Big Apple Breweriana: A History of Beer in NYC

I hereby provide my proposal for discerning audiences.

For my research project, I propose a history of New York City breweries, mapping their locations across the city, their time of operation, and their reasons for both opening and closure. I intend to use this information to map broader trends in a growing and changing city, and how shifts in industry, laws, and demographics help shaped an industry that is only now beginning to re-emerge.

Before prohibition, there were 70 breweries operating in New York City. Today, only six remain, and none of them have been operating for more that 25 years. This shift cannot be explained very simply, and as New York City continues to change, shedding light on how a single industry flourished and disappeared in certain areas of the city can provide valuable historical context for other issues and subjects.

In my initial research, I have found several possible avenues at which to direct my project. Many breweries in the city sprang up during a period of increased German immigration in the mid-nineteenth century, creating new demand for beer styles not yet popular in the United States. I believe that when the breweries are mapped with correlating demographic statistics, a strong correlation will appear.

The most ruinous event for breweries in New York City (and the United States as a whole) was the enacting of Prohibition from 1921 to 1933. Many breweries did not survive the period, and some limped on by providing non-alcoholic malt beverages in place of their usual offerings. Researching which breweries survived, and by what products, could not only give a great insight into the time period but provide the possibility for very rich media to share.

While many breweries survived prohibition, many eventually fell victim to local laws, labor strife, and economies of scale that did not favor inner-city production. This is a broad topic that can be used to reflect larger macro-economic trends of the mid-20th century. Many breweries simply could not brew to the scale necessary to remain competitive, and moved operations out of the city. Now, as breweries move back to the city, scale and local laws remain an issue. Only recently did the Brooklyn Brewery begin to actually brew their beer within the city, and even now the majority of it is brewed upstate through a contract brewery.

Some of the types of media I expect to include are the images of the former breweries themselves, descriptions of the beers (and recipes if available), advertisements for the brewing companies, and video footage/interviews from some of the current breweries in operation.

This (sad to say) is not my first project in graduate school that has involved beer. In my research for the previous project I completed I found the industry to be extremely helpful to researchers who could help define the history of brewing outside of the nationwide macrobreweries, as well as show their brand’s contribution to the surging popularity of small-scale brewing operations across the country. Homebrewers with a preservationist bent have gone so far as to recreate styles from defunct NYC breweries. I’ve even discovered one company that provided a walking tour of where many breweries once resided in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

With the rising popularity of small scale breweries in the United States, people tend to forget that there was already a landscape of small breweries across the country, who had their reasons for appearing, disappearing, and reappearing again. Using URT, I can show the change in laws, demographics, tastes, and economic conditions that dramatically shaped an industry over the course of 150 years.

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