A Brewery Grows in Brooklyn

This past Monday, Brooklyn Brewery hosted a launch party for its new special reserve beer, “Dark Matter.” Over two hundred people attended the release, sampling the new brew as well as the tasty snacks supplied by local businesses The Bedford Cheese Shop and The Meat Hook.

Dark Matter, which will hit taps starting the week of March 22nd, is a robust brown ale aged for four months in bourbon and rye whiskey barrels which give the beer caramel and chocolate flavors that are, according to the brewery’s press materials, “heightened by vanilla-like oak notes and hints of the barrels’ previous tenants.” It’s a rich, textured beer that pairs very well with food, particularly meat and cheese (notable varieties at the event included the Bedford Cheese Shop’s Pleasant Ridge Reserve [from Wisconsin] and The Meat Hook’s Country Pate).

The special reserve is the latest from the Williamsburg-based brewery, which has grown rapidly since its arrival in the neighborhood in 1991. Despite the current economic downturn the craft beer business, as a whole, is doing well. Last year, the industry grew 7.2%, according to a Brewers Association press memo. For comparison’s sake, the Brooklyn Brewery grew 20%. The growth isn’t just financial, however, it’s also literal—the brewery is in the process of expanding into a space adjacent their current facility on 79 North 11th Street, where they’ve been since 1995.

“The expansion will radically increase the capacity of this brewery,” Brooklyn Brewery President Steve Hindy said of their newly acquired 16,000 square feet of space that will allow the brewery to increase their production twelve times over. “We just broke ground a couple of weeks ago. We’re hoping to be brewing there by December. We just bought a new brewhouse from Germany. It’s a very exciting time for us. In the beginning of the company, there was a very wise man who said to me, ‘If you guys work at this, you know, really stick with it, in ten years, you’ll be an overnight success.’ And that’s about it works.”

With countless awards, loyal customers and supporters including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and revenues of $18 million in 2009 the brewery is very much a success story. But in the last 25 years, it has come a long way.

Founded in 1987 by Hindy, a former journalist, and Tom Potter, a former banker, the brewery has a fascinating and unusual story. While working for the Associated Press, Hindy spent six years in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent covering, among other stories, the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, an event Hindy witnessed from the bandstand. It was in these turbulent times he also first became interested in homebrewing.

“I would leave home to go to Iran for the revolution and be gone for three months,” said Hindy. “My wife was in Beirut, which was much more dangerous than Iran. It was kind of a crazy life and she was fed up with it. She lived there for about five years. And so I gave it up, came back here, settled in Brooklyn, was making beer at home. I went to work for Newsday. Eventually, I got taken by this dream of starting a brewery in Brooklyn.”

But there were many obstacles along the way, even after Hindy and his wife returned stateside, ranging from Hindy’s day job as a foreign news editor at Newsday to years of hard work without profit to visits from the mob. Even his friend, neighbor and founding partner-to-be Tom Potter, was initially skeptical. Despite all this, Hindy and Potter persisted, united by the dream of a proud and revitalized Brooklyn, and a beer that could represent it. In their book, Beer School, which was published 2005 by John Wiley and Sons, they write, “We believed that Brooklyn was more than a place. We believed strongly that it was a word tied to a mythical image that was central to the idea of New York City and America. Brooklyn was the birthplace, workplace, or adopted hometown of legends: Mae West, Dionne Warwick, Woody Allen, Barbra Steisand, Joe Torre, Mos Def, Chuck D., Spike Lee. Brooklyn was [also] the starting point for millions of immigrants coming to America.”

“Brooklyn is a place with a history of entrepreneurship,” added Hindy during an interview held in his trophy-filled office at the brewery. “There are a lot of strivers in Brooklyn, a lot of people who want to make something of themselves. It seemed like a place that was on the upswing.”

It isn’t just a name or idea, though. Brooklyn Brewery’s role in the Brooklyn community is both active and impressive. Each year the brewery gives beer away to 200-300 local nonprofits for events, fundraisers, benefits and openings.

“It was a decision I made at the very beginning of the company,” said Hindy. “[It was] partly a business decision and partly a personal preference. It seemed to me that New York is such a noisy place to get attention. Companies come into New York—breweries and other consumer products companies—and spend millions of dollars on advertising and they are hardly a blip on the radar. We didn’t have millions of dollars to do that. It seemed to me that one thing we did have was knowledge of the community. We all lived here. So it seemed to me that being a good citizen would be a way to get attention and earn people’s gratitude and respect.”

In addition to donating, the brewery has a long history of community activism and involvement. “We’ve been supportive of a lot of community causes,” said Hindy. Over the years, the Brooklyn Brewery has hosted community meetings to oppose the building of a “marine transfer facility” (which is to say, basically, a garbage dump in Williamsburg where much of Brooklyn’s trash would be shipped in on barges) and a power plant, as well as to support a controversial neighborhood rezoning project. Supporting the development of high-rises is never a popular move, but it was one Hindy viewed as necessary and, in some ways, inevitable. “You can’t just be against things forever,” he explained. “Otherwise if you keep opposing things, you’re going to get something bad. Like a power plant, or whatever. In the end, there was a compromise to allow the big high-rises on waterfront, but also the city committed to improving the parks in this area. The mayor committed $50 million to redo McCarren Park Pool, which is a project people have fought over for 25 years.”

“I like to be involved,” said Hindy, who is, along with his role as president of the brewery, a chairman of the board of the Open Space Alliance and on the board of directors of cycling advocates Transportation Alternatives.

He summarized it like this: “To be in business you have to make money, sooner or later. Otherwise, you’re not going to be business very long.” He laughed. “But once you do, what’s it all about? Is it to make more and more money? Or to do some good along the way? For us, we believed in doing some good.”

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