What’s Brewing in the Bronx?

The Bronx. Even for folks who’ve never been there, the name evokes a very specific place. Named for a 17th century Dutch-employed Swede, Jonas Bronck, the borough that bears his name is the home of the New York Yankees, a major incubator for Hip-Hop music and has seen more than it’s fair share of urban-blight related issues. This gritty history has been well-represented in both music and film. However, it has been over 30 years since the Bronx was burning, and while this representation tends to be the most pervasive, the Bronx has a long and storied brewing history.

Starting with a wave of German immigration in the mid-19th century, the Bronx was home to a large number of small breweries including the Hupfel Brewery and the Schott Brewery next door to the much larger Ebling Brewery, the Haffen’s brewery at Melrose Ave between current day 151st and 152nd St., Bruckner’s Brewery at E. 161st St and Elton Ave., Kolb’s Brewery on 3rd Ave at 169th St., and a myriad of others.

This history recently came to light with the discovery of some long forgotten lagering caves, originally built and owned by the Ebling Brewing Company.  The Ebling Brewing Company was located at the corner of St. Anns Avenue and  156th St.  and stopped production after the owners pled guilty on charges of producing real beer in 1925 during Prohibition (this story alone is fascinating and can be read about in a few New York Times articles from that time  here and here).  After the shut down, the brewery complex suffered through a series of fires before eventually being razed.  The site sat undisturbed until the recent excavation that uncoved the long forgotten caves.

Ebling Brewery

Fast forward about a hundred years to 2010 and we have the very exciting emergence of a new Bronx-based brewery.  The Bronx Brewery is the brain-child of three people, Stephen O’Sullivan, Niall Henry and brewmaster Damian Brown.  The three are currently raising investment funds for the construction of a new brewing company to be based in the Bronx.  I recently had a chance to chat with Damian about his love of craft beer, the trio’s plans for the brewery and the state of craft beer in general.

The Interview

JM – Damian, thanks for doing this.  I’m just wondering what your background is in the brewing industry?

DB – Yeah, I went to Davis and attended the master brewer’s program there… finished that this year.  Then I got the Diploma in Brewing from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling.  Then I received that diploma in August or September of last year.  So in addition to that I worked for about a year and a half as an assistant brewer at Shanendoah Brewing Co in Virginia.  I’ve also been homebrewing since I turned 21.

JM – And homebrewing was always an interest of yours?

DB – Beer has probably always held a very special place in my heart.  I think it has such a great story and I think one of the things we’re looking to do here with the brewery is to share some of that, some of the art, the science and the history and tradition of beer.

JM – I saw that you, I think on your website, that you spent some time in the UK as well, is that right?

DB – That was more of a joke that I think Steve had sort of made that quote to someone.  Yeah, I spent a few weeks travelling around there… I’m a real ale and pale ale fan so I was basically going around to pubs and breweries and doing lots of tastings. Nothing professionally in terms of doing brewing or anything like that.

JM – Ok, but I imagine lots of sampling took place?

DB – Oh yeah, always lots of sampling whereever I go.  I think the most interesting thing I’ve had has been some chicha in the mountains of Honduras out of an old bleach bottle.

JM – Oh wow!  How was that.  I’ve never had real chicha.

DB – It was interesting… very cidery almost.  Extremely cloudy and it was made in, it was strained with a laundry basket… it was just extremely primative.  Made in a tiny little town, but it was good.  It was a little sour, a little tart – cidery, but it was good.

JM – Yeah, I had some weird sorghum product that my wife brought back from Africa and it was sort of like that as well.  Interesting though.  Cool, so that’s your background, I guess you guys are still in the process of looking for a brewery and scouting out locations.  How is that process going?

DB – Basically, where we’re at is that we have our business plan and everything is lined up.  We have a management team put together.  We’ve put together a marketing and branding officer on board, we have an architect on board, lawyers all of that stuff is lined up.  We’re scheduling meetings with investors as we speak.  We have our first one next week and we have a bunch lined up.  We’re looking to raise anywhere from 700K to a million in start-up capital.  We’re going to be some type of tight budget to do something in New York, but we have as one of our partners Dad’s owns a construction company here in New York and we’ll be relying on them heavily for building renovations and stuff like that.  We think we have a great business plan and we’ve been getting a lot of interest from all sorts of people in New York and in the Bronx.  Non-profits like the Bronx works, some artistic groups, and all sorts of bars and restaurants to do some preliminary tasting and sampling.  We’re just trying to build as much interest as we can in what we’re doing.  We have a concept, we have a business plan and we’re ready to go once we’ve raised enough start-up capital.

