Homebrewing on the Rise in New York City

Posted on 14. Nov, 2009 by Jeannette Neumann in Living, Money and Economy

By Jeannette Neumann

Josh Fields’ beer money started drying up last year when profits from his art studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where he paints and sculpts, began to dwindle.

Determined not to curtail his taste for good beer, he pulled some cavernous kettles and kegs out of storage, and returned to brewing beer at a friend’s loft in Williamsburg.

Fields, 30, and his friend, Jon Conner, 39, a fellow artist, first experimented with homebrewing six years earlier, but only made brews from time to time. It was not until last February that they returned to the craft seriously and found themselves among a growing trend of New York City beer enthusiasts discovering the thrill of raising a toast with their own stout or lager.

“It seems like it’s really blowing up,” said Fields, as he served a dry stout from a “kegerator,” a refrigerator he and Conner built to hold three, five-gallon kegs of their brew. This batch was dubbed Micky Rourke because it’s “been around the block and has a punch,” Fields said with a laugh.

They brew enough, they said, for their own enjoyment and for friends, as well. While a six-pack at the corner bodega sells for around $10, a pint of their homebrew costs 30 to 40 cents to make.

“When you realize you can do it yourself, for less money, that’s a pretty appealing idea,” Fields said.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, the two artists were presiding over a beer tasting for 23 visitors and a handful of friends in Conner’s loft as part of the week-long, second-annual NY Craft Beer Week, which offered lectures, tours and competitions – one of a growing number of activities throughout the city promoting micro- and homebrews.

Josh Bernstein, 31, a freelance writer for New York magazine and Time Out New York, led the group on the seven-hour stroll to the homes of four brewers in Bay Ridge, Carroll Gardens, Clinton Hill and Williamsburg. He leads tours throughout the year.

The exact number of homebrewers in New York is difficult to estimate, Bernstein said, since the drink is for domestic consumption only. Gary Glass, director of the American Homebrewers Association in Boulder, Colorado, estimates that 2,400 of the 750,000 homebrewers in the U.S. live in New York City, based on membership in his organization. Danielle Cefaro, 25, and her husband Benjamin Stutz, 32, said they believe the number of homebrewers is nearly seven times that figure. The two former chefs opened Brooklyn Home Brew in Sunset Park at the end of July, one of only two specialty stores in New York selling brew ingredients and equipment.

Most enthusiasts said brewing beer at home is unlikely to become a common practice in New York City, where many apartments are not spacious enough to house equipment or store the beer while it ferments.

“Space is what kills beers in New York,” Bernstein said.

Also, cities like Portland, Seattle, Denver, San Diego and San Francisco have a stronger tradition of micro- and homebrewing. That means there are more stores that sell equipment and ingredients and more homebrewing clubs, making it an accessible hobby to pursue, Glass said.

Regardless, most agree homebrewing has continued to grow exponentially since it started catching on in New York City less than five years ago.

Home concoctions are nothing new of course – the brewing of alcohol flourished at home during Prohibition.

But these modern day moonshiners aren’t brewing in their bathtubs.

A homebrewing kit can cost anywhere from $70 to nearly $500, depending on the materials, which could include a kettle, ale yeast, floating thermometer, funnel and a hydrometer. Tips and tribulations are shared on online forums that continue to pop up, guiding the brewer through an all-day process that includes crushing the grain, steeping and boiling the ingredients, quickly cooling the unfermented beer in a cold-water bath in the sink, straining the concoction into a large fermentation bottle and adding yeast. Then the brew is left to sit for anywhere from two weeks to six months depending on the kind of beer.

Fields and Conner even invested $20 in a computer program to measure the alcohol content of their beer. Mickey Rourke measures 4.95 percent.

“What they’re showing is a great appreciation for craft beer,” said Ben Hudson, a marketer for The Brooklyn Brewery, which has grown into one of the most successful microbreweries in the city since it opened in Williamsburg in 1996. “Tastes are continuing to change, with people expecting flavor in their beer instead of yellow, watery fizz.”

Hudson said he has seen an increase in homebrewers at The Brooklyn Brewery’s weekly happy hours and tours over the past few years. Many share with him their dream of opening a brewery, he said, following in the footsteps of The Brooklyn Brewery’s co-founder and president, Steve Hindy, who got his start homebrewing while working as a Middle East correspondent with the Associated Press in Beirut in the 1980s. Hindy’s brewery now produces over 90,000 barrels of beer a year.

