Somewhere between the Captain Lawrence Freshchester Pale Ale and the Ithaca Apricot Wheat beer, as a relaxing haze was gradually descending, another was being lifted. Here, in the last gallery of the fresh and, yes, slightly intoxicating new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, “Beer Here: Brewing New York’s History,” I was reminded just what all the fuss was about during the course of recorded history, or at least, in this case, the recorded history of New York State.


The show ends in a small Beer Hall, in which local varieties of this bitter, rich, smooth, quenching, biting beverage can be purchased and quaffed, as if in a celebratory ritual of a journey happily completed. Beer, we learn, under the firm guidance of the show’s curators, Debra Schmidt Bach and Nina Nazionale, is one of those small things through which large forces can be discerned. And its history in New York is as unexpected as the variations in taste produced during today’s micro-brewing renaissance.


The tastes at the end nicely pulled it all together. That distinctive tang of hops, for example? We learn that these light green, cone-shaped flowers became a commercial crop in New York State in 1808, and that by 1840, New York led the country in their production (at least until blights of mildew in 1910 led to their local decline). We see, on loan from museums in Cooperstown, where hops thrived, a painting of their harvest in September, along with hops poles used for their plucking, hops gathering baskets, and even a graffiti-covered door from a farm where migrant workers were housed.


And that sense of warmth, the dissipation of tension that can be felt after tasting just a few ounces? I might have once attributed it solely to the aftereffect of alcohol, but here I learn that aside from commercial sales to brewers, hops were packaged for medicinal purposes. One box of Medico Malt With Hops, from the turn of the 20th century, proclaims the product to be “A Nerve Tonic, Sedative and Reconstructive. An invaluable remedy in Nervous Debility, Nervous Dyspepsis, Sleeplessness, and in all disordered conditions of the Nervous System.” And all that is before fermentation. Hops are also, the label concludes, “Excellent in pregnancy and for Nursing Mothers.”


And what would beer be without water? An entire section of the show is devoted to it, because New York City, at least until the opening of the Croton Aqueduct in 1842, had no clean, reliable source. In fact, since hops have a preservative quality, and brewing requires boiling, “beer was once considered safer to drink than water.”


We see why: shown are water pipe sections that are little more than hollowed tree logs girded by iron strips, used by the Manhattan Water Company, co-founded in 1799 by Aaron Burr. It was a “largely unsuccessful venture,” partly, perhaps, because its water was stored near a polluted Manhattan pond. One reason that Brooklyn developed so many breweries in the 19th century (48 were active in 1898, when Brooklyn became a borough of New York City) is that it had access to fresh water from Long Island; a reservoir was built near Bushwick and Williamsburg, where breweries flourished.


And one of the most lovely and unexpected objects here is a landscape from around 1890 by Andrew Fisher Bunner, an answer, perhaps, to earlier Dutch paintings of ice skaters. But here, as the title tells us — “Cutting Ice, Rockland Lake, New York” — we see horses on ice and men with poles cutting right-angled sheets from the white surface, with icehouses for storage on the shores. New York brewers, we read, were among the city’s largest consumers of ice, much of it harvested from lakes north of the city. In fact, more than half of the city’s ice came from Rockland Lake in the mid-19th century. And along the walls, on loan from the South Street Seaport Museum, is an almost fearsome collection of the specialized tools that were used: ice saws, scrapers, tongs, a sieve shovel, an ice pike.


We also learn something else: In the early part of New York’s history, because of British influence, breweries and taverns typically sold ales, which are made with yeast that ferments on the top of a vessel; the process uses warm water, and the brew is often served warm.


But German immigrants, beginning in the 1830s, brought a different tradition, which ultimately triumphed. Their lagers were bottom-fermented and stored cold. The packs of ice floated down the Hudson were used for making lager. And by 1880, we read, Yorkville, the Lower East Side, Williamsburg and Bushwick, which had all became home to large populations of German immigrants, were also home to more than a hundred breweries.


One wall sign here, a calendar, shows their stunning presence. In 1866 George Ehret opened Hell Gate Brewery in Yorkville. The poster shows an imposing edifice, topped by a steeple, looking as if it were a free-standing brick town, stretching from 91st to 94th Streets between Second and Third Avenues. Three years later another German immigrant, Jacob Ruppert, opened a brewery nearby, between 90th and 93rd Streets on Third Avenue. Ruppert’s son, Jacob Jr., who took over the business, also became a four-term Congressman and a majority owner of the Yankees.