JM – Are you guys planning to do direct distribution or will you be working with a distribution company?

DB – Yeah, we’ll be self-distributing.  You can self-distribute in New York up to about 60 000 barrels of production, so we’re going to be self-distributing within New York City at least for the first year or two to build our customer base.  We’d be doing that anyway in order to capture the margins that self-distribution would provide.

JM – Self-distribution is pretty important.

DB – Yeah, when you’re small you don’t have much leverage to do anything and once you get locked into a distribution deals, the franchise rules are pretty tight and pretty cumbersome.  You would also, being a small account to a distributer who also has other accounts in their portfolio, you would be out there without a sales force, regardless.  Being small, we’re going to undertake that logistical exercise.  We think, just having control of delivery and customer service in house we’ll be able to build up enough of a customer base where we’d feel we’ll have some leverage with wholesalers.

JM – You said that you have a branding officer.  What is your positioning statement or how do you plan to brand yourselves?

DB – Yeah, obviously, the Bronx is going to be our main branding element and it’s sort of interesting.  We face this juxtaposition, if you will, of craft beer being what it is and the Bronx being what it is… at least most people’s perception of it and we’re trying to bring that tough, edgy, kind of feel to what we’re doing.  So, we’re building the brand around the concepts and notions of the people of the Bronx and trying to introduce a very local but high-quality brewery to the community.  There’s a pretty tremendous brewing history in the Bronx itself.  That’s the idea… we want to be a brewery that the Bronx can call it’s own and participate in it locally.

JM – It worked for Brooklyn.

DB – Yeah, absolutely.  To their credit, they’ve created a hugely successful company.  My two partners, Steve and Niall when they first contacted me, they were looking at doing a contract-brewing type company, where the Bronx Brewing company would be just a sales and marketing company.  Obviously that is how Brooklyn Brewery got it’s start for a number of years before they actually, physically started brewing in Brooklyn.  We just decided that if we were going to rely on the borough and it’s people to brand our company and buy our beer, we want to actually be there.  We want to be an active participating member of the community.  So we opted not to go that route.

JM – It works certainly.  Schmaltz has made a good go of it so it can be done.

DB – Absolutely, it can be done.  Just in naming ourselves the Bronx Brewery, if we were not in the Bronx we would have a tough time justifying that decision to anybody.

JM – Are you guys looking at any specific neighborhood to locate the brewery?

DB – Yeah, we’ve partnered with a group called SoBro, that’s South Bronx, Development Corporation who basically manage a number of state and local incentive programs for neighborhoods in the South Bronx, like Hunts Point, Port Morris, Mott Haven that basically fall under their jurisdiction.  Any of those neighborhoods would work.  We’ve identified a number of sites that we would be happy with.  The BankNote Building, my two partners have assured me, is high on the list.  It’s strictly a matter of getting funding in place where we can sign a lease.

JM – I guess you guys will be draught only?

DB – Yeah, we’ll be kegs and casks for the first few years and then we’ll see about investments into a bottling line and facility further down the road.

JM – Do you guys plan to have a tasting room on site, where you could visit the brewery?

DB – Yeah, we’re going to have a small tasting room on-site.  Obviously a lot of that is going ot depend on where we locate the business as far as retail potential goes.  Whether we’ll have a bar or just a simple tasting room where you could sample the brews.  We’re absolutely planning on doing that and there are a few other things we want to do, potentially, is have a brew-on-premise facility where our customers could come in and brew their own beer on a 10-15 gallon sized equipment.  That will depend on the space, and the regulatory environment for doing so, but we’re working on that.  That sort of gap in the laws is being addressed, hopefully.  We hope to bring that sort of business to New York City in order to help build a greater beer culture.

JM – Is that in conjunction with the brewery itself, or would that be a side project.

DB – No, absolutely that would be a part of the brewery itself.  We have an architect building that into the plans.  He’s allocating space for the brew on premise equipment in the drawings.

JM – I know that there is a big brewer culture in Southern California, where the brewery really go out of their way to help each other, has that been the case here?

