New York City. Countless words have been penned about the Big Apple, to the point it’s almost passe to even mention the place. Sipping on a Sixpoint Eight Days o’ Wheat that was poured straight from the tap into a growler just a day ago, I look back on my brief time spent there with both wonder and contempt.

Without being able to sample before I purchased at the Whole Foods on Houston Street, I opted for the Sixpoint offering seeing as how I had yet to try anything from their brewery, but have heard great things about their beer. It’s a densely hazy, somewhat muddled rusty orange American Wheat beer – a lot going on but not much to it, yet it keeps me coming back. This couldn’t be a more perfect analogy for the city itself.

When you think about it, New York has so much happening at once, so many things that just collide into one another, that it’s hard to get a grip unless you try and zone everything else out. Which is damn near impossible. Believe me, I’ve been there before.

By the same token, there’s not much to it, really. You’ve got commerce buzzing about you, tourists on their own breath-taking and perhaps disappointing traipses around the city, and incredibly ugly architecture.

You want to know why people love Europe? There’s your answer. Even though some European cities can be dirty as hell, at least there’s something pretty to look at while you’re there. New York is a take-it-or-leave-it kind of town. Warts and all.

It may come as no surprise to some of you that craft beer is becoming hip. I’ve seen it on the streets of New York and Richmond, and can only imagine all the other metropolitan areas of the country adopting the same stance. It’s another counter-culture expression, yet oddly, mainstream. It’s taking something that has been a silently churning movement for quite some time and harnessing its potential to transform obscurity into cool points.

For example, the bloke behind the counter at Whole Foods was so coolly detached it defied belief. Did he know much about beer? I’m not sure, because it seemed as though he couldn’t be bothered, other than to chat up his cohort about the recent Sunny Day Real Estate reunion show at Terminal 5. (Old people and foreigners, don’t worry. Just know that it’s an indie music culture reference, one with which I have a personal connection.)

Regardless, I got the feeling that my own, sad obsession with beer had become this guy’s latest fashionable accessory. Seems we could’ve been on opposite ends of the planet, even though I always manage to make beer a topic of conversation with most everybody I meet. That social, egalitarian aspect of beer I often try to cultivate now seems to have evolved into a form of elitism that I couldn’t have imagined coming from the hipster set. We may yet see the day that RateBeer and Arab Parrot become one.

If all of this seems to be one giant bum-out, fear not. I had a great time hitting up some amazing culinary delights with my resident friends all over Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Long Island. And amidst the hustle and bustle of navigating the city proper when my girlfriend and I were wandering on our own, there was actually a bright spot. Its name? The Blind Tiger.

More to come on that soon.