How journalist Steve Hindy started Brooklyn Brewery
Brooklyn Brewery co-founder left a career as a foreign correspondent to take on a whole new kind of adventure: entrepreneurship.
We’re back in the archives this week, revisiting my 2006 interview with Steve Hindy, co-founder of Brooklyn Brewery. Steve’s career journey, both as a foreign correspondent before he took the entrepreneurial leap, and as a brewery owner, is the stuff of blockbuster movie fare. After all, being robbed at gunpoint and being threatened by the mob are not problems the average entrepreneur encounters (thankfully!). Steve and his co-founder Tom Potter forged ahead through the ups and downs of the early years, even staring down bankruptcy at one point.
In 2003, Steve and Tom sold their beer distributorship for $10 million to focus on the brewery. Since we spoke, Brooklyn Brewery has grown from $12 million to over $50 million in revenue, and it’s become a local institution, committed to investing in and giving back to the community. At the end of 2020, 36 years after convincing his neighbor and homebrew partner to quit his steady job at a bank and join him in starting a brewery, Steve announced his retirement. His story is proof that with grit, determination and a bit of fearlessness, you can turn your passion into a thriving — and thrilling — venture. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast and Spotify. If you love it, please help more people find it by leaving a review!
“[Being a foreign correspondent] is a very exciting life, going from revolution to war to assassination to revolution. But it’s also a very tough life.”
When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re inevitably going to face setbacks, challenges and the occasional sleepless night. It comes with the territory. Sometimes those challenges, like worrying about how you’re going to be able to make payroll, can be pretty terrifying. While Steve Hindy didn’t have any experience running a brewery when he founded Brooklyn Brewery in 1984 with his neighbor Tom Potter, he did have some experience with terrifying moments. Steve spent six years in the Middle East working as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press, where he covered some of the biggest and most dangerous stories of the era, from the Iranian Revolution in 1979 to the Iran-Iraq War to the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (Steve was sitting behind him at the time). But after he returned to the U.S. to take a job at Newsday, he began to feel a little antsy. So he turned his attention to a new adventure.
“Eventually, I started reading about the small breweries out on the West Coast and got carried away with my hobby.”
Steve admits he “didn’t have the greatest resume for starting a brewery.” But he realized he did have a potential partner in Tom, who was a vice president at Chemical Bank at the time and also feeling a little restless in his job. Although Tom didn’t have any experience running a brewery either, Steve recognized he needed a numbers person who could persuade investors that it was going to be a viable business. Together, they created a business plan and went out and raised about a half million dollars in seed money — including more than $100,000 from people in the Newsday newsroom — and Brooklyn Brewery was born.
“I think a lot of people bought our beer because they sort of identified with our entrepreneurial spirit.”
Steve and Tom raised more money in the next couple of years, and then they did something that not many other microbreweries had done, which was distribute their own beer. “Looking at it 18 years later,” Steve told me, “I don’t think we would be in business today if we had not done that.” He believes the reason Brooklyn Brewery made it while so many other New York startups failed at the time is that they were able to build a market and get valuable feedback through that direct connection to their customers. That’s not to say being a distributor was easy. They were robbed, had drivers take off with their trucks and spent $60,000 in parking tickets in one year.
“I felt that was like my first lesson in real, hardcore capitalism.”
Steve says it took about 14 or 15 years before they were able to deliver a return to their early investors. During that time, they turned down opportunities from big investors who wanted to come in as partners and pay off their original investors. The catch: Those original investors wouldn’t make anything, because the business wasn’t yet making money. “We said no to a couple of deals like that,” he says, “because we felt that we were a success, that we were going to be able to make money. And we didn’t want to sell our friends down the river.” Eventually, they were able to give those friends an almost five-fold return on their investment.
That wasn’t the only time they said no when others might have said yes. Although Steve says they always thought they’d take the business public, when the time came, they ended up turning down the offer, realizing they weren’t big enough to afford all of the administrative work that goes into being a public company. It’s a decision they’ve never regretted.
“Entrepreneurship really takes all the creativity and all the resources that you have.”
Back in 2006 when I interviewed Steve, I hadn’t yet started my current businesses, Muck Rack and The Shorty Awards. As I listen to him talking about “entrepreneurial terror” now, it resonates even more today than it did back then. Steve tells the story of a particularly stressful period in the early years when expenses were high, sales weren’t where they needed to be and the two co-founders had to go without pay. Steve ended up going back to work at Newsday during that time to make ends meet, spending mornings at the brewery and evenings and late nights at the paper.
There was also that frightening moment when they were robbed at gunpoint of $30,000 in cash. And then there was the run-in with “some sort of mob types” who were looking for bribes. But none of that, he says, was as scary as facing the possibility of failure.
“A lot of times when you feel like you’re totally out of energy, out of juice, you realize you don’t have a choice. You’re halfway up this mountain and you want to get up to the top to go down the other side.”
Plenty of people would have considered hanging it up after going through some of the things Steve and Tom experienced. But Steve compares building a business to hiking a mountain: “You just put one foot in front of the other and, somehow, you get there...You just do the work every day.” About five years in, the business made some money and things started to look up. By the time they raised the capital to build the brewery a few years later, they realized they’d made it over the hump. “There are many other reasons to lose sleep,” Steve told me. “But, you know, I think we left behind the fear of total failure.”
“We’ve tried, from the very beginning, to be a good citizen.”
The story of Brooklyn Brewery is also a story about Brooklyn. It’s interesting to listen from today’s vantage point about some of the big plans that were being discussed back then. Atlantic Yards (now Pacific Park Brooklyn) still isn’t finished, but the brewery has lived up to its goal of becoming a local institution, thanks in large part to the company’s commitment to giving back and investing in the community, whether through its support of longtime partners like the Stonewall In Gives Back Initiative or, more recently, by providing resources and support to Covid-related causes.
Of course, it’s inevitable that some decisions will stir up controversy. In 2006, a few bloggers called for a boycott when the company supported the plan for a Nets arena in Brooklyn. But for someone who’s had a front-row seat to an assassination and stared down his fair share of entrepreneurial terrors, that’s not something to get hung up on. As he told me, “That’s sort of something you got to face up to if you're going to be involved in the community. And we don’t have any regrets about that.”
There’s never a dull moment when you’re an entrepreneur. That’s the good news and the bad news. But Steve’s story shows us that you can build great things when you’re willing to face the obstacles head on — and be a little fearless when you need to be.
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