A review of Citi Field's beer selection

While Sandy Alderson and Terry Collins work to give you the best Mets experience they can on the field, the Mets do what they can to provide a memorable and enjoyable day at the park regardless of how the team is doing. This year the Mets really stepped up their beer game, although finding those beers can sometimes be confusing. There are TVs and radio feeds throughout the park, but you're not at Citi Field to wander the concourses in search of a quality brew.

Here's an excerpt from the more in-depth BeerGraphs review of the craft beer at Citi Field:

The Promenade Food Court behind home plate is the place to be. You can get just about every beer option here. The Empire State Craft Beer Stand up here actually has two craft beer taps and in April they were pouring Sixpoint Sweet Action and Bronx Pale Ale. The Bronx Pale Ale on tap is probably my favorite here, although Captain Lawrence's Kölsch is a great beer for a ballgame and the Coney Island Seas The Day is excellent. The Blue Point Toxic Sludge is the closest thing Citi Field has to a dark beer.

You can find good beer at just about any corner of Citi Field. Both foul pole corners on the Field Level have craft stands, and in a pinch the two Big Apple Brews stands in center field and behind home plate on the Promenade level provide a wide variety of beers distributed by Anheuser Busch-InBev. Picking one of the cans that are 16 ounces rather than 12 is a nice way to be a little thrifty, as they're all the same price. The various Pat LaFrieda stands also have IPA cans, usually Sixpoint Sweet Action or Brooklyn Brewery East India Pale Ale. If you're in the clubs, particularly the Caesar's Club or the Delta Club, there are several good beers on tap.

AB-InBev, thanks to a lucrative contract with both MLB and the Mets, dominates most ballparks. You may recall that in the first two years of Citi Field the four Danny Meyer food stands—Shake Shack, Blue Smoke, El Verano Taqueria and Box Frites—all had exclusive Brooklyn Breweries beers. But when those beers left the park, beer selection suffered for a while.

Even the craft beer stands are not without Big Beer's influence: Many of the beers available there are actually craft labels produced by the macro beer companies and many others, like Blue Point and Goose Island, are breweries that are actually owned by AB-InBev.

Ultimately craft beer wins out, at least among the social-media-savvy fans. Utilizing data mined from Untappd and Foursquare, the most commonly checked-into beer at Citi Field is Brooklyn Lager.

Of course it's not all good. Citi Field still lacks a real dark beer. Blue Point Toxic Sludge is a cascadian dark ale, also known as a Black IPA, but that's still a hoppy style and not quite the type of dark beer you might crave during a cold April or October game. Perhaps if the Mets start playing more games in October, the dark beer would follow? The kölsch is a nice light summertime style, but it'd be nice to mix in a saison somewhere as it's a style that was originally brewed for warm summertime days.

The Mets also play on the road and it's fun to check out new ballparks and still see the boys in orange and blue. BeerGraphs can help you there too.