E-Malt.com News article: US, NY: Greenpoint Beer Works to pump out more this year

Kelly Taylor started brewing beer about 20 years ago using a hot plate in his college dorm room. Now, he manages one of the largest breweries in Brooklyn, fort-greene.thelocal.nytimes.com reports.

Mr. Taylor owns Kelso of Brooklyn beer and serves as the head brewmaster for Heartland Brewery — a chain of brew pubs in the city. Both companies brew their beer in a two-story brick brewery in Clinton Hill called Greenpoint Beer Works. Greenpoint Beer Works is a brewery, not a brand of beer, and it is the exclusive home to Kelso and Heartland. “They’re not made anywhere else,” Mr. Taylor said.

The brewery expects to pump out 20,000 kegs of beer this year, up from 12,000 in 2009. Aside from Heartland and Kelso, Mr. Taylor also does contract brewing, making beer for other breweries that don’t have the space in their factories. He has previously brewed for Sixpoint in Red Hook, and now brews for two upstate breweries, Great South Bay Brewery and Empire Brewing Company.

Greenpoint got its start when Heartland wanted to move production out of their restaurants into a separate space to save money. Mr. Taylor, a Washington State native, designed the brewery, and its construction was completed in 2003. The brewery was going to be built in Greenpoint but after the original space fell through and the brewery ended up in Clinton Hill, Mr. Taylor said it was easier to just keep the Greenpoint Beer Works name.

When Mr. Taylor decided he wanted to have his own label, Heartland suggested that they share the space in Greenpoint Beer Works.

“Since I already built this place anyway,” he said, “I might as well make my beer out of here.”

In 2006, Kelso brewed its first pint. Mr. Taylor got the name by combining his first name, Kelly, and his wife’s, Sonya. She runs marketing and social media for the brewery.

In the beginning, it was hard for Mr. Taylor to compete with bigger labels and imports.

“It had been frustrating for a while just to go out and say, ‘look, my beer’s made like three miles from here,’” he said. “People were like, ‘Oh well, who cares. I got Stella and everybody knows what that is.’”

But over the last few years, local has become a selling point, Mr. Taylor said.

“People are starting to figure it out that you can buy local products and it’s going to be in many ways better quality, or at least it’s going to be fresher,” he said. “You’ve seen that mental switch just in the last few years and that’s been very gratifying to see.”

Kevin Avantanzo, business manager for the bar and restaurant Union Hall in Park Slope, said he stopped carrying beer from the most famous local label, Brooklyn Brewery, because much of its production was actually upstate. (Brooklyn Brewery’s recent expansion will allow production to be split between Brooklyn and Utica by 2013.) Mr. Avantanzo has kept Kelso on tap.

“Brooklyn Brewery had gotten fairly large, and I was concerned about keeping things even more local,” Mr. Avantanzo said. “Breweries like Kelso are relatively small. Kelly I might see a couple of times, and I’ve never met the owner of Brooklyn Brewery. It’s one of those connections that two of those small businesses have with each other.”

Around the United States, smaller, independent breweries — called craft breweries — have been on the rise. In the past 30 years, the number of breweries grew from 100 to 1,759, according to the Brewers Association, a trade group for craft breweries. Out of the 1,759, 1,716 are craft breweries, and the Brewers Association estimated that craft brews made up $7.6 billion of the $101 billion in beer sales last year, 7.6 percent of the market.

There are 70 breweries in New York State, three in Brooklyn (Brooklyn Brewery, Greenpoint Beer Works and Sixpoint), and New York breweries make up just under 10 percent of craft brewery beer sales nationwide, said David Katleski, president of the New York State Brewers Association.

“It’s still not where we want it to be,” he said. “The biggest challenge for breweries in New York State is to get the public to really focus on the beer being produced in New York and try to buy local.”

The local craft brewery competition may be cutthroat, Mr. Taylor said, but it’s also an exciting time to be making beer in Brooklyn.

“We think there’s tremendous growth in the craft market, in the draft market, in New York City,” he said. “There’s a lot of imported tap handles out there that are ready to fall.”


20 April, 2011