Once the Nation’s Beer Capital : Big Apple Now Has 2 Breweries

New York City, once the beer capital of the nation with 121 breweries, again is percolating with the smell of hops and malt.

A small brewery and restaurant opened in Manhattan last year and a new, larger one, the Old New York Brewing Co. is putting finishing touches on its copper kettles to begin pumping lager early next year.

They are the first breweries to operate in the city since 1976, when the last of the big beer makers moved out.

The Old New York Brewing Co. is the brainchild of Matthew Reich, a native of the Bronx who had been a wine and food buff until he made a batch of beer at home five years ago and got hooked on it.

“I made a batch of home brew, I smelled it and I said I want to make that smell commercially,” Reich said. “It became my dream to build a brewery in New York.”

Reich started making his lager, which he dubbed New Amsterdam after New York’s original name, at an existing brewery in Utica, N.Y. He produced 10,000 barrels of it this year and has among his customers more than 500 restaurants in New York City.

But his dream was to build his own brewery in New York City. “We wanted to bring brewing back to what was once the capital of brewing in the United States,” he said.

Reich scouted locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx until he settled on the bottom three floors of an old warehouse on Manhattan’s West Side, in the heart of the old home of dozens of pre-Prohibition breweries.

“It took five years to find. Honestly,” Reich said. “We had to find a building that had the right zoning, that had concrete floors and where we could get trucks in and out. It was a long search.”

The Manhattan location fits into New Amsterdam’s marketing as an “upscale” beer, as well as personally pleasing Reich, who simply wanted to work in the city.

Reich’s brewery is much larger than the Manhattan Brewing Company, which opened late last year in SoHo, producing about 2,500 barrels a year.

Reich plans to make 30,000 barrels and eventually expand to 50,000 barrels of beer annually.

Both the Manhattan Brewing Company and Reich’s brewery have restaurants on the premises. The latter, called the Tap Room, opened Oct. 23 and seats 150 people, who can see the huge all-copper brewing kettles as they drink and eat.

The 25-year-old kettles, which weigh more than 80,000 pounds when filled with beer, once were part of a brewery in southern Germany that was shut down last year.

Reich bought the kettles and had them dismantled and shipped to New York, where German engineers have been busy reassembling them.

“You can’t buy stuff like this new. It would be ridiculously expensive,” he said. “They’re really majestic, large copper kettles. They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”

Free tours of the plant already are available seven days a week at 1 p.m., 3 p.m. and 6 p.m.

The odor of malt and hops, which Reich described as “pleasant” and “like cooking oatmeal,” will be vented 115 feet above street level and should only be noticeable during brewing hours, which will initially be five to six hours a week and which will later expand to 10 hours to 12 hours a week, he said.

Reich does not foresee a return to the glory days of brewing in New York, when there were as many as 121 breweries before Prohibition.

Breweries were attracted in part to the city because of its unusually pure water supply.

“The big breweries aren’t going to come back because of the utilities, the expense of real estate here and because of the hassles of doing business in New York City, where the building codes are the most unusual in the country,” he said.