Frieda Lim recently invited press and public to her incredible rooftop vegetable garden. Lim grows beets, eggplant, cucumbers, tomatoes and a host of herbs using a technique called “sub-irrigation agriculture.” The plants grow from a shallow tray of earth that is nourished by water wicking through a plastic tube from a plastic tub below. The veggies are delicious, and they were even better when paired with Brooklyn Lager and Pilsner, donated by The Brooklyn Brewery. “Sub-irrigation is a way for anyone to have a fresh box of vegetables for a $20 investment,” said Lim.  Pictured above are Lim, at right, and from left, Barbara Kariya, Ellen Foote and Sabine Hrechdakian. Also attending was Rachel Wharton of Edible Brooklyn magazine.

– Steve Hindy, Founder & President

UPDATE! There must be something in the air because The Old Grey Lady also published a recipe for beer can chicken this week. I like the recipe below from L Magazine, though.

Steve Hindy, Brooklyn Brewery founder & president, actually told me that this was one of his favorite recipes. L Magazine provides a colorful step by step guide to preparing a delicious whole chicken with a can of Brooklyn Lager firmly positioned in its largest orifice.

By Brett Stetka for  L Magazine

My wife and I debated the point all weekend: Is the cavity in a chicken the neck opening or the butt? Turns out it’s the butt. Once that was settled we procured a fresh chicken from Marlow and Daughters, fired up the grill and lodged a can of beer in its ass. Hence: Beer Ass Chicken. Or as it’s more often known, Beer Can Chicken.

I felt a certain evolutionary guilt about sticking a metal can up a fellow creature’s exit hole, and wished things had turned out differently in the neck vs. ass debate. But what’s done is done, and the incredibly moist and tender result eased my conscience.

My recipe is a modified version of Pat Neely’s, of Memphis barbecue and Food Network fame. Because yes, I have a thing for cooking shows with painfully canned banter (we all have our embarrassing vices: Conklin has golf; I have the Down Home With the Neelys [Ed.—I also count Down Home With the Neelys as a vice, for what it's worth.]). But do the Neelys use dark brown sugar and ground mustard? No they don’t, because doing so would be too extreme for the Food Network. Ok, it’s actually not that extreme, but I needed to make this recipe my own, and the brown sugar gives the chicken a nice charred and crispy caramelized crust. So without further ado, go make a Beer Ass Chicken this weekend:

INGREDIENTS:

For the rub:

Keep in mind these are rough estimates.

-1 tablespoons smoked paprika (careful – stuff’s powerfully smoky)

-2 tablespoons salt

-2 tablespoons onion powder

-1 tablespoon dark brown sugar (go easy here, otherwise the sugar can burn)

-1 tablespoon garlic powder

-1 tablespoon cayenne pepper

-1 tablespoon ground mustard

-1 tablespoon cumin

-2 teaspoons dried thyme

-2 teaspoons dried oregano

-2 teaspoons black pepper

For the Chicken:

-1 4 pound chicken, give or take a pound

-Vegetable oil

-1 12-ounce can of beer*

*A note on the beer: I like to use a medium-bodied lager with some malty sweetness to it for extra flavor; something like Brooklyn Lager, which does come in cans if you look hard enough. In reality it probably doesn’t matter what you use since the beer is mainly just a water source to help steam the chicken and keep it moist. But beer is more fun than soda, so you know, stick with beer.

Click here for directions and photos.

For years now Brooklyn Brewery has been selling Lager in Israel and Turkey. Even before that, though, the story of Brooklyn Brewery really began in the Middle East, when founder Steve Hindy first picked up home brewing as a foreign correspondent for the AP. The Atlantic now reports that Steve’s success  story of crafting good beer has inspired the Lebanese microbrewery 961.

