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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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. (Originally sent out to newsletter subscribers July 2, 2009. To subscribe to our newsletter, click here.)  '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. Welcome to Oyster E-News!  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 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. |