Queens is poised to become the latest hotbed for craft breweries, with two recently opened and another two on the way.
“The future’s bright for brewing in Queens because there’s a market of people that appreciate good beer,” said Ethan Long, co-owner of the Rockaway Brewing Co.
Long, along with Emmy-nominated cinematographer Marcus Burnett, opened the Long Island City brew house in June.
The set-building company owner was inspired to take the leap after noticing a growing number of microbreweries on the West Coast during a cross-country road trip with Burnett and their families.
New York City “is one of the biggest beer-drinking markets in the world,” Long said. “I just feel like we need more locally made beer.”
The microbrewery, which supplies its ales to concession stands on the Rockaway boardwalk, plans to begin selling growlers on-site next month.
“Our goal is to attract people to come visit us and buy our beers so we can keep growing,” Long said.
But Rockaway wasn’t the borough’s first brewery to open in recent memory.
Beyond Kombucha, an Astoria company that concocts fermented sweet tea, can claim that title.
The company was forced to seek a brewery license after the feds cracked down on the trace amounts of alcohol in the popular health food beverage.
“Because we didn’t want to change the formula or the process, we decided to get the alcohol licenses,” said founder and brewer Spiro Theofilatos, who also makes a kombucha ale with a 6.5% alcohol content.
“That enabled us to experiment with higher alcohol formulas,” he said.
SingleCut Beersmiths is slated to open in Astoria with five different beers in October.
“It’s going to put Queens on the map,” said SingleCut’s president, Rich Buceta, who hopes his suds house will become a neighborhood attraction.
Buceta plans to specialize in lagers and hoppy ales that will be sold at bars in Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan.
“There are many good craft beer bars that are opening through Queens,” he said. “So to not have a brewery was crazy.”
Homebrewer Kyle Hurst also plans to jump on that boozy bandwagon.
He and a partner plan to open the Big Alice Brewing Co. early next year in Long Island City.
“It’s a weekend thing for us,” said Hurst, who is a salesman for an air conditioning and refrigeration company. “We’re going to be doing very small batches of specialty ales.”
Samuel Merritt, president of the beer consulting firm Civilization of Beer, said there is an increase in small U.S. breweries focusing on quality.
“The same thing that’s happening in Queens is happening in the rest of the country,” he said.
Beer writer Jonathan Moxey, also a member of the New York City Homebrewers Guild, attributed the revitalization of the neighborhood beer scene to consumers “looking for things that are locally made” that taste better than mass-marketed beers.
“Craft brewing has been regaining popularity,” Moxey said. And the new breweries are “riding the tide of this resurgence.”
