Christine Goerke, who is getting ready to join the long, storied line of Brünnhildes who have scaled Wagner’s epic “Ring” cycle at the Metropolitan Opera, walked into Valhalla.

No, not the majestic castle in the sky where her character, a Valkyrie warrior, brings slain heroes to serve her father, the mighty god Wotan. This Valhalla is a bar in Hell’s Kitchen, a few blocks south of the Met, that bills itself as “craft beer heaven.”

“I’m going to be a total jerk and have sparkling water,” Ms. Goerke said at the bar, bowing to the coming marathon she faces in rehearsing and performing one of the toughest assignments in opera: her first complete “Ring” cycle, a sprawling 17-hour, four-opera saga of gods, dwarfs, giants and humans that she will star in between March 25 and May 11. “But on May 12, I’m getting so drunk — having all of the things.”

It’s a triumphant return to the opera house where Ms. Goerke trained as an insecure young artist in the 1990s. When she sang the small role of the Third Norn in “Götterdämmerung,” the fourth “Ring” opera, at the Met in 2000, she recalled, she would linger in the wings after her exit, watching the soprano singing Brünnhilde and thinking: “Some day.”