Eat the City(52)

The last of the old New York City breweries closed in 1976, at a kind of low point in American beer, when Miller Lite had just emerged, low-calorie light lager beers were driving the market, and brewers were on their way to consolidating into only forty-four companies. But in 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed a law legalizing home brewing for the first time since Prohibition. Experimental new breweries began to produce small batches of distinctive beers. The craft brewing movement had launched.

Now light lager still dominates nationally, but its sales are declining, as craft beer sales grow. There were more than 1,927 breweries across the country at the end of 2011, 1,877 of them craft breweries, with 855 more in the process of getting licensed—which is almost 50 percent growth.

But in New York, real estate is expensive, and brewing takes up space. Delivery trucks crossing in and out of the city have to pay costly tolls (as much as forty-two dollars for an eight-wheeler to cross the Verrazano Bridge), and factor in traffic jams and parking tickets. Taxes are higher and so are wages. New York has become a hard city for breweries.

Still, hundreds of hobbyists now brew their own beer in closets, by their bedside tables, in their kitchens and bathrooms, and in airshafts between buildings. Unlike when Josh and Jon first began brewing, specialized homebrew supply shops, along with plenty of other outlets, even Whole Foods, sell ingredients and equipment. Homebrewers organize competitions, tastings, and boozed-up twenty-five-dollar house tours. The New York City Homebrewers’ Guild convenes at Burp Castle in the East Village, in a room decorated with murals of orgiastic beer feasts, where homebrewer presses against homebrewer, pouring new beers. In Park Slope, Brooklyn, a partner in the beer bar Bierkraft grows his own hops in his backyard, tending plants that look like sweet-peas, climbing and curling around themselves—but instead of pods, they have pretty little pale green cones.

The city seems primed for Josh and Jon’s beer. As of 2011, there are still only six professional breweries in New York City, depending on how you count them. Little Portland, Oregon, less than a tenth of New York’s size, has almost ten times the breweries. Josh and Jon are situated smack in the middle of what could be the country’s densest agglomeration of the craft-beer curious. It’s easy to imagine a little brewery with a tasting room filling with a rush of people at four p.m. on a Friday, the brewers finishing up their work to drink alongside their customers cum friends. “It would really be awesome,” Jon says.

“This is the best beer I’ve ever tasted,” friends would tell Josh and Jon when sampling their boozy experiments. Some would donate money toward ingredients and tell them they should start a neighborhood brewery where everyone could hang out. The enthusiasm bolstered Josh and Jon’s dream of making a viable working brewery.

Josh realized that with beer, unlike with art, he could “be creative and share the product with a large group of people who could afford it and who really enjoyed it.” Beer, unlike art, was gratifying.


IN 1626, the year the Dutch purchased the island of Manhattan, a visitor from Holland wrote that they “brew as good beer here as in our Fatherland, for good hops grow in the woods.” In those days, impure drinking water made people sick, while fermented beer was safe. Yet even in a tippling time, the Dutch stood out. The settlers of New Amsterdam brewed so much beer, the story went, that there was no grain left for bread. Leading citizens—magistrates, merchants, aldermen—ran breweries on Brouwers Straet (now Stone Street, in the Financial District), and one report noted that a quarter of all the settlement’s buildings sold alcohol. Women and men met in taverns and bars to play games like backgammon, handball, and bowling. Yet all this was not to last. The British took New York, and switched to English-style ales and stouts and porters, and over time, rum and whiskey became the drinks of choice. Beer declined—until the Germans came to Manhattan in the 1840s with their love for lager.

Bavarian brewing techniques date back to 1487, when the ingredients of beer were limited to barley hops and water, in a ruling that was soon codified as the Reinheitsgebot, or purity regulations. Later laws also limited times for brewing to winter and spring, necessitating storage, or lager, in German. The result was a fresher, lighter-tasting beer, with more carbonation and lower alcohol, made from a different yeast that thrived in the cold. It’s not clear exactly when lager came to America, but various brewers likely boarded boats on the Rhine carrying their own packets of Saccharomyces pastorianus, or bottom-fermenting lager yeast, to found separate breweries across the country in the 1840s. Those who came to New York arrived in a city just outgrowing its small-town past and setting up conditions to brew massive quantities of beer. Kleindeutschland, where many Germans settled, was becoming the first immigrant neighborhood in an American city—later to be known as the Lower East Side. The city had just built a system for piping in pure water (the purer the water, the more control the brewer has over the beer), from the Croton Aqueduct. As the first of the new breweries opened, a recent immigrant named Franz Ruppert became the city’s first maltster, the person who wets the barley, allows it to germinate, and roasts it to preserve its sugars—making malt, a crucial ingredient for beer.

Franz was too ambitious to stick to manufacturing a single ingredient. With New Yorkers mad for lager, in 1851 he bought the Aktien Brauerei, on Forty-Fifth Street near the East River, then a small German settlement where people lived in log cabins and old railroad cars. As dozens of other lager brewers launched elsewhere in Manhattan and in Williamsburgh, Bushwick, and the Bronx, Franz Ruppert installed a backyard beer garden and reopened his own Turtle Bay Brewery.