📍TALEA Beer Co, New York City

Brooklyn Crawl: Stop 4

NYC's Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint sections are hyper-concentrated with great coffee shops, food, and bars. So when a friend visited from Los Angeles, I got the opportunity to revisit some favorites.

Stop 1: Sey Coffee
Stop 2: Win Son Bakery
Stop 3: L’industrie Pizzeria
Stop 4: TALEA Beer Co
Stop 5: Pizza
Stop 6: Cocktails

The walk between places got much shorter in the back half of this crawl. We got thirsty after pizza and breakfast. At first, we talked about getting more coffee. Instead, we skipped the coffee stop and subsequent pizza stop for a brewery. We walked for around 10 minutes to get here from L’industrie.

TALEA is huge. Through the front door, there’s a merch and to-go store with a coffee counter. On the left, you can walk out to a small outdoor courtyard. On the right is the main bar and tap room. There are bar seats, high tops, small tables, and big tables. That aligns with the groups inside. Early Saturday but we were definitely not alone in our thirst for beer.

I had two beers. TALEA doesn’t do multiple sizes like a lot of breweries. They do tastings, however, which my friend did. They come on a beautiful paddle with half pours. I tried sips of a couple of his but I’ll reserve my opinion for the things I ordered.

The first beer I had was the Mango Lassi Sour. I’m not much of a sour drinker but I was compelled to order this one. I love mangos and lassi is part of my ethos. This was really approachable. The aftertaste had some sourness but it was muted. I tasted really bright mango flavors, in fact, you could smell them. There was a hint of spice to it but nowhere near the masala chai lager my friend tried. There was this yogurt-like finish to the beer which I appreciated. Acidic yogurt is a key component of lassi and I think blended well to the sour finish here.

The second beer was a Black IPA called Midnights. From the look of it, you wouldn’t know the Mango Lassi sour had a higher ABV, 7.5% to 6.1%. This tasted a lot like an IPA with an earthy citrusy flavor. The twist here is that it also had coffee. The tasting notes say “espresso foam” but I got a warm roasted flavor that reminded me of coffee without tasting like coffee. It felt like an easy drink compared to a coffee porter or stout.

This was supposed to be a pizza crawl. We had one slice each at the end of the fourth stop. Time to fix that. Onwards to more New York pizza.

📍TALEA Beer Co
87 Richardson St, Brooklyn, NY 11211