Greenpoint Beer Works

BY ALL ACCOUNTS, New York should be a beer city. Peter Minuit established the country's first public brewery on the southern tip of Manhattan in 1633. In 1879, New York City was home to 124 breweries. N. 11st St. in Williamsburg, once 10 ten breweries on its block, has been commemorated as Brewer's Row, even though its oldest and only remaining brewery is the Brooklyn Brewery, established here in 1996.

Today, counting brewpubs, contract brewers, microbreweries (but not brewing equipment supply stores), there are fewer than a dozen breweries, if that, in the five boroughs. The last big exodus of a brewery from New York City was Rheingold's departure from Brooklyn, which left nearly 4000 people jobless and tens of thousands of kegs of beer in its wake.

The latest cause célèbre of Brooklyn beer was the partial return of Rheingold's brewing operation to Brooklyn. But the real story here is not that Rheingold has decided to divvy out a piddling ration of business to a smallish Brooklyn brewery, but that a new smallish brewery has opened in Brooklyn. (By sheer force of its existence, the Greenpoint Beer Works has increased New York City's brewery presence by at least 10 percent.) In 2003, the Greenpoint Beer Works opened a facility in a former Borden dairy-processing plant in Fort Greene. In an unfortunate (and slightly absurd) real estate/branding snafu, the Beer Works had licensed its name before it learned that its offer on a space in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood had fallen through.

Greenpoint Beer Works came into existence to function as the central brewery for Heartland Breweries, which, until recently, boasted on-site brewing at its three Manhattan locations. Director of Operations Kelly Taylor, a former brewer at Heartland and one of three full-time Beer Works employees, doesn't have much nostalgia for the days of elbow-to-elbow brewing.

"It's quite a change from being in the city," he says, standing unencumbered in the center of the lofty concrete space. Here, the most noticeable signs of activity are the beep-beep of the fork lift driven by Heartland head brewer Allan Duvall, the filling of kegs by boot-clad employee Tracy Shaede and the bubbling of yeast in the brew kettles actively converting sugar to alcohol.

"Brewing in a restaurant under cramped conditions is very different from this."

Here, brewing takes place five days a week, requiring nearly three weeks to turn around a batch of beer. Heartland Brewery represents about 90 percent of Greenpoint's output-the rest is Rheingold and other small accounts-producing 25 varieties of beer year-round, among them stouts, lagers and ales. So far, Greenpoint Beer Works has been outputting 3500 barrels of beer a year (one barrel is equal to two kegs of beer), though they have the potential to produce about three times that much.

On this August day, the climate inside the Beer Works is overwhelmingly hot and humid. Taylor, a rugged West Coast type with fluffy light brown hair and a ready smile, regularly refills our water glasses as he takes this quickly fading writer on a tour. The seltzer that I drink, which they also make here along with Heartland's sodas, tastes vaguely of beer. I ask Taylor how they can stand the heat.

His chipper reply: "You have to sweat a lot and drink."

Out of mercy, Taylor brings me into the cooler where the hops, jars of compacted green pellets that looked like hamster chow, are stored. Hops, says Taylor, give beer its bitter flavor and herbal aromatics. Opening different containers, the smells alternate from citrus to anise to Earl Grey tea. Likewise, different malts are used as bases for different brews. Back in the heat, Taylor points to sundry burlap sacks of specialty malts-some caramel-y, some chocolate-y, some wheat, some coffee flavored-that are used as bases for a variety of featured beers.

The beer production is fairly small scale, 10 tanks on a 30-barrel brew system, meaning each individual batch yields about 60 kegs of beer. Taylor designed the plant's interior, creating an orderly process starting with malted grains being siphoned from a silo into a grist, where they are crushed, and the grains' inner starches, which will later be converted to sugars and finally to alcohol, are exposed.

After the grains are soaked to spur the conversion of starch to sugar, the brewery discards about a ton of malt, or "mash," a resulting flaky byproduct. During a brewing stint in Seattle, Taylor sold mash to area farmers, who used the nutrient-rich mixture to fortify pig and other animal feed. Now, in New York City, some demand exists from area farmers, but Taylor is trying to figure out what to do with all the excess stuff.

"We're talking to a Hasidic bakery down the street about making a spent grain bread for the Heartland Brewery," he confides.

The beer-making process ends with five to 14 days of "conditioning," during which the beers' flavors-hops, spices, malt and yeast-commingle. They are finally carbonated, filtered (with the exception of the cloudier brews, like Heffeweissen and stouts) and kegged. The duration of the conditioning is also contingent on how sweet the beer should be-ales, which tend to be sweeter, thus require less time with the sugar-busting yeast; dry lagers require twice as long.

"The fun part is, all yeast grows," says Taylor. "You put in two buckets and a week later get out five to six." Likewise, with room to double its volume, Greenpoint Beer Works is looking forward to new accounts, and more beer. o