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Blogs abuzzin with Brewed in Brooklyn!

7/10/2009

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Check out the blogs that have written about the Brewed in Brooklyn tour this past week!  NYTimes City Room published a blog post this morning about the history of brewing in Brooklyn and described the tour.  Also, read about what Diego Cupolo at BushwickBK and Will at BeerMenus.Com thought about the tour after coming on it a few weeks ago!

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From the Brewed in Brooklyn Archives: An Excerpt from the Second Edition of Oyster E-news

7/7/2009

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The Smells of Summer
(Originally sent out to newsletter subscribers July 2, 2009. To subscribe to our newsletter, click here)
Nowadays, New York City residents often complain about bad odors during the height of a sweltering summer.  Just be thankful that you are not living in 1870’s Brooklyn nearby one of the thirty or so breweries of the period.  An angry neighbor of a brewery on Lafayette Avenue in what was then known as the Lefferts Park neighborhood (now Bedford-Stuyvesant) wrote this letter of complaint to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in July 1871:

"There is a brewery in Lafayette avenue which ejects its refuse fluid in the gutter, whence it finds its way to the junction of Tompkins avenue, where it lodges. The offensively noisome gases emitted by this deposit assail our olfactory nerves continuously during summer, causing nausea of the stomach and engendering diarrhea and other serious internal derangements. Two storekeepers, a grocer and a butcher, who occupy the easterly corners of Lafayette and Tompkins avenues can bear testimony to this perpetual nuisance, and both complain that the offensive odors lodge in their commodities, the one in his fruits and vegetables and the other in his fresh meats."

This wasn’t the only brewery in Brooklyn where drain-off caused a ruckus.  Just one year before, the health officer at the newly established Board of Health wrote a letter to the Eagle reporting investigations into several breweries: “….in the absence of any sewerage of the streets on which they (the breweries) are located, orders have been issued to their proprietors to construct deep cesspools into which all the waste and drainage shall be properly conducted.”   If you think all of that sounds bad, complaints about the waft from the “piggeries” or slaughterhouses near the old Bushwick train depot were even worse.

Well, as you toast to modern-day sanitation this Fourth of July weekend, we hope you’ll avoid “internal derangements” altogether, and instead make plans to beat the heat this summer with us over refreshing samples of beer on a Brewed in Brooklyn tour.  Click here for more info.



 

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We're in the Navy Now! From the Second Edition of Oyster E-news

7/6/2009

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(Originally sent out to newsletter subscribers July 2, 2009. To subscribe to our newsletter, click here.)

We're in the Navy Now! 

Well, not quite, but Urban Oyster is in the Brooklyn Navy Yard doing tours on behalf of the Brooklyn Historical Society and the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation.  Surrounded by fences and walls since the 1820s, the Navy Yard has long carried with it an alluring mystery to many New Yorkers.  One of New York City’s greatest hidden treasures, this 300-acre property on Brooklyn's waterfront has an amazing history of building and outfitting some of America’s most famous ships, from the commissioning of the Monitor, a Civil War-era ironclad; to the Maine, immortalized during the Spanish-American War; the Arizona, now a memorial in Pearl Harbor; and the Missouri on board which the Japanese signed unconditional surrender at the end of the war.  From the 1830’s Naval Hospital to the oral histories of World War II, our tour of the Navy Yard tells a story about wartime efforts dating all the way back to the Revolutionary War. 





