Business

Grill and beer it

When you celebrate Memorial Day by throwing some dogs on the grill, you’ll need something to wash them down. That’s where these mags can come in.

If you prefer your beers micro, fruity, infused with chocolate or laced with the heat of a thousand fire-kissed jalapenos, then Draft magazine’s most recent issue is the one for you. If you yearn for a more mundane assortment of quality brews, search elsewhere. Indeed, the May/June issue may prove a touch too novel for the average suds drinker, with the glossy pub publication featuring specialty beers brewed with cocoa nibs and strawberries as well as habanero and ancho chilies. Ack! We guess that’s what the hipster kids are drinking these days. Elsewhere, the bi-monthly run by Editor-in-Chief Erika Ann Rietz rounds out its issue by focusing, perhaps too excessively, on pairing your beer with things like, say, cupcakes, and potatoes.

The biggest problem with Imbibe magazine is that its lovely concoctions are too enticing. Readers will be sloshed from testing them before they finish reading. We held back long enough to be tickled by the article on Father Bill Dailey, the bartending priest. We also liked “cocktail archeology” by David Wondrich, who told us the history of the Blue Moon Cocktail, which hails from Joel’s Green Room, a now long-gone cabaret in Midtown. That said, Imbibe could be more critical in its product reviews. Not every jigger is worth the money, and telling people what not to buy and why something stinks is just as important as what’s hot.

The drinks are so photogenic in Wine Enthusiast they pour off the pages. The magazine’s not just about wine, either. There’s the cocktail of the month, the Jamaican Me Hazy, a fruity rum number that’s Jamaican us thirsty. The best part about WE is that the Big Apple gets proper treatment as the drinking capital it is. Two of the five City Pickers destinations for good tasting are within the five boroughs, City and Red Hook wineries. And 11 of the 40 under 40 tastemakers — a Forbes-like list of connoisseurs — are from right here. This month’s WE is the 25th anniversary edition and the wine guide is still chugging. The best part: It’s not pretentious. Many of the choices are well within a reasonable budget, so cheers to that.

The editors of Wine Spectator know their wines upside-down and sideways. Bruce Sanderson’s review of 2010 Burgundy is about as thorough as it gets. The New York office blind-tasted 525 bottles. That’s work we’d gladly pay for. Winners? Out of most people’s price range, we suspect. First up, $225 Newman Bonnes Mares and the Roumier Musigny at $5,000. (Editors did include a value column on the $19 Bourgogne Emotion, however.) Wine Spectator is generally accessible for the common wine enthusiast, but we think the eds may want to take the wine googles off when they profile vineyard owners. Also, a special nod to Peter Hellman’s piece on how one French man resurrected the family wine business.

New York Editor-in-Chief Adam Moss decided to make a feature on space ports putting rich people in orbit his cover story. He must have been spacing out considering the strong material on local news he had to choose from. The magazine does a nice job revealing how Brooklyn District Attorney Joe Hynes, participating in a made-for-TV-drama that will air right before his re-election, is unfair to his political opponents, and may be compromising his cases. Then, New York crosses the thin blue line with a revealing profile of Bronx policeman Pedro Serrano, who is exposing the unfairness of stop-and-frisk searches.

New Yorker, on the other hand, features a judge’s decision on stop-and-frisk which is a bit too verbose. Speaking of too many words,the cover story on how Silicon Valley believes it can fix the country’s ills starts with an interesting personal narrative on how it is one of the most economically unequal parts of the country. But the feature is 11 pages and rarely gets to what seems to be the real point. The complexity of running a public television station, while being dependent on wealthy donors, is explored in an insightful story on how David Koch resigned from public television station WNET’s board because of its decision to air an unfavorable documentary on him.

Time took the somewhat bold move of featuring Angelina Jolie on its cover instead of covering the Obama scandals. However, its story on Jolie’s decision to have a double mastectomy does not go very far. While it starts by speaking about the questionable value of genetic tests, it ends by praising Jolie. Which is it? The feature on the Second Wives Club, founded to abolish permanent alimony, finds a compelling angle on a common story. Joel Klein, for what it’s worth, considers Benghazi a “scam” and does not seem overly concerned about the White House snooping on AP reporters