To say that craft beer makers relish using strange ingredients to flavor their brews would be an understatement. Oyster shells? Piece of cake. Recycled sewage water? No big deal. Icelandic whale testicles smoked in sheep’s dung? Mmmmmm, yeah.
Brooklyn-based Folksbier and Black Seed Bagels collaborated to produce a small quantity of Black Seed Glow Up, and the first batch is almost sold out. Image by Alex Ostroff
Exotic add-ins offer an intriguing hook, but sometimes the most appealing combination is the one that seems so obvious you wonder what took so long to make the connection. Such is the case with Black Seed Glow Up, a collaboration between Brooklyn-based brewery Folksbier Brauerei and local mini-chain Black Seed Bagels that puts one of New York’s seminal carbs front and center – and makes the case for sustainability at the same time.
“We were thinking about our food waste and how we have leftover bagels at the end of the day, no matter how hard we try to nail the [right] number,” Black Seed co-owner Noah Bernamoff told Fortune in an interview. “We started to think about how we could manipulate the leftovers into a very different form, and we came across this idea of making beer.” He approached Folksbier founder Travis Kauffman with the idea, and not long after, Black Seed Glow Up was born.
The limited-edition mashup uses bagels that are boiled in water and honey and finished in a wood-fired oven. Image by Alex Ostroff
Released on April 25, the first batch used about a hundred pounds of bagels – the equivalent of a week’s worth of waste from Black Seed – to make a few hundred gallons of beer, and less than two months on, it’s nearly sold out. If you really search, you can still find a bottle or two around town: at Grand Army, Celestine, The Smile, and Old Rose, all of which are affiliated with Black Seed’s owners. (It’s also available in limited quantities at Hell’s Kitchen beer bar As Is and at Bernamoff’s upstate grocery, Otto’s Market.)
In an interview with October magazine, Folksbier founder Travis Kaufman described Glow Up as “a really bright, clean tart beer.” Image by Alex Ostroff
So, if you manage to track down an elusive bottle, what to expect? “It’s an easy, tasty beer to like,” Kauffman says. He explained to Fortune that he relies on the same method here as he does for Folksbier’s sour Berliner Weisse, with bagels standing in for the fruit used in the Berliner, and the result is a “tart, pleasantly acidic” flavor with a hint of breadiness. Of course, whether or not that hint appeals depends on how you feel about the ingredient itself. “Some people want it to taste like bagels, and some are afraid of it tasting like bagels,” Kauffman says.
The Folksbier tasting room in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Image by Folksbier
Though Black Seed Glow Up is currently sold out on draft, the craft-beer curious can head to Folksbier’s tasting room to sample two other sour wheat Glow Up-style brews—right now, they’re pouring one with mandarin juice and zest and one with cucumber and lime. With an expanded production facility and a host of summer events on the horizon (think: a can-release party with Tex-Mex plates like barbacoa and lobster tamales), plus a second batch of bagel beer in the works (it’s expected to arrive later this year), the future looks rosy for Kauffman’s Carroll Gardens brewery. As he told Fortune, “There is a lot to be said about buying something locally made.”
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