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'USS NEW MEXICO IN DD 4 PORT SIDE LOOKING AFT,' Jan. 1918 - Courtesy of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, Photo No. n3478 Brooklyn Navy Yard Archive - courtesy National Archive and Records Administration, Northeast Region - NYC, Record Group 181
The Brooklyn Navy Yard today is just as much a story of the future, as it is of the past.  After the Navy de-commissioned the yard in 1966, the property was sold to the City of New York and has functioned as an industrial park ever since. Today it is home to some of the most fascinating and innovative companies in the country.  Duggal Visual Solutions is one such example.  A long-time producer of large-scale photos like the billboards in Times Square, Duggal has recently broken into developing renewable sources of energy and uses the yard as a laboratory to test out new technologies, such as solar- and wind-powered streetlights.  Visitors may also be familiar with Sweet n’ Low, a product that was originally produced just outside the gates of the Navy Yard and is still manufactured there today.  Finally, the Navy Yard seeks to attract green companies and construct LEED certified industrial buildings, making it a center of sustainable industries in New York City.  You can learn more about their green efforts here.

Our tours will take you into the Navy Yard by bus, and at hop off
stops we will explore these stories and the dozens more contained
within its walls.  Check out our tour schedule here.


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First Edition of Oyster E-News (originally sent 6/12/09)

7/1/2009

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Welcome to Oyster E-News!

(Originally sent out to newsletter subscribers June 12, 2009. To subscribe to our newsletter, click here.)

Welcome to our inaugural Oyster E-News edition.  A couple of times a month, we will send you important news about Urban Oyster and what we are up to.  Topics will include information about our tours, fun facts to impress your friends with, news from the neighborhoods that we tour, events, and more.  Many of you have been great supporters of us as we have launched Urban Oyster and we are grateful to have you as part of our Urban Oyster community.  We hope you enjoy hearing from us and staying in touch.  We plan to grow quickly over the next few months and we're sure that we'll have lots of exciting news to share as we do.

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First Brewed in Brooklyn Tour This Saturday

(Note: our next tour will be July 11 - buy your tickets here.)
 
We are very excited because this Saturday marks our first Brewed in Brooklyn Tour.  Yaaay!!  Thanks so much to all of you that have helped us bring this one of a kind tour to fruition.  For those that are unfamiliar, Brewed in Brooklyn tells the amazing story of beer brewing in Brooklyn that boomed during German immigration in the 1800s to Williamsburg and Bushwick with more breweries than Milwaukee! Then prohibition, national breweries and high production costs killed the industry so that by 1976 there was a not a single brewery operating in Brooklyn.  Then in 1996, brewing returned with Brooklyn Brewery.  Today there are two more, Greenpoint Beer Works and Sixpoint Craft Ales.  On the tour we get to see some of the old
brewery buildings, an inside look at Brooklyn Brewery, the old German neighborhood, and we get to taste a lot of fine beer and food.  All history should be learned over a pint, right?  We hope that you can join us on the tour.

Cheers To You!

We've had so much help from our friends, family and colleagues that, one more time, we'd like to thank all of you for your support and encouragement along the way.  We could never have gotten this far without the help, ideas, talents, and enthusiasm of our friends, family, and the people we've met as we've developed these tours.  We hope to see all of you on one of our tours soon.

By the way...if you like our logo and our Brewed in Brooklyn beer label, all of these have been created by our wonderful designer Carrie Chatterson who we would strongly recommend to anyone. Check her out at www.carriechattersonstudio.com

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Urban Oyster is all over the Internet!

7/1/2009

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Welcome to the Urban Oyster blog! We will be using this page to post news about our company and upcoming events; interesting articles and websites related to the themes and neighborhoods of our tours; and news coverage about Urban Oyster and our projects.
There are a few things worth noting on this page:
If you would like to follow this blog on your RSS reader, click the link at the top right.
Share this page with your friends on Facebook. You can also join us on Facebook by visiting our company page, here.
We won't always be able to write blog posts about articles we come across, so follow our delicious linkroll in the right sidebar.
Urban Oyster is also on Twitter, so watch out for our tweets.
Please take some time as well to visit our partner organizations and some of our favorite sites, listed in our blog roll.
We hope that this site will help us to stay more connected to our friends, visitors, partners, and the neighborhoods where we give tours. Please feel free to share any comments, suggestions, or ideas you have for us, and we'll see you in the neighborhood!

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