In addition to technology and equipment, an underlying philosophy appears to unite these 21st century anti-teetotalers, one that takes a page from the slow food movement catalyzing the boom in farmers markets over the past decade: Make what you can yourself or buy it local.

At the third stop on Saturday’s homebrewers tour, 38-year-old electrician Paul Kaye served up his Belgian whit, a Helles, a porter and a milk stout in his Clinton Hill backyard garden, carpeted with basil, lemon mint, oregano, tomatoes and zucchini.

“With homebrewing, from the beginning to the end, you know exactly what goes into it,” Kaye said. “It fits in with the whole concept of eat and buy locally.”

Conner’s 4,500 square foot apartment is also his sculpture studio, where he cut and assembled the latticed wood crates to store his bottled beer.

Cefaro said most of her customers at Brooklyn Home Brew are 25- to 35-year-old males who share an artisanal approach to life, whether it’s canning their vegetables or making ice cream from scratch. Many live in Brooklyn.

“They’re carrying on a very fine tradition” of small-scale brewing, explained Matt Levy on a recent Sunday bike tour exploring Brooklyn’s history as a stronghold for German brewers at the turn of the last century, also part of NY Craft Beer Week.

Levy considers the recent surge in domestic beer making a resurgence, especially in Brooklyn, where the smell of malt and yeast used to hang over the cobblestone streets, replaced decades ago by the smell of fresh fruit sold in the sun, weekend laundry and last-days-of-summer barbecues.

With a hopeful lilt to his voice, Levy ended his bike tour with a toast: “To Brooklyn and breweries.”

A Stink on 101st Street

Posted on 02. Nov, 2009 by Taylor Brown in Beats Blog, Brooklyn

By Taylor Kate Brown

Sometimes it’s not there for months; at other times, it stays for days. For Bay Ridge residents near Fort Hamilton Army Base, the unexpected visitor is not a barely-tolerated relative, but a pervasive, rotten-egg stink that emanates from sewer grates and basement plumbing.

Homeowners along Fort Hamilton Parkway, from 92nd to 101st Street, continue to cope with the gag-inducing odor after three years.

In 2004, the Department of Design and Construction installed a new sewer along the Fort Hamilton Parkway, in response to years of homeowner complaints of severe basement flooding during storms. After completion, the flooding continued and raw sewage leaked into basements. The contractor, JR Cruz Corp., fixed the flooding, but left the old sewers intact under the new.

Soon after the repairs were finished and the street was closed up, the odor appeared. While residents still have no definite answer from the Department of Environmental Protection, they are convinced the second sewer project is responsible.

The irregular timing is frustrating and perplexing for homeowners.

“It’s not low tide or high tide. It’s not the temperature,” said Christine Mascialino, a resident of the area. “We’ve never found the trigger or the common denominator.”

Mascialino, who wrote a letter detailing the problem to the city’s public advocate in November 2008, says that, though the smell bothers her, she doesn’t have time to be a crusader.

Community Board 10 has a foot-high file documenting the situation, while Councilman Vincent Gentile’s office sent a letter of complaint in July 2009 to the Department of Environmental Protection.

Representatives from the department come dutifully to investigate every time a complaint is made, but the root of the problem remains.

“Myself and a neighbor had the DEP come into our houses to test the plumbing,” said Irene Rivera, who lives on Fort Hamilton Parkway. “Two years later, and we still haven’t gotten a result.”

The reason for the delay? They were told it had to go to the head of the department first.

In November 2008, officials from the department of environmental protection were invited to explain the steps they had taken to find and remove the smell to the community board’s general meeting. According to the community board, no one from the department attended.

“I think DEP thinks the odor is a lower priority than flooding,” Community Board District Manager Josephine Beckmann said, “I don’t share that view.”

Department officials did not return calls or emails for comment.

In early March 2009, the odor became sulfurous, prompting residents to call 911. The nearby Fort Hamilton Senior Center was evacuated. The new smell showed up again on March 23rd.

Community liaison Stephanie Giovinco at Councilman Gentile’s office said officials from the environmental department met with the councilman’s office last month. They had ruled out an accidental sewage connection to the Fort Hamilton Army Base, which borders the street, or open catch basins beneath sewer grates as the culprit.

