Rocky Point Artisan Brewers

Yesterday I produced a podcast (episode 120, “small is beautiful“) in which I continued making my case for why beer enthusiasts should start to support local breweries. The assumption is that the local beer is good and that it is something that they want to drink. The difficulty in arguing the “buy local” position is that we are so used to getting whatever we want regardless of how far it has to travel to get here. If someone living on Long Island likes Tröegs HopBack Amber better than Blue Point Hoptical Illusion, then they will probably feel entitled to drink HopBack despite the fact that it’s a beer brewed the next state over.

Another difficulty with buying local Long Island beers is that many are brewed off the island. This applies primarily to the bottled product. Blue Point and Crop Circle beers are brewed in Baltimore at Clipper City. Southampton bottled beers are brewed upstate and in New Jersey (and, I believe, production has started at a Pabst contract brewery, the Lion Brewery in Wilkes-Barre). Bottles of Brooklyn beer have always been produced at the F.X. Matt brewery in Utica (except for the big corked bottles which are produced in Williamsburg). The bottom line is that if it’s in a bottle, then it had to be shipped to Long Island in a truck. Is it still local?

The best option for the local beer drinker is to buy beer on draft. And if you want local beer on tap at home, invest in a draft system and buy beer directly from the breweries. Most breweries will fill a five gallon corny keg for you.

In the next couple of years Long Island will have four new small breweries (that I know of at the moment): Star Hose, Great South Bay, Blind Bat, and Rocky Point Artisan Brewers. At least two of these will be small batch breweries, or nanobreweries: Blind Bat and Rocky Point. These new brewers will need your support to be successful.

What’s interesting about a nanobrewery is that it isn’t a money making model. Nanobrewers are brewing enthusiasts who love making beer and want to contribute to the local beer culture by giving beer enthusiasts truly local options at their neighborhood taproom. With kegs (half barrels) of beer selling for between $120 and $200 (depending on production cost) the profit margin for brewers is not good at all if you are brewing a barrel or a barrel and a half at a time. Considering it’s a full day’s work to brew a batch of beer regardless of batch size, brewing more at a time is the only sensible thing for a brewer who wants to quit their day job and devote full time to brewing. This is why most new breweries are microbreweries turning out between 10 and 20 barrels a day.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 8:05 am and is filed under the cottage brewer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.