ale, insert spiral of orange or lemon peel (or both) and dangle end over rim of glass. (In The Fine Art Of Mixing Drinks, David Embury says, “A cooler is a Horse’s Neck with a kick.”)
