One Brewer’s Foreign Reporting Roots

The New York Times reports: At work in Cairo during the early 1980s, Steve Hindy found himself drinking beer that had been brewed at home by other American expatriates. They had picked up the skill living in parts of the Middle East where alcohol was banned. It was pretty good, and Hindy learned to make it himself when he and his family moved back to New York in 1984. Their old neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan had gotten too expensive, so they found a two-bedroom apartment in a part of the city that a family with young children could afford. It was Park Slope.

An upstairs neighbor, Tom Potter, liked the home brew, which he shared with Mr. Hindy as they watched the Mets in the transcendent baseball season of 1986. Why not make small batches of craft beer and sell them around the city? The next year, against a lot of advice, Hindy gave up a job as an editor at Newsday, and Mr. Potter left banking.

In 1988, they began by making a single premium beer brewed according to a Bavarian purity law from 1516, with no additives. Production would be done under contract with a brewery in Utica, in upstate New York.

They called it “Brooklyn Lager.”

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