It’s easy to envy Pat Fondiller, the beermeister of Park Slope institution The Gate. He gets paid to have conversations like this one on a recent late weeknight in the bar’s back corner. He was talking with Gate founder and owner Bobby Gagnon. The topic was which beer the bar would not carry. One TV over the bar played the Yankees game. Another, muted, played Chuck Norris' original The Delta Force.

Mr. Gagnon: “We won’t carry Heineken because it’s crap.”

Mr. Fondiller: “It’s crap in the truest sense.”

Mr. Gagnon: “I give Budweiser all the credit in the world. They have the most consistent beer operations on earth. If you open up a bottle of Budweiser, you’ll always find it the same. Heineken, it won’t be the same. … What it is, it’s skunked.”

Mr. Fondiller: “It’s the skunky flavor of it.”

Mr. Gagnon: “In beer language, if you put something in a green bottle—it ruins it.”

Mr. Fondiller: “It’s affected by the light, by the photons and it reflects the flavor of the beer; and it makes it skunky. The thing about Heineken, in my opinion, that sucks—they’ll even take that beer that they keg, which wouldn’t have had that effect, because it’s never been exposed to sunlight, and they purposefully skunk it so it has the consistency of flavor.”

So, no to Heineken. Yes to just about everything else.

Mr. Fondiller, 44, was working at an Italian restaurant in the Paramount Hotel in midtown in November 1999, when Mr. Gagnon called him in response to his dropped-off resume. Would he like a job? “This was more my scene,” Mr. Fondiller said matter-of-factly.

No doubt: He is an imposing figure, in a black T-shirt with the sleeves shorn off; a long salt-and-pepper King Leopold II beard; snarls of tattoos; and a deliberate and fast gait, even in the bar’s more crowded moments. One wonders if beer had not come into his life—or he into it—he wouldn’t have been drafted, perhaps forcibly, into the Hell’s Angels.

He lived in California after all. “I was in San Francisco; I had been working in bars since I was 17." This began in his native Central Jersey, and continued in his 20s out West. "I worked in a bar in San Francisco—it wasn’t necessarily a beer bar, although we had six or seven beers running. I lived next to one of the original craft beer bars—the Toronado—in San Francisco. They had 40 taps and lines of craft beers. … I was in that place every day for, like, 10 years.”

 

AS IT WAS, HE moved back East and settled in the spring of 1997 on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, when Park Slope was not so … Park Slope. “You wouldn’t walk up and down the street.” Mr. Fondiller lived above what’s now Bageltique. It wasn’t Bageltique then.

Mr. Gagnon, one of New York City’s true beer pioneers (Mr. Fondiller referred to him in a later email as “the master and I am the student”), opened The Gate in what was a risky move in a dodgy location; The Gate’s location had been an upholstery store, but, before that, was inhabited by bars going back to the 19^th century. Mr. Gagnon’s risk reaped dividends. His bar rode not only the gentrification crest of north-central Brooklyn but that of the craft-beer revolution nationally; to have been digging smoked porters and East India Pale Ales and doppelbock in the mid-1990s was to have mastered a secret handshake.

It was, fortuitously enough for Mr. Fondiller, always a West Coast thing first. “Coming from the West Coast, we drank good beer and we were already looking for new stuff,” he said. “But out here it was pretty much Budweiser, and you had Sam Adams making inroads into the market.”

The acquired expertise has helped Mr. Gagnon’s Gate swell into one of the more storied beer bars in the city. Barely 12 years old—it opened on May 23, 1997—it has the feel and the reputation of some British pub whose born-on date is best left to estimates. Hopheads follow the bar’s beer list online; attend its regular brewery highlight nights and festivals, including a cask ale one usually in the autumns; and just generally make it a point to be territorial about what The Gate has to offer. In other words, wheat beer devotees, for instance, get elated over a new weissbier on tap, but disdain the stouts, even in the coldest of winter eves; and vice versa.

There’s a responsibility behind ensuring that diversity and continuum. It seems funny, right? Being someone’s (or some thousands’) beer guy? But it’s not. It’s serious business.

“I know one thing Bobby told me when I started working here is that it’s like an Irish-style pub,” Mr. Fondiller explained, “and that’s always something that always stuck with me. Like, I’ll sit here and there’ll be nobody in here at 2 in the morning; I’ll lock the door and I’ll sit at the bar until 4 a.m. just in case somebody wakes up and decides they want to walk down here and have a pint at 3:30 in the morning because they can’t sleep.”

As for his favored beers—the $6 question, as it were—Mr. Fondiller appreciates various types to various degrees. Firstly, he’s a devoted hophead and if you stood him against a wall, he would say Lagunitas’ Hop Stoopid Ale was his favorite brew, period. Wheat beers? Not so much, but he understands “it’s visually appealing to people,” the pale, lemony looks. Stouts and heavier ales? Sure. Lambics, especially the sharper kinds, imbued with fruit flavor? “I like my lambics stouter and plain.”

And, occasionally, quite freaky.

Mr. Fondiller, who split Brooklyn for quieter Westchester three years ago and who has a newborn daughter named Ruby with his girlfriend (they plan a Brooklyn return at some point), also organizes Freaktoberfest, which is exactly what it sounds like: a running freak show, now in its second consecutive year, with live music and fine beer. It starts anew at 2 p.m. this Saturday in Williamsburg (the inaugural was in Coney Island).

“I had this idea a couple of years ago,” Mr. Fondiller said. “Brooklyn didn’t have its own beer festival, and I decided that I wanted to do one. … I hooked up with Matt, who owns Bierkraft up the street, a high-end beer store, and we set out to find a place to do it; and later on ended up hooking up with the guys from He’Brew in Coney Island. They were like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’d really like to be a part of this; we’ll even give you the name ‘Freaktoberfest.’ It’s the name of one of their beers. I was like, ‘Awesome.’ I was originally going to call it ‘Brooktoberfest.’

“As of now, I have something like 20 confirmed brewers,” Mr. Fondiller said last month. “and I expect upward of 30 by the time it’s over.”

 

SO, YES, IT’S EASY to envy Mr. Fondiller: beer, talking about beer, organizing beer festivals in America’s fourth-largest city, helping pick beer for a revered bar like The Gate, beer, beer, beer. It’s a cool life. Are there any flaws?

Mr. Fondiller is a big-time baseball fan, and participated this past summer in a fantasy tournament in Cooperstown, next to the Hall of Fame. Year-round, he’s a Mets fan.

O.K. ... Not quite as jealous any longer.  

tacitelli@observer.com