From TheAtlantic.com

“One of the books (Mazen) Hajjar read, in the summer of 2006, was Beer School, an autobiography by Steve Hindy, the co-founder of Brooklyn Brewery. In the early 1980s, Hindy was a correspondent for the AP in Beirut, covering the civil war in Lebanon. (He later moved to Cairo, where he first encountered homebrewing, before graduating to the real thing back in New York.) More than anything, it was Hindy’s improbable tale, Hajjar says, that convinced him to try his hand at a homebrew. When he went to the States for the beer festival, Hajjar also scheduled a stop in Brooklyn, where he met his unwitting mentor.”

Read the whole story here.

Steve Hindy, Brooklyn Brewery’s co-founder and president, received a special honor at last week’s Craft Brewers Conference in Chicago. He was celebrated with the F.X. Matt Defense of the Small Brewing Industry Award for 2010, as presented by the Brewer’s Association. That’s right. Steve’s a defender! Read all about it below.

Also from the BA, comes the 2010 list of top 50 Craft Breweries. Brooklyn clocks in at number 17. See the whole list here.

Brewers Association honors Brooklyn Brewery’s Steve Hindy at World Beer Cup 2010 in Chicago

From Examiner.com

By William Loob

The Brewers Association, the trade group that represents the interests of craft brewers, honored Steve Hindy, co-founder and president of Brooklyn Brewery with the F.X. Matt Defense of the Small Brewing Industry Award for 2010. Hindy accepted the award last week at the Craft Brewers Conference, in Chicago. The F.X. Matt Award recognizes people distinguished service to the craft beer industry. Hindy has played an active role in regulatory issues throughout his career atBrooklyn Brewery. Among his efforts to benefit the industry, the association noted his testimony before Congress on the effect of state franchise laws on small brewers. 
At the end of the conference, Hindy also got to see one of the Brooklyn Brewery entries, Local 2, win the bronze medal in its category in the World Beer Cup competition. He took a moment to share his thoughts with Examiner.com about this year’s conference and the state of the craft beer business today. 
Conference attendance was an indicator of the overall health of the craft beer business, he says. “It was the most exciting conference to date. We had 3,400 attending, last year it was about 2,200, and the keynote speaker was a member of Congress,” he says. (That Congressman is Peter DeFazio (D-OR), who was a co-founder of the House Small Brewers Caucus in 2007.) “The enthusiasm for craft beer is starting to take hold in America.”

(read more)

Through the miracle of a video/audio hook-up with Skype, I recently gave a talk and answered questions from business students and professors at the Kharkiv Polytechnical Institute in the Ukraine.  BEER SCHOOL, the book I wrote with brewery co-founder Tom Potter, has been translated into Russian.  Some of the students had read the book, and some had heard it on audible.com.

It was a fascinating hour and a half.  The students spoke very good English.  Each one came on camera and asked a question and a follow-up.  They asked about business plans, partnerships, raising money, corruption and competition.  I talked about a few run-ins with rough characters in Brooklyn.  They assured me that corruption in the Ukraine was much more pervasive, and dangerous, than in America.

I don’t think they completely understood Brooklyn Brewery’s support for not-for-profit and arts organizations and its word-of-mouth marketing.

Their instructor, an American named Maryann McGuire, warned me that the mindset in the Ukraine was quite different than in America.  I didn’t know what she meant until she translated the poster they produced for my appearance.  The headline read:

ASK A MILLIONAIRE ABOUT SUCCESS!!!!

Video-conference with a successful American businessman and millionaire from Brooklyn, NY.

Well, two out of three ain’t bad.  I am successful, and I am an American businessman from Brooklyn.  The millionaire label is a bit premature.

–Steve Hindy

Read More

Craftbeer.com gives us the documentary treatment.

CraftBeer.com Brew Stories – Brooklyn from Brewers Association on Vimeo.

The Brooklyn Paper interviewed Brewery Founder, Steve Hindy, and did an little piece about the rapid change in Williamsburg over the past 20 years.

From The Brooklyn Paper

Brooklyn Brewery beer is now a premier Friday night lubricant for hipsters and other young people who flood the bars and clubs that glut the major avenues of Greenpoint and Williamsburg.

But when the brewery opened more than 20 years ago on Meserole Street in nearby Bushwick, things were different.

