Eat the City(51)
When the lights dim naturally as the sun fades from the kitchen skylights, Jon turns on two neon lights he made himself—one a yellow ear of corn with a green husk, and one a red and orange spiral. A red-light-district-red bulb hangs over the bar in the elevator shaft. In the dim light, people laugh more, drink more. Someone breaks something; the volume rises. A black-eyed woman in a denim skirt comes back to the elevator, beer in hand, saying, “I love this.” A crowd gathers around Josh and Jon.
The party lasts until the early hours of the morning, until the beer runs out.
Josh and Jon began brewing in 2002, when they were roommates in this 4,500-square-foot loft, drinking enough beer that they decided to save money by making five gallons at a time on the kitchen stove with a kit—a can of syrupy malt extract, pre-mashed grain, and hops: just add water. “Beer in a bag,” says Josh, “like buying a cake mix instead of baking from scratch.”
Soon they switched to grinding their own grain so they could have more control over the flavor. Over the years, they graduated to a larger pot for heating water, balanced over two burners on the stove, and a plastic Igloo cooler, which kept the grain and water at a constant temperature during mashing. Then they built their own more advanced system that allows them to be more precise in their control and more prolific in their output.
At the very first beer party, to celebrate Jon’s birthday, friends had swigged fifteen gallons of blond ale and asked, “When’s the next party?” A couple months later, they held another, and then another, and each time the volume of beer and the number of people increased, until about a hundred and fifty people were showing up in the loft to consume eighty gallons of beer. “We were busy,” Jon said. Once, some Swedish guys stole from the bathroom wall a framed replica of the Constitution that came from Colonial Williamsburg. But mostly it was friends and friends of friends, who kept coming back, contributing their own small gifts of homemade pickled eggs or soft, baked pretzels. “It ended up being a fun way to share the beer and be able to brew more of it,” said Josh. They could nail down recipes, try new things—and get instant feedback. When Josh moved out of Jon’s loft to live with his girlfriend, he and Jon continued to brew.
Josh has the kind of warm, easy smile you like right away, a soft, blunt-featured face, a ponytail, strawberry-blond stubble, and a faint brush of brows. He’s a conceptual artist who has worked with sculpture, paint, and drawing. As the economy fell apart, he realized that most of his work made him dependent—on art markets, which plummeted; on gallery owners, who became conservative; on other artists, who could no longer hire his help. Beer, on the other hand, was a constant. When times are good, people drink it to celebrate. When times are bad, it promises consolation.
Jon’s schlubby, paint-splattered aspect—brown plastic glasses, loose, graying curls, a mask of a beard, layers of T-shirts—belies his precision work as a sculptor and fabricator. He has shown his art in prestigious galleries and taught at Yale, but as commissions slowed, he found himself cutting and building three-dimensional objects to other people’s specifications, “like a short-order cook.” His grandmother’s grandfather had been a brewer in Dayton, Ohio, and legend says the family drank beers on the roof of the brewery during the city’s Great Flood. Jon’s grandma also told stories of sipping tea during Prohibition with the ladies when a series of booms rattled their teacups—exploding bottles from a homebrew setup in the basement. “Embarrassing!” she said.
Drinking beers at the kitchen table after long days of brewing, Jon and Josh would assess the situation: Not enough work in art. Not enough faith in the art world. But they had plenty of small-business skills and enthusiasm for beer. Why not be independent, they thought, and make art of something their friends can drink? Why not start a commercial brewery?
Over the course of a year, to the crooning of Sunday-morning Sinatra on NPR, Jon and Josh hammered, welded, drilled, insulated, encased, wired, coiled, computerized, and reformed a thousand dollars’ worth of odd parts into a functioning brewery, adding new components all the time.
At one point, they talked about lawyering up in order to legally sell growlers—half-gallon glass jugs of draft beer—out of the ground-floor garage. But they were put off by arcane regulations and overlapping bureaucracies. Then Jon’s landlord announced that she wanted to sell. Spaces like the loft had become rare and valuable, even with its open elevator shaft in the kitchen, its rattling windows and skylights and its cracks in the walls. Jon thought about trying to raise money to buy the place himself, but then he heard the asking price: three million dollars. “No way,” he said. So while Jon’s landlord looked for a buyer, Josh and Jon started looking for a new place to brew.
ONCE, in the late 1800s, New York was the brewing capital of America. Beer-loving Germans made up a third of the city’s population in 1875, and they poured lager in saloons and grocery stores, beer gardens and beer halls, at picnics and parties and parades, helping to support as many as 125 breweries in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
But across the country, a new breed of Prohibitionist campaigned not only against whiskey and rum—but also, specifically, against beer, and the urban immigrants who brewed and drank it. During Prohibition, many small and midsize city breweries closed for good, hastening waves of consolidation that made beer the province of giant corporations. When Prohibition was repealed, the Midwestern brewers, who had developed national distribution systems, took over. In the following decades, the last neighborhood breweries in New York City went out of business, including that of Jacob Ruppert, who had owned the New York Yankees and built Yankee Stadium, and Rheingold, which sponsored a Miss Rheingold beauty contest that in the mid-twentieth century had garnered a third as many votes as the recent U.S. presidential election. Beer ceased to be a neighborhood commodity.