I remember the first time I walked into a Brooklyn brewery and barely recognized half the tap list. It was 2010, and the chalkboard read like a hop-head’s ransom note: Simcoe, Citra, Amarillo. At the time, that felt radical. Now? You can grab a hazy IPA brewed with experimental hop extracts from a Bushwick bodega. The change from then to now isn’t just about more breweries or bigger tanks—it’s a complete rewiring of what a Brooklyn beer even is, who’s making it, and who’s drinking it.
Back in 2010, Brooklyn’s brewing identity was still wrapped up in a scrappy, post-industrial romance. Brooklyn Brewery had already gone global, but the real heartbeat was in the little guys: Sixpoint was canning before anyone thought cans were cool, and Kelso of Brooklyn was quietly putting out balanced lagers and a nut-brown ale that felt like a locals-only handshake. The scene was tight, almost insular. If you wanted a beer from Greenpoint Beer & Ale Co., you went to Greenpoint. No delivery apps, no DTC shipping, no Instagram geotagging frenzy. The beer itself had to pull you in.
Fifteen years later, the physical map of Brooklyn brewing has ballooned and shrunk in weird ways. Neighborhoods that used to have one or two taprooms now have clusters—Gowanus, Williamsburg, Bushwick—while other areas have watched promising spots fold under rent pressure. The number of active brewery licenses in Kings County has more than tripled since 2010, but the churn is relentless. For every Grimm Artisanal Ales that graduates from gypsy brewing to a permanent, beautifully designed taproom, there’s a tiny operation that quietly disappears after a lease renewal doubles the overhead.
The IPA Arms Race and Its Casualties
Walk into a Brooklyn bar in 2010, and the IPA section was simple: a West Coast-style bitter bomb, maybe an English IPA if the bar was thoughtful, and a handful of pale ales. The haze craze hadn’t landed yet. Lactose, vanilla, and fruit purées belonged in smoothie shops, not fermenters. By 2015, that script had flipped entirely. Other Half Brewing opened in Carroll Gardens and almost instantly rewired the borough’s palate. Their all-Citra, all-Mosaic, all-the-time approach—opaque, juicy, low-bitterness beers that smelled like a tropical fruit stand—became the new normal. Lines formed on release days. Trading culture went nuts. Brooklyn turned into a pilgrimage site for IPA hunters.
That shift had consequences. On the upside, it forced every brewery to tighten up their cold-side processes. Biotransformation, dry-hop timing, water chemistry—these became everyday vocabulary. The quality floor rose. But it also squeezed the stylistic bandwidth. For a few years, walking into a new Brooklyn taproom meant facing a wall of eight IPAs, one obligatory stout, and maybe a kettle sour if you got lucky. The diversity that defined early craft brewing—the ESBs, the altbiers, the milds—got shoved into a corner. I’ve had brewers tell me, off the record, that they felt trapped. If they didn’t have a hazy IPA on, customers would walk. That pressure is real, and it’s a direct product of the 2015–2020 haze boom.
The Lager Revival and a Return to Restraint
Something interesting started bubbling up around 2018, and it’s now in full bloom: Brooklyn brewers are making lagers again. Not as a token nod to tradition, but as a point of pride. Wild East Brewing Co., which opened in Gowanus in 2020, built its whole identity around mixed-culture fermentation and meticulously crafted lagers. Their Czech-style pilsner, conditioned for weeks and poured with a dense, creamy head, is a quiet masterpiece. Threes Brewing, which launched in 2014, has always kept a lager program alongside their IPAs, but lately they’ve doubled down, releasing foeder-aged pilsners and crisp helles lagers that get just as much buzz as their hoppy stuff.
This isn’t just nostalgia. It’s a reaction to palate fatigue and a market that’s growing up. The drinkers who discovered craft beer through hazy IPAs a decade ago are now in their thirties and forties. They still want flavor, but they also want balance, sessionability, and something that pairs with food beyond a burger. Brooklyn’s food scene has always been a driver here—you can’t drink a triple IPA with omakase. The lager revival is also a flex of technical skill. Any brewery can hide flaws under a mountain of hops. A clean, crisp pilsner exposes everything. Brewers who came up in the haze era are now proving they have the chops to make the hard stuff.