DB – Yeah, absolutely.  We’ve had great feedback from Keegan, Captain Lawrence and others.  It’s definitely a strong community.  We’ve been reaching out to homebrewers as well.  Part of what we want to do with that BOP capability is to create a sense of kinship among homebrewers in New York City where there’s a brewery that is supporting their effort.  We’re going to present at the New York City Homebrewer’s Guild. We’ve got relationships with a few other homebrewers and homebrewing clubs.

JM – Cool.  I guess that’s been helpful for you guys in terms of getting the buzz out there in the craft-beer community?

DB – It’s been a sort of viral-marketing campaign.  We’re trying to pull in a circle of friends who we can count on when making brewing decisions.  We think that it’s important to not only foster relationships with brewers, but also to let other people know how great it is to brew beer and to be able to give them a facility and a means to do so.

JM – Very cool, I’m wondering about the decision to start the company in the middle of a recession.  Was that a conscious decision, to be looking for space when hopefully rents are depressed, or was that just the way it turned out?

DB – That’s just sort of how it worked out.  It was simply a matter of timing when Steve and Niall decided to start up.  Thought it was a great idea and we wanted to see what we could do with it right away.  We’ve been impressed.  We’ve come a very long way in the last three months.

JM – It seems like you’ve made a lot of movement very quickly, so that’s always good.  I guess that’s the business side of things but I’m wondering about the beer.  What are you plans for styles, types of beer, that sort of thing.

DB – At this point, we’re going to purchase some small-scale, pilot brewing equipment strictly for tasting and sampling.  We’ll have an Irish-style Dry Stout, which we’re calling Hip-Hop Stout.  We’re going to have a south German Hefeweizen that we’re going to be calling, Mother ‘heffen Bronx, and an American Pale Ale, which we’re going to call the Bronx Brewery Riverd’Ale. So we’re obviously, those are going to be our first three beers that we’re planning on making on a pre-operations, marketing standpoint.  I think we’re also going to have five or six year-round beers and then a class of seasonal and specialty beers.  We want to have the brewery introduce some more indigenous types of styles to people here in New York in the US.  We’re planning to do things like traditional-brewed chicha, or sahti or things like that.  Those are some of those styles that I think have extremely interesting stories and that are extremely tasty as well.  We want to do things that you can’t really find here.

JM – Have you tried many of those types of styles?

DB – Yeah, I have actually.  I think that one of the things that we’d like to do is help sponsor cultural festivals where we would reach out to cultural New York groups and elect to make a traditional style beers for their festivals and indie events and things like that.

JM – Cool… I mean we’re beer geeks and we tend to geek out on weird, hard to find stuff, and unusual styles, so it seems like you’re on the same page as far as that goes.

DB – It’s sort of baby steps as far as the company goes and although there is a strong beer culture here, we do feel that there are gaps in the Bronx itself that we can fill.  So as a brewery, they are sort of mainstream beer styles that we need to do as well.

JM – Hey, you’ve gotta pay your bills.

DB – Yeah, we hope to have our flagship beer out there but also have the flexibility to do a few more interesting things as well.  We’re also planning on putting things out in casks and reaching out to bars that have cask equipment.

JM – Cask beer seems to have become huge here in the last few years.  When I moved here nobody had this stuff here and now it’s really popping up everywhere.  Not only in places that you think of as destination craft beer bars, but even places that just serve quality food they want to have cask beer on.

DB – Yeah, it’s almost a thing where to qualify as a beer bar here in New York, I’m happily learning that many have one or two casks available at all times.

JM – Have you guys started doing any test batches yet or are you still on the planning side?

DB – Yeah, this weekend, I’m actually brewing the Riverd’Ale, so by the end of next month, we should have beers to sample.

JM – Very cool.  I’d love to come up and try some of your stuff.  What does the Riverd’Ale look like on paper?

DB – It’s going to be a Centennial and Cascade hopped American Pale ale.  We’re going for traditional American hops which are personally my favourite and what I tend to drink in large quantities.  It’ll be dry-hopped and unfiltered.  We’re not going to be pasteurizing anything.  We want to keep things fresh.

JM – That sounds great… I want to thank you for your time and I’d love to write an update once you’ve got a few things to taste and we can see how things are progressing for you guys.  I really wish you guys all the best and I look forward to seeing your offerings on tap around the city soon.

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