Born in Brooklyn

Will Hawkes visits the Brooklyn Brewery in New York, at brewery at the epicentre of innovation in the USA.

The mobster was angry. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he squeaked impatiently, Joe Pesci-style, as he sat in the warehouse of the as yet unfinished Brooklyn Brewery.

“We’ve had enough of this bullshit. We’re here for one thing: J-O-B-S, jobs. You built this brewery without us. The first brewery in Brooklyn in a long time. That’s an insult.” Steve Hindy, co-founder and president of the Brooklyn Brewery, stared back at him. It was early 1996 and the company’s new brewplant was nearing completion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Ex-AP journalist Hindy had been visited by a group of men whom brewmaster Garrett Oliver later described as being “straight out of central casting: big overcoats and heavy Brooklynese accents.” These men – ‘union representatives’ – were unhappy that the brewery was being built without their connivance.

Even today, Hindy finds it hard to believe that he and the brewery survived this encounter relatively unscathed. “We were very fortunate,” he says. “I thought that we were going to be faced with bribing these guys to get them to leave us alone but in the end they left us alone after threatening me and scaring me. I don’t really know why they left. Maybe it was because of my journalism background – they thought I could be a real problem for them, or maybe because the project wasn’t as big as they thought it was.

“I always wondered if it was just a game. It wasn’t a game. I asked a friend of mine in law enforcement and he said: ‘they’re not playing with you, these are dan.....

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By Will Hawkes

Section : International Brewery

Page number : 36