You’ve probably made a promise to yourself to spend the last days of summer soaking up some sun, but here’s a good reason to cave. As in, literally cave*. Thirty feet below the streets of Crown Heights, in a 19th-century tunnel that belonged to the Nassau Brewery Company, there’s a cave that produces cheese for shops like Whole Foods. Next month, you’ll have a rare opportunity to have a look inside the home of Crown Finish Caves, try their cheeses and drink some beers.
The “cheese tunnels,” originally built for fermenting lager, are really something special– you can glimpse them in this Curbed video, in which Benton Brown and Susan Boyle, who bought the brewery complex in 2001, show how they control the cave’s humidity and temperature to age their cheeses. Given how cool (literally) this place is, a simple beer-and-cheese pairing would’ve justified the $55 price of tickets to the Sept. 23 tasting, but the organizers have gone all-out on this one. The aged cheeses will have been washed with beers by local brands Interboro and KCBC, and paired with those same beers. And to take things one step further, Arcane Distilling, a Brooklyn-based maker of limited-run beer whiskeys, will be distilling those same beers into whiskeys that will be available for tasting.
So, to sum up, you’ll be eating cheese made from beer while drinking whiskey made from beer, while inside of a cheese cave made from a beer tunnel. If that’s confusing, don’t worry, the distillers and affineurs will be on hand to explain everything, along with host Joshua M. Bernstein, author of The Complete Beer Course and The Complete IPA.
*Sorry if that cave pun was cheesy.