Eat the City(61)

In late-night conversations over beer, Josh and Jon forged and canceled business plans and clarified their own ambitions. They wanted to start their brewery on a low budget, all by themselves, without investors, and build up from there. They might open as a brewpub, and then distribute more widely, but their eventual goal was to be a local or regional brewery—not to ship beer all over the country. “A lot of breweries make this massive initial investment and owe a lot of money so constantly need to crank out more product to start making money,” said Josh. “You get trapped in a cycle of growth where once you get all that initial equipment paid off, you’re expanding, and getting rid of the equipment, and buying all new equipment, and it seems like a never-ending expansion process.” They wanted somehow to avoid the endless expansion that has determined much of brewing since Jacob Ruppert’s time. “We’re putting our lives and souls into this,” said Jon, “and if there’s any success or rewards for this labor, we’d like to do it our way and get that back.”

Meanwhile, another option was on the table. Jon’s father offered them space on his large rural vineyard in Oregon to start their brewery—for free. They would be able to brew off a gravel road in view of grape vines and the distant smoky blue of the Cascadian mountain range—the antithesis of the high-density hassles of Brooklyn. It was something to think about. It meant they didn’t need to jump on the first opportunity.

They wanted to start a brewery, but it wasn’t clear that it should be Marco’s old brewery in Bushwick. “All those old breweries closed for a reason,” said Jon.


PROHIBITION proved hugely unpopular, especially in big cities like New York, and after more than a decade, the beer world was banking on repeal. Aged horses were readied for wagon deliveries; big copper vats were cleaned and polished; and the United States Brewers’ Academy in Midtown reopened to teach trainees the chemistry and technology they would need to become master brewers. But the landscape had changed. Gangsters ran some breweries. Others had closed. “They are not sure their salesmen can meet the competition of gangsters’ machine guns, sawed-off shot guns and bombs,” the Times reported when the brewers sent lobbyists to Washington to discuss combating organized crime.

When beer finally came back, the triumph was incremental. A beer bill allowed states to decide individually to legalize a low-alcohol 3.2 percent brew, which was suddenly classified as “non-intoxicating,” giving it a status similar to soft drinks and allowing it to be sold to minors in grocery stores and drugstores, as well as in restaurants and clubs. And so at 12:01 a.m. on April 7, 1933, after thirteen years of proscription, 3.2 percent beer, at least, returned to New York.

Anxious that “there be no carnival or untoward celebration,” Jacob Jr., the head of the United States Brewers Association, ordered members across the country not to deliver beer right at midnight, but to wait until six the next morning. “Beer may not be intoxicating, but its promoters do not intend to take responsibility for any orgies that may accompany its return,” noted the Washington Post.

Just after the ban lifted at midnight, some speakeasies in Manhattan managed to provide sips of beer reputed to have come by taxicab from “an uptown brewery,” but there was little open revelry. Instead, six grave, hatless men dressed in tuxedoes staged a Midtown funeral for near beer, carrying a keg of the dealcoholized brew out of a restaurant and into a waiting hearse. A six-piece Bavarian band struck up a dirge as the car cruised slowly through the streets, attracting a cortege of more than two thousand impromptu “mourners.” The real show was at the breweries, where quiet crowds assembled to watch trucks load up cases and kegs for distribution at dawn.

Later that very day, the Colonel’s new threat took shape in the form of six Clydesdales, their manes decorated with red and white roses, pulling a shiny red Anheuser-Busch wagon carrying three hundred wooden cases stamped BUDWEISER across Thirty-Fourth Street. Out-of-town brewers were staking a New York claim. Beer needed massive reinvestment, and the Midwesterners, with their national networks of equipment, salesmen and advertising, were positioned to dominate.

The Rupperts’ beer thrived for a while. In the days after the ban was lifted, restaurants and cafés offering free beer with meals had to post STANDING ROOM ONLY signs. Thousands of New Yorkers took the elevated train to Coney Island to sip a beer by the beach, though it was freezing outside. Local brewers hired two thousand new workers to pour beer all night and still failed to keep up with orders. They quickly ran out of bottles and barrels and resorted to buying them used from speakeasies. Veteran beer drinkers showed up to rush the growler, like the elderly man with a handlebar mustache who was cheered when he emerged from the Ruppert brewery with a brimming tin pail in each hand. In days, beer taxes from New York City alone added a million dollars to federal, state, and local government coffers.

At first it looked as though the Colonel had come out on the winning side of consolidation. The Rupperts’ old friend and rival George Ehret had never recovered from the seizure of his plant during the war, and when he died in 1927, his children closed his factory. The Ruppert brewery bought it, more than doubling its size to thirty-five fortresslike redbrick buildings, occupying most of four blocks from Ninetieth to Ninety-Fourth streets between Second and Third avenues.

But soon the eaters get eaten.

A generation had skipped beer and grown up with sweet, fizzy soda pop and hard liquor. Saloons, the lifeblood of the local brewer, were gone, and the Midwestern brewers, far more experienced with marketing, came up with slick new campaigns. An uneasy Jacob Jr. ran his own educational advertising to tell people how to drink beer. One ad showed a formally attired, debonair, white-mustachioed elderly man with a handsome young couple. “Take it from an old-timer—this is the real Ruppert’s Beer!” Another showed a woman setting a table and suggested including beer in fine dining: “The dainty glass bottle of Ruppert’s harmonizes with fine linen, delicate china and sparkling glass.” In the fall, Jacob Jr., aware of the power of a grand public gesture for a popular cause, donated $250,000 to support Admiral Byrd’s expedition to the South Pole. The freighter for the voyage—the Jacob Ruppert—left port loaded with 180 husky dogs to pull the explorers’ sleds, as well as 20,000 cases of Knickerbocker lager.