But they were no closer to finding the source of the smell.

After months of sweet air, Mascialino got whiff of the odor again on October 1st, but she is weary of the formal complaint process.

“Nothing has ever been done about it, so today I didn’t bother,” she said.

Late in the Game, Thompson Reaches Out to Boroughs

Posted on 28. Oct, 2009 by Taylor Brown in Metro, Politics and Government

On a rainy Friday evening, Bill Thompson sat in the front of the Arab American Association office, trying to convince community leaders in Brooklyn that he was their candidate, not Mike Bloomberg. The Democratic nominee arrived in Bay Ridge without any campaign staff, save a single, silent man who stood by the door looking out towards the street. The 20 people stuffed into the former gynecologist’s waiting room, including leaders in the Arab, Pakistani, and Chinese communities, as well as a few Democratic politicians, seemed receptive to Thompson’s belief that Mayor Bloomberg had ignored ethnic communities and outer boroughs at his own peril.

“In a city that’s more diverse each day, and is stronger because of it, why would you ignore that?” Thompson said.

The comptroller stressed the importance of his get out the vote effort, saying that this close to election day, the campaign becomes “ about who actually goes out to vote.” He argued that Bloomberg had been mayor to only midtown Manhattan and the financial district.

With the incumbent mayor outspending Thompson 16 to one, Kenneth Sherrill, professor emeritus of political science at Hunter College said focusing on voters in the outer boroughs is a wise strategy for Thompson, and perhaps the only one he can employ with the resources at hand.

“If he doesn’t have money, he needs people,” Sherrill said, “If [Thompson] can’t work up some grassroots support, he’s cooked.”

Sherrill notes that Bloomberg’s mayoral tenure has been more disdainful towards participatory democracy across the board, not just in the outer boroughs. “To overstate it possibly, Bloomberg is an equal opportunity autocrat.”

Thompson’s support included his father, William “Willie” Thompson Sr., who arrived early. Thompson Sr., a former state senator, appellate judge, and city councilman, spoke animatedly with Habib Joudeh, a community board member and Khader El-Yateem, pastor of Salam Lutheran Church, about a proposal to add two Muslim holidays, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha to the calendar of the city’s public school system.

The city council passed a non-binding resolution supporting the proposal, but afterwards the mayor said that honoring every religious holiday celebrated by students in the city’s schools would be impractical. Although important to the city’s growing Muslim population, the measure has been practically stalled ever since.

Thompson, the former board of education president, released a statement in June supporting the idea. “It made sense to me,” he said again during the hour-long discussion, “We’ll find the two extra days and extend the school year if need be.”

Malik Akbar, a businessman from Midwood asked Thompson why his campaign had not reached out to the media in Pakistani groups and others. Akbar said that the impact of ethnic newspapers and television, especially non-English media, could make a big difference to the campaign.

Thompson said that his communications team would look into these suggestions. Later he acknowledged that his campaign could have been doing more to reach out to these various groups, but that “we’ve been speaking to so many different people across the city, some of them for months now,” he said, referring to the primary season.

Also in attendance were City Councilman Vincent Gentile, State Assemblywoman Janele Hyer-Spencer, and Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes.

Hyer-Spencer, a supporter of Thompson, said that while she believes that Mayor Bloomberg has done good things for the city, she found the extension of term limits to be “deeply disenchanting” .

“The vote should have gone back to the people,” she said, referring to the city council vote that extended term limits for elected city officials, including the mayor, “He’s acting more like an emperor than a mayor.”

Hyer-Spencer said that support of the Arab community in Bay Ridge had been crucial in her election to a historically Republican seat divided between Bay Ridge and Staten Island.

Linda Sarsour, director of the Arab American Association, suggested that Thompson would be able to make a big difference in his campaign if he stopped by the mosque in Bay Ridge on 5th Avenue after Friday prayers, where thousands of worshipers from Brooklyn would be in attendance, as well as march in the Muslim Foundation of America parade that upcoming Sunday. She noted that during his entire tenure as mayor, Bloomberg had not attended the parade once.

Thompson could use the exposure. While polling shows his support among likely voters has wavered up and down, a recent Quinnipiac poll found in for Kings County, 37 percent of voters haven’t heard enough about Thompson to have an opinion about him, compared with 35 percent who felt favorably. In recent weeks, his overall polling numbers have dropped.

