When we started The Brooklyn Brewery, in the late 80s, we had a couple of simple goals to guide our way. We wanted to brew the best beer possible no matter the cost and to bring brewing back to Brooklyn, once one of the great beer capitals of the world. Thirty years later we are the #1 craft beer brand in New York City, and the #1 draft beer in Brooklyn. We’re proud to have accomplished these goals and many more that we could never have imagined when we started.
One of those unforeseen goals was tapping into the international demand for great American craft beer. As it turned out, from the earliest days of The Brooklyn Brewery we were exporting beer around the world. In the 1980s, it was a fun sideline of our main business, which was establishing Brooklyn Lager in NYC. Now exports have grown to be more than half of our annual production, and we send beer all across the globe as far as Australia, Asia, South America, and Europe. We also have a team of passionate Brand Ambassadors who support our beers in many of these locations.
The continuing growth in global demand for Brooklyn Brewery beers never fails to amaze us, and we’re grateful for that support. However, the logistics of getting beer in as good condition as possible to our customers in so many places is daunting. We’ve also become much more conscious of our growing global carbon footprint in the process.
In 2014, we started brewing locally in Japan so our beer would no longer have to journey via container down the East Coast, through the Panama Canal, and up and across the Pacific. Since then, we’ve spread our brewing operations to carefully selected breweries in countries including Australia, Sweden, and Brazil. This allows us to bring the freshest beer possible, as quickly as possible, to some of our most passionate drinkers around the world. Our beer will travel 3.5 million miles less this year, dramatically reducing our carbon footprint.
Closer to home, our teams in Brooklyn and Utica, New York produce everything from Brooklyn Lager, The Stonewall Inn IPA, and Bel Air Sour, to specialty beers like Black Ops and boundary-pushing limited releases. We continue to invest in our capabilities at home in an effort to expand the range of products we can produce. We will also still continue to export these smaller batches of specialty brews using the best shipping methods available.
All of these initiatives are overseen by our brewing team- Brewmaster, Garrett Oliver; Technical Director, Mary Wiles; Director of Brewing, Taylor Onda; and Brewing Project Director, Kyle Wilson. We are committed to brewing and selling the freshest, brightest and most flavorful beer for all our US and international drinkers. We believe these practices will ensure that quality commitment and create a more sustainable future at the same time, allowing us to bring you more exciting and tasty new beers in the future.
– Eric Ottaway, CEO
