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Pitcher This: A brewery grows in BrooklynLocal beer disappeared from Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1976. It took about a decade before someone had the idea to bring it back, and within 20 years, Brooklyn was finally brewing again.
That’s the short version of the history of Brooklyn Brewery, which turned the resurgence of craft beer into something of a brewing renaissance for the borough.
Brooklyn, according to a history of the company, was home to nearly 50 breweries in the late 1800s. Brooklyn has long been a haven for immigrants, and at the time German newcomers were in abundance. They brought their culture with them, including the brewing of beer — lots of it.
Brooklyn’s breweries began producing again along with the rest of the rest of the country in 1933 when Prohibition was lifted, but big Midwestern breweries soon rose to the top of the tank, distributing nationwide in vast quantities, slowly pushing out many smaller and regional beer makers.
By 1976, Brooklyn’s last two brewers closed up shop, and New York, like much of the rest of the country, drank whatever the big companies were selling.
Then, in a sense, an even tougher form of prohibition helped to engender brewing’s return to Brooklyn.
Steve Hindy was a correspondent for the Associated Press, posted in the Middle East through the late 1970s and early 1980s. In these Islamic locales, alcohol was strictly forbidden, leading Western diplomats to brew their own out of view of the authorities.
When he returned to the United States in 1984, he and his downstairs neighbor in Brooklyn, a bank loan officer named Tom Potter, discovered a mutual fondness for the Mets and good beer. Mets games, of course, were in good supply. Quality brews, not so much.
Hindy and Potter quickly settled on the solution to that quandary: Quit their jobs and start a beer company.
Brooklyn Brewery opened for business in 1987, with Hindy and Potter making deliveries themselves in the company’s one truck. Their beer was brewed under contract upstate in Utica, but Brooklyn’s name was back on bottles. In 1996 they bought a former ironworks and matzoh ball factory in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, just across the East River from Manhattan and set up shop. After two decades, Brooklyn was brewing again.
Today, the brewery’s ivy-covered walls house production of the company’s seasonal and specialty draft beers, though the signature Brooklyn Lager, Brooklyn Pilsner and most of the company’s bottled product comes from Utica.
You’ll find some of that product on a few shelves here, though it somehow tastes better fresh from the tap at the brewery’s weekend open houses. Still these two are worth a try if you can find them:
• Brooklyn Lager - The company’s flagship brand. A robustly malted lager with the sweetness you’d expect from its light brown color.
• Brooklyn Brown Ale - A more-highly hopped version of the traditional British style, made with all-American ingredients.