“The trucks delivering beer to the warehouse would not come after dark,” said Steve Hindy, co-founder of Brooklyn Brewery. “They were afraid.”

Crime was crippling in the late 1980s, and it was still lurking in 1991 when Hindy and his company moved to N. 11th Street and Berry Street in Williamsburg. He remembers the junkies. He remembers being robbed at gunpoint at the brewery when a bandit made off with $30,000 in 1995.

Gradually, things improved, following a course of gentrification that has since become nearly cliché. Artists and creative people pushed out of SoHo were taking up residence among the established black, Latino, Italian, Polish and Orthodox Jewish communities in the northernmost Brooklyn neighborhoods by the early 1980s. They made the neighborhood cool and, after a decade or so, the artists were pushed aside by the trustifarians, or hipsters with a wealthy background. They made the neighborhood hot for bars and clubs and restaurants and Starbucks and luxury condos.

But the hipsters’ disposable income, along with that of the yuppies and professionals who followed them, also inspired reclamation of the area’s decaying waterfront, bringing the prospect of new parks and open space, along with luxury dwellings that popped up like mushrooms after the 2005 upzoning of the waterfront.

“It’s been a revolution here,” Hindy said.

Read More

From YourNabe.com

Brooklyn Brewery receives state funds

Plans to expand, add jobs and green technology

By Stephen Witt
Monday, October 26, 2009 9:14 AM EDT

The bootlegging barons of the prohibition era must be smiling in their graves.

The state government last week awarded $800,000 to the Brooklyn Brewery to jump-start their $6.5 million expansion in Williamsburg.

The company, along with its signature Brooklyn brands of ale, lager and beer, is converting 13,500 square feet of vacant distribution space into a beer fermentation facility, and increasing brewing capacity from 8,000 to 50,000 barrels per year.

The plant is located at 79 North 11th Street.

The grant came from a competitive process, yielding a total first-round $7.8 million that will eventually total $35 million to revitalize the downstate area, and grow the job and tax base.

Municipalities, non-profits and businesses receiving the money also had to provide an ecological or green compnonent in their application.

“We are grateful to Governor Paterson and Empire State Development for this grant from the Downstate Revitalization Fund,” said Brooklyn Brewery Founder and President Steve Hindy. “Support like this is vital to growing manufacturing jobs in New York City. These funds will enable us to complete a six-fold capacity expansion, adding 15 full-time jobs with benefits, and further expanding the Brewery’s green initiatives.”

Read More

On an idyllic Saturday afternoon, one of the last days of summer, we hosted 20 lovely mermaids at a barbecue in my backyard in Brooklyn.  Many racks of ribs were consumed and a keg was kicked.

For the last three years, these creative beauties have represented the brewery in Coney Island Present’s MERMAID PARADE.

The brewery is proud to contribute to Dick Zigun’s annual production, one of Brooklyn’s finest festivals and probably the closest you get to a Mardi Gras scene in New York City.  (Right up there with the West Indian Day Parade and the Halloween Parade in the Village.)

–Steve Hindy, Founder

Brock back in TX

St. Arnold Brewery owner Brock Wagner dropped in to Brooklyn to say hello today.  A few years back, Brock and I served on the board of the Brewers Association together.  We had a good talk.  Brock’s cellphone was ringing constantly because he released Divine Reserve #8 today, a special limited volume beer that is much in demand in Texas.  St Arnold is in Houston.

Brock said he hoped to open his new brewery with a 127-barrel German brewhouse in November.

Garrett gave him a tour of the Brooklyn Brewery and a preview of Brooklyn Rheinschweingebot.  I showed him around the conditioning rooms across the street where Brooklyn Black Ops and Brooklyn’s Manhattan Project are gestating.

Brock was in town serving his fine beers at Fashion Week.  (I kid you not.)  It was some sort of boondoggle organized by the powers that be in Houston to showcase a Texas designer.  I never pictured Brock as a fashionista, but craft beer is opening many doors these days.

–Steve Hindy