That Sunday, Thompson walked for part of the parade down Madison Avenue, together with with the NYPD band and various religious and community groups. Along the route, only a few people watched.

A New Start at a Catholic School in Bay Ridge

Posted on 24. Oct, 2009 by Taylor Brown in Education, Religion

By Taylor Kate Brown

On the second morning of school, Rosemarie Diaz, a secretary at Holy Angels Catholic Academy in Bay Ridge, is still enrolling new students. The mother of a new student asks questions about the uniforms in a nearby display case; they sport the logo of a shield with a wing sprouting from each side. A class waiting in the hallway chimes a hello, in chorus, to their principal.

Just a few months ago, parents and teachers feared the school would close for good after years of decreasing enrollment.

Instead, Holy Angels is one of several schools to reopen this year under an independent Catholic academy model, where each school, administered by a board of directors comprised solely of laypeople, is legally and financially independent of the parish. The parish priest and the bishop of the diocese remain responsible for keeping the school Catholic.

The Roman Catholic Diocese in Brooklyn hopes to convert all its financially struggling schools to the academy model by August 2013. Last year, around 35,000 students attended 111 elementary schools within the diocese.

The journey from Our Lady of Angels School to Holy Angels Catholic Academy started last January, when the diocese announced that the parish school of the 4th Ave church would be one of 11 schools in Brooklyn and Queens closed at the end of the academic year. Parents and teachers found out about the school’s closing when a reporter stood waiting outside the gates, garnering reaction to the diocese’s press release.

“We were hurt in the way that it happened,” Rachel Connolly, the Parent’s Association president and mother of two children at the school, said.

Rosemarie McGoldrick, the school’s principal, said she expected to have two years to prove herself. Instead, the announcement of the school’s closing shocked her mid-way through her first year as principal.

“I’d come from a parish that closed its school because it didn’t have the money. We [Lady of Angels] had money,” she said.

Our Lady of Angels School received an endowment of $1 million from Phillip Whitcomb, an alumni, upon his death. Plus, the school rents out part of the 36,000-square foot building to Treasure Island, a day care, and to HeartShares, a human service agency. Parish and school finances usually didn’t mix, with the exception of a shared bookkeeper between the two accounts.

Instead, the school suffered from low enrollment. By the time of the diocese’s announcement, the total number of students for Pre-K to 8th grade had fallen to under 180. The target for all Brooklyn diocese elementary schools is at least 200.
According to McGoldrick, four Catholic schools in the immediate area and 20 years worth of speculation that the school would be the first to close, didn’t help enrollment numbers.

“Bay Ridge is a small town,” McGoldrick said, adding there were some concerns with the prior school administration.

“The perception was not positive.”

Connolly and other parents were determined to keep the school open. They set up a phone bank to gauge interest in the school if it did stay open. An online petition to “Save Our Lady of Angels School” garnered more than 850 signatures.

“It’s a special place,” Roseann Raccuia, an alumna and now the school nurse, said, “And [closing the school] affects the whole community. We have the seniors’ leisure club, scouts, and speakers here.”

McGoldrick, Fusco and two parish priests worked on a proposal to convince the diocese that the school could switch successfully to the model the diocese had proposed as part of a long-term solution to an ailing Catholic school system.

There were several items in their favor: the endowment, a school building with an auditorium, gymnasium and a whole unused floor, plus a promise from McGoldrick to increase enrollment. Superintendent Tom Chadzutko said the school’s commitment to stay open, as well as a realistic plan for the future, convinced him.

In the end, eight of the eleven schools did close, but Holy Angels is one of seven new academies in the diocese this year. In May, the original school closed and the entire staff had to apply again for their jobs. Not all were hired back. Even Mary Brennan, a Pre-K teacher who has worked at the school for 25 years, had to interview for her own position.

“There were questions as if you hadn’t worked here before, like ‘What would you bring to Holy Angels?’” Brennan said.

She said she is glad the school remains open and notes the teachers will be involved in more extra-curricular activities, like after-school arts-and-crafts.

“All eyes are on us, we’re like the guinea pig,” she said.

As of the second day of school, Holy Angels’ enrollment stands at 217.