An agitator in the ranks of New York City’s craft brewers

For years, brewers, brewers guilds, and larger associations supported by craft brewers have worked hard in concert with each other to do the heavy lifting to improve the industry: lobbying for relaxed regulations and lower excise taxes while also working to promote craft beer. And brewers have always looked out for each other and banding together in times of need, as when Long Island’s Barrier Brewing was destroyed in Hurricane Sandy. Craft brewers are a band of brothers (and sisters) who are all in it for the love of beer and to better the industry.

Or so we’ve thought. Two seemingly insignificant pieces of paper at one local brewer seem to point to a different way of operating. The sign above posted at Astoria’s Singlecut Beersmiths appears to be a shot fired across the bow at other New York City brewers.

Singlecut correctly points out that all of their beer is “made in New York City and no where (sic) else.” This didn’t come out of nowhere - Rich Buceta and his team at Singlecut have been beating the “local” drum in the press since before they had even brewed their first batch. But the sign is a pretty aggressive attack on those local brewers who don’t produce their beer locally. There are quite a few who could take offense to this sign.

Brooklyn and Sixpoint only produce a portion of their beer in Brooklyn, though the former is brewing significantly more beer in their namesake borough with a recent expansion. Bronx Brewery brews beer in Connecticut and Wisconsin but are gearing up for the opening of their brick-and-mortar brewery next year. Brewers like Grimm Artisanal Ales, Coney Island Brewing, Alphabet City Brewing, City Island Brewing, Radiant Pig, and Queens Brewery currently brew their beer far outside the city limits. This sign is seemingly an attack on every brewing outfit in New York City apart from the four (Rockaway, Big Alice, Bridge & Tunnel, KelSo) that produce all their beer locally for outside consumption.

Brewing every drop of beer in New York City is an expensive proposition for a brewery. Brooklyn opened their Williamsburg facility only after brewing for eight years elsewhere. And it took millions of dollars and a state grant for them to expand enough to brew a significant portion of their beer in Brooklyn in the last two years. Sixpoint and Brooklyn both brew much of their beer in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and Utica respectively, but also employ staff there to brew the beer. Sixpoint completely outgrew their first facility within a half-decade of opening. Bronx Brewery is in the midst of fulfilling a promise they made when they launched: when they have the funds to do so, they would open a brewery in the Bronx.

And therein lies the reason why so many contract operations exist in New York City: it’s insanely expensive to open a brewery here. Real estate, construction, licensing, and lawyers are just the start of it. Even a small-scale brewery could require hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital. A brewery the size of Singlecut was a multi-million dollar undertaking. The smallest breweries - nanobreweries that brew only a couple barrels at a time - may never be able to raise the money needed to open a larger facility on their successes alone.

For the small upstart brewer in New York City, contract brewing is often the only answer. But there’s no distinction, it seems, in Singlecut’s definition of “Contract Brewing.” Some of these small operations - like Grimm and Radiant Pig - are run by brewers who physically brew their own beer on someone else’s equipment. And as we mentioned, Sixpoint and Brooklyn have their own hired staff that brew in Wilkes-Barre and Utica. Those are a far cry from, say, Queens Brewery, which is more of a beer marketing company that doesn’t have a brewer making on-the-fly adjustments to their beer as their Lager is brewed in Saratoga Springs.

The one larger question that the sign raises, though, is whether or not it’s honest to market beer as “local” when it’s not brewed locally, whatever the intentions. Is it honest to list Sixpoint’s source as Brooklyn on a tap list when the keg came from Pennsylvania? The New York beer scene could use more transparency. Though most brewers are quite transparent about where their beer is brewed, it doesn’t always carry on to the retailer. There’s an increasing focus on localism in food and drink that helped drive the expansion of craft beer. Contract beer can still benefit the local economy with local jobs selling the beer, but what of the construction, brewing, and taproom jobs that could come with the opening of a truly local facility?

But again - contract brewing is rarely a cop-out; it’s a financial issue. Singlecut’s attack is rooted in the fact that they could find the investors for a brewery in New York City while their counterparts could not, or found it a risky or unsound financial proposition. Is that fair?

The sign’s last pessimistic claim - that contract brewing “will be the death of craft beer” - has some historical basis in fact. Contract brewing exploded in the mid-90s just before the craft beer industry suffered its first setback in the form of an industry-wide correction that saw a couple hundred breweries close. But something else also happened that time: a lot of really bad beer was made. That bad beer came from brick-and-mortar breweries and brewpubs just as often as it came from contract brewing. The bad beer comes out of both today, too.

The difference between then and now is that there are a lot more talented brewers out there than there were two decades ago, and consumers are more educated at distinguishing good beer from bad beer. If contract brewers in New York contributing to the oft-discussed “craft beer bubble,” they’re not doing any more damage than the large number of breweries opening in other parts of the country where opening a brewery is not a seven-figure proposition. A handful of contract brewers in the Northeast are hardly even a blip on the beer bubble when new brick-and-mortar breweries are opening in states like Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington at the rate of one or two per week.

Moreover, very few beer drinkers are drinking exclusively local beer to begin with. And with more and more options pouring into the market from out-of-state, most beer drinkers these days care far more about “good” than they do about “local."

In the end, though, is it worth it for a brewery to air grievances in public and attack their craft beer brethren when all these brewers, no matter what the source of the beer, are in the same fight together? Craft beer still has a measly single-digit market share nationwide, and New York is still lagging behind, and this looks like petty infighting over the leftover scraps from Bud, Miller, Coors, and the big imports. Perhaps their concern is well-founded, but isn’t there a bigger enemy that might be more deserving of a passive-aggressive sign on a bulletin board?