The Taproom as Third Place—and the Threat to It
In 2010, a brewery taproom was often an afterthought: a folding table, a few stools, maybe a food truck outside if you were lucky. The model was distribution. You made beer, you kegged it, you fought for tap handles at Spuyten Duyvil and Barcade. Today, the taproom is the business. Direct-to-consumer sales, where margins are fattest, have become the financial backbone for most small breweries. This has led to beautifully designed spaces—Grimm’s airy, plant-filled room in Williamsburg, Strong Rope’s cozy, Adirondack-lodge vibe in Gowanus, Talea’s brightly lit, Instagram-optimized taprooms in Williamsburg and Cobble Hill. These are places built for lingering, for remote work, for first dates.
But leaning so hard on taproom revenue has a dark side. It makes breweries hyper-vulnerable to rent hikes and neighborhood rezoning. We’ve already seen casualties. The original Greenpoint Beer & Ale Co. closed in 2018 after its building was sold. Folksbier, a wonderful little brewery in Carroll Gardens known for its delicate, old-world styles, shut down in 2022, citing the economic impossibility of keeping a small taproom-focused operation alive in a high-rent district. The very thing that made Brooklyn breweries special—their integration into walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods—is now the thing that threatens them. A brewery that could survive on wholesale in 2010 can’t survive on taproom sales in 2024 if the landlord decides the space is worth more as a bank branch.
The Diversity Gap: Who’s Brewing, Who’s Drinking
In 2010, if you pictured a Brooklyn brewer, you probably imagined a bearded white guy in a flannel. That wasn’t just a stereotype; it was largely accurate. The brewing scene was overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white. The shift since then has been real, but it’s been slow and uneven. Talea Beer Co., founded in 2018 by LeAnn Darland and Tara Hankinson, was explicitly created as a female-founded brewery with a taproom environment designed to be more welcoming to women and non-binary people. Their success—they now have multiple locations—proves there was a massive, underserved audience. Other breweries have made genuine efforts to diversify their staff and their customer base, but the ownership level remains stubbornly homogenous. Walk into most Brooklyn breweries today, and the person who signs the checks still fits that 2010 profile.
The drinking audience, however, has diversified dramatically. Brooklyn’s taprooms are no longer the exclusive domain of beer geeks. You’ll see groups of friends who treat the brewery like a wine bar, ordering flights and discussing the esters in a saison. You’ll see families with strollers on a Saturday afternoon. The beer itself has diversified to match: hard seltzers, fruited sours, low-ABV table beers, and non-alcoholic options are now standard. In 2010, a brewery offering a non-alcoholic beer would have been laughed at. Today, it’s a business necessity. Athletic Brewing, though not Brooklyn-based, has forced every local brewery to consider what they’re offering the sober-curious crowd.
The Distribution Squeeze and the Rise of Hyperlocal
The wholesale market that once sustained Brooklyn breweries has been gutted by consolidation and competition. In 2010, getting your beer into a few key accounts in Manhattan could float your entire operation. Now, those accounts are flooded with options from all over the country, and the distributors who control access have become gatekeepers with little incentive to push small, local brands. The result is a retreat to hyperlocalism. Breweries like Wild East and Strong Rope distribute almost entirely within a few zip codes. They self-distribute or use small, craft-focused distributors. The dream of becoming the next Brooklyn Brewery—a national brand—has been replaced by the dream of becoming the best brewery in your neighborhood.
This hyperlocal focus has some beautiful side effects. It deepens the relationship between a brewery and its immediate community. Strong Rope’s Gowanus location overlooks the canal and hosts local artists. Wild East collaborates with nearby food vendors and other small businesses. The beer itself often reflects the neighborhood—names, ingredients, even yeast strains sourced from local plants. But it also caps growth. A brewery that only sells within a five-mile radius can only get so big. For some, that’s the point. For others, it’s a frustrating ceiling.
