Back at the tail end of last year, the brewers behind Pennsylvania’s Sly Fox (owned by one Brian O’Reilly) and Shmaltz Brewing Company from Upstate New York got the idea to do a Hanukah-Christmas beer challenge. The follow up–St. Pat’s v. Purim, naturally–will be held tonight, March 7, from 7 to 10 pm at Jimmy’s No. 43.
There will be special beers from both breweries, plus, promises owner Jimmy Carbone, “in the back we’re doing a more-or-less traditional Purim celebration (costumes required!) where we’ll have authentic hammentaschen from Moishe’s. Gonna have some Irish meats, too.” That includes musicians and a reading of the Megillah, the part of the torah with the Book of Esther, her King Ahasuerus and his evil prime minister Haman, from whom we get those hammentaschen. (They look like his hat.)
Carbone also says that Judd Greenstein, the musician, helping to set up the reading of the Megillah, tells him that “what we consider ‘Irish meats’ in NYC (like corned beef) actually are Jewish meats that were popularized among the Irish community when they encountered them in mixed Irish/Jewish neighborhoods in 19th-century NYC.” Without doing the research ourselves, we’re going to go ahead and believe it for a bit, considering Purim begins tonight–though perhaps we’ll reverse our thinking on March 17.
