Eat the City(62)

In December 1933, when Prohibition was finally fully repealed, there were only twenty-three breweries left in the city, down from seventy before the ban on alcohol. Across the country, the great brewing families were getting out of the business: Hensler and Krueger’s and Ballantine’s in Newark; Fort Pitt, Duke, Silver Top, Old Shea, Dutch Club, and Tube City in Pittsburgh; Jax Beer in New Orleans and San Antonio; and hundreds of others. Old-fashioned, city-based brewing companies with high land and labor costs were set up to market their beer in corner saloons, not to capture national markets.

Prohibition had created an army of liquor-and-beer specialized thugs. Seeking to go legit, some took out licenses to open breweries, only to use the same old tactics. Hijackers kidnapped a Ruppert driver and stole the beer. A Ruppert employee exchanged shots with four men carrying army revolvers and sawed-off shotguns.

A Brooklyn barkeep was terrorized by thugs demanding he stock their brand of beer, in a conversation the Times relayed in classic gangster style:

“What’s wrong?” asks the barkeep upon encountering a gangster in his establishment.

“Nothing,” says the gangster, “or, not just yet anyway. What sort of beer are you handling?”

The barkeep names a brand. The gangster chuckles.

“You mean you was,” says the gangster. “From now on you’re selling ours, get me?” he declares, naming his own brand.

When the barkeep demurs, the gangster threatens: “Oh, that’s the way it is, eh? Wanna be persuaded, do you?” Then he turns to his companion and says: “Give him the works!”

“The works,” unfortunately, include a ruptured scalp for the barkeep’s wife, who intervenes.

Meanwhile, the era of consolidation was just beginning.


GET New York City brewers together to talk about beer today and you hear a strange mix of pessimism and fervor. At the Craft Beer Jam in the performance space of a local NPR station, representatives of four local breweries sit under studio lights talking about the explosion of home brewers and craft beer connoisseurs, and how somehow, the enthusiasm just hasn’t bubbled up into many city breweries.

Homebrewers have long formed the ranks from which craft brewers emerge. Some of the professionals at New York City breweries today started as Bud Lite fans in college who wanted to guarantee their own cheap supply of booze while still underage, or produce quantity for sale by the plastic cup, or add a hint of West Coast hip or European sophistication to their rote weekend beer consumption.

Steve Hindy, a cofounder of the Brooklyn Brewery, first got the idea for homebrewing while working as a journalist in Saudi Arabia, where alcohol is banned. The Brooklyn Brewery has become a kind of model for small business development in New York City, complete with its own manual, Beer School, a case study in entrepreneurialism written by the founders. But the brewery, opened in 1988, initially made all its beer upstate and only began brewing within city limits eight years later. Land was cheaper then, and about a dozen breweries operated in the city around that time, a recent peak. In the early 2000s, the Brooklyn Brewery tried for years to expand its Williamsburg plant, succeeding only when the economy tanked, rents went down, and the state contributed an incentive grant. The owners want to expand further, so the current plan is to build a bigger brewery—upstate.

Sixpoint started brewing in 2005, in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn on the site of a former brewery, pressing its enormous old stainless steel fermenting tanks into service until the brewers could afford replacements. Putting his brewery to double duty, Kelly Taylor operates both the Heartland Brewery and Kelso, the brand he runs with his wife, at one site near downtown Brooklyn.

In a kind of local shoutout, Kelso puts out a Putrid line of beers named after putrescent city waters—the Newtown Kriek, a lambic; the East River porter; the Fresh Kills brown ale; the Saint Gowanus Belgian pale ale. Distribution has expanded and now some Duane Reade drugstores sell Kelso growlers. Recently Kelly did a beer tasting at the Duane Reade in Williamsburg. “One guy had two packs of condoms and three growlers,” Kelly said, grinning. “Saturday night, man!”


THROUGHOUT his life, the Colonel drank little, worked hard, and remained vain enough to avoid being photographed wearing glasses. In his middle age, Bachelor magazine considered him glamorous enough for a jubilant if slightly misogynistic feature. “Colonel Jacob Ruppert says men marry only when they are lonely or in need of a housekeeper—He is neither!” said the headline. “He likes the ladies. He’s glad when they are married to someone else,” the magazine wrote. A photograph shows him taking his breakfast from a silver tray, alone at a long table.

But at seventy-one, he fell ill with phlebitis. In 1938, while his brother George ran the brewery, he followed the Yankees on the radio from his sickbed and was so captivated that he ordered all home games thereafter to be broadcast, in what sportswriters would later note was his last official act. In early 1939, Babe Ruth was among the last to see him alive. The beer baron had always called the baseball player “Ruth”—which sounded, with his slight German accent, more like “Root”—never using the famous nickname. Now the older man held out his hand to clasp his protégé’s. The Colonel said one word: “Babe.” The next day he died.

He left behind the Yorkville neighborhood his family helped create, where German butcher shops sold wiener schnitzel, German newsstands sold the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung—and, of course, German-style taverns served frothy lager in pewter-lidded beer steins. Up in the Bronx, Yankee Stadium was known as the house that Ruth built—but more accurately, it was the house that beer built.