Ingredients, Innovation, and the Ghost of Terroir
Brooklyn beer will never have terroir in the wine sense—our barley comes from the Midwest, our hops from the Pacific Northwest or New Zealand. But there’s a growing interest in what local character can mean. Several breweries are experimenting with New York State ingredients: malt from Hudson Valley maltsters, hops from the nascent upstate hop farms, even wild yeast captured in Brooklyn backyards. Grimm’s “Super You” series uses locally foraged botanicals. Transmitter Brewing, a tiny operation in Long Island City, has built a cult following around farmhouse ales fermented with mixed cultures they’ve cultivated themselves. These beers taste like nowhere else, not because of the soil, but because of the specific microbial life in that particular corner of Queens.
This is a direct counterpoint to the 2010–2015 era, when innovation meant importing the newest hop variety from Australia or dumping a box of cereal into the mash. The current wave of experimentation is more subtle, more biological, more tied to process than to ingredients. Kettle sours have given way to long-term mixed fermentations. Pastry stouts are being replaced by grisettes and saisons with delicate, evolving flavor profiles. It’s a sign of a maturing scene that trusts its drinkers to appreciate nuance.
What We’ve Lost, What We’ve Gained
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss some things about 2010 Brooklyn beer. I miss the janky taprooms where you sat on a keg and talked to the brewer because they were also the bartender. I miss the thrill of discovering a new style—a gose, a rauchbier—that felt like a secret. I miss the lower prices. A pint in Brooklyn now routinely costs $9 or $10, which prices out a lot of the people who built this scene. I miss the sense that craft beer was a weird little club, not a lifestyle brand.
But what we’ve gained is substantial. The beer is objectively better. The technical quality, the consistency, the depth of flavor—these have all improved enormously. The taprooms are more comfortable, more inclusive, more intentional. The range of styles, after a worrying contraction, is expanding again. And the conversation around beer has matured. We’re talking about labor practices, about sustainability, about who owns the means of fermentation. In 2010, we were just talking about IBUs.
Brooklyn’s brewing scene is no longer the scrappy underdog. It’s an established, complex ecosystem with real strengths and real vulnerabilities. The next five years will be defined by how it handles the economic pressures, whether it can continue to diversify its ownership and its offerings, and whether it can hold onto the sense of place that made it special in the first place. I’ll be at the bar, drinking a lager, watching it all unfold.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the biggest change in Brooklyn beer styles between 2010 and 2020?
The dominance of hazy, juicy IPAs—led by breweries like Other Half—completely reshaped the market. Traditional styles like ESBs and milds nearly vanished from tap lists, replaced by a wall of low-bitterness, fruit-forward IPAs. This shifted consumer expectations and forced nearly every brewery to prioritize hop-heavy offerings.
Why are so many Brooklyn breweries focusing on lagers now?
After years of IPA saturation, both brewers and drinkers are seeking balance and drinkability. Lagers require exceptional technical skill, which appeals to brewers wanting to prove their chops. They also pair better with Brooklyn’s diverse food scene and appeal to a maturing audience that wants flavor without high alcohol or palate fatigue.
How has the business model for Brooklyn breweries changed since 2010?
In 2010, most breweries relied on wholesale distribution to bars and restaurants. Today, the taproom is the financial center, with direct-to-consumer sales providing the best margins. This has led to more inviting spaces but also made breweries extremely vulnerable to commercial rent increases and neighborhood rezoning.
Is Brooklyn’s brewing scene more diverse now than in 2010?
The customer base has diversified significantly, with taprooms attracting a broader demographic. However, brewery ownership and head brewer positions remain predominantly white and male, though breweries like Talea Beer Co. have made notable strides in creating more inclusive spaces and proving the demand for diverse leadership.