breuckelen distilling co.

neighborhood: sunset park | space type: commercial | active since: 2010 | links: website, facebook, twitter

Brooklynites are makers. We make everything, no matter how weird or difficult. We make gardens in abandoned lots, screen-printed skateboards, pools in dumpsters, art from old books, games out of shopping carts. So of course we’re also making booze. There’s beer from Brooklyn Brewery and Sixpoint, wine from Brooklyn Winery, and a handful of small distilleries making harder stuff: Kings County Distillery in Bushwick, New York Distilling Co. in Williamsburg, and Breuckelen Distilling Company in Sunset Park.

all photos by Maximus Comissar

Housed in a former boiler room—which used to contain a massive coal-fired furnace that steam-heated the surrounding buildings during the Industrial Revolution—Breuckelen offers a selection of gins and whiskeys. They make all their spirits on the premises, from scratch, using organic ingredients sourced from within New York State. And they do it all themselves, from milling the grains to corking the bottles. You can buy their spirits in bars and liquor stores around New York City (and in a few other states), and you can sample them at the distillery: they have tastings every Saturday from 12 to 6—for only $3, refundable if you buy a bottle—and they pair their gin with Q Tonic, also from Brooklyn.

So how’s this stuff made? I didn’t know, so in case you don’t either, here’s a simple rundown. Breuckelen’s spirits start with organic, whole-grain wheat from Upstate New York. This is milled into flour, which gets dumped into a huge masher, mixed with water and natural enzymes, heated, and then cooled. Next they add yeast and pump it into fermentor tanks (which smell just like baking bread!). What comes out is like a crude form of beer. That’s loaded into their custom still, which heats the mash gently and evenly. During the fermenting process, the spirit that comes off first isn’t palatable, so Brad and Co. smell and, eventually, taste the first few jars to determine when the alcohol is good to drink.

At this point, the spirit can become either gin or whiskey. The gin is re-distilled with juniper berries, lemon peels, ginger, rosemary, and grapefruit. The whiskey is aged in charred oak barrels, which gives it  a maple syrup flavor, along with the yeasty taste of the wheat; Brad says it tastes like a pancake breakfast. Finally, the spirits are diluted with NYC tap water, bottled, and corked. Neat!

 

 

brooklyn spaces: So are you a huge gin drinker? What made you decide to do this?
Brad: Yeah, I like gin, I like whiskey. That was one of the things that was important to me, to make something that I appreciate. I had this other job where I wasn’t making anything, and I saw all these people in Brooklyn making stuff, taking something and transforming it into something totally different, whether it’s turning steel into a knife, turning flour into bread, or turning coffee beans into the second most delicious thing in the world. I wanted to do something like that, to make a contribution. Then one day I read an article about how the federal government had recently relaxed some of the rules and now it was financially possible to have a small distillery. It sounded perfect, to do something totally my own, whether it’s good, bad, popular, unpopular; it would taste of the ingredients we used, and of the processes we designed to make it. I decide to try it, and things sort of came together.

brooklyn spaces: How did you know how to get started?
Brad: I read some books, then I visited some small distilleries, like Koval in Chicago. Kothe, who made the still for us, puts on some classes, so I took one of those. I also did a lot of drinking to understand the different spirits, why they taste the way they do. And then just a lot of experimentation.

brooklyn spaces: How did you find this space?
Brad: I knew I needed sixteen-foot ceilings because the still was going to be so tall. My real estate agent told me about this space, but she said it in passing, like, “Well, there’s one other place with high ceilings, but it’s not in the right neighborhood for you. You can go look at it in your spare time if you want.” So I rode my bike down here, and I remember coming under the BQE; with all that construction, it felt like a war zone. The neighborhood seemed a little desolate, but the space was beautiful, and I knew it was a good fit. And then once I started coming down here, I realized there are actually a lot of really cool, friendly people doing great things around here. A couple doors down is Object Metal, they makes gorgeous furniture; next door Kevin Barrett is doing amazing abstract metal sculpture; down the block is Pawz, a company that makes rubber dog booties, which my dog uses all the time and they’re awesome. There’s a bunch of other artist studios next door, and nearby there’s Cut Brooklyn, who makes knives, Sway Space Letterpress, and Lite Brite Neon.

brooklyn spaces: So it’s a good community?
Brad: Yeah, it’s really awesome, really friendly. After I rented the space, one of the first things I bought was the forklift, and I had it delivered in the middle of the night, because that was cheaper. So the guy shows up at three in the morning, we unload the forklift, and I try to bring it inside. It’s a used lift, and the guys who had it before had modified it by welding a section on the top, so even though I’d checked the height online, it didn’t fit through my doors. Kevin wound up storing it for me for three months while I got the doors replaced. So yeah, there’s a great community down here.

brooklyn spaces: I feel like there’s almost an unprecedented surge of creativity in Brooklyn right now. Do you think Brooklyn attracts people who want to do things like this?
Brad: Definitely. For me it was just being here and realizing how great it was and deciding I wanted to be part of it. It really made me rethink my path. The whole idea of Brooklyn, it was inspiring to see people doing these crazy, ridiculous, but really authentic projects, independent of some giant organization. And people support that here, too; I used to bike three miles to get the coffee beans that I like.

brooklyn spaces: What are your goals for the future of the space?
Brad: To survive. To keep making better gins and whiskeys. We’re working on a jenever-style gin, and a barrel-aged one, gin aged in an oak barrel like a whiskey. I have a couple other ideas for different flavors that I want to try. The whole project is a big experiment, trying to figure out how to keep making it better and better.

Like this? Read about more makers: Metropolis Soap, Urbanglass, Ugly Duckling Presse, Twig Terrariums

jerkhaus

neighborhood: sunset park | space type: music & living space | active: 2004–2011 | links: none (sorry!)

The Jerkhaus is an incredibly lived-in communal-housing and punk-show space. They’ve had almost sixty roommates over the seven years the house has been active, plus hundreds of crashers and couch-surfers and short- and long-term guests. Not to mention the bands that come through to play shows, and all the people who stop by for parties and gatherings of all kinds.

It’s housed in a fancy-looking brownstone, and in fact I was worried that I had the address wrong, until a couple of pierced boys with torn shirts let me in. It’s a terrific mess in there, full of bikes and records and ashtrays and posters and busted chandeliers and foam-leaking sofas and sagging stuffed animals and speakers and graffitied subway signs. It’s, in other words, an incredibly loved space.

Rudi and Kever, two of the Jerkhaus’s founders, were super nice and welcoming, and they chatted with me for a couple of hours.

 

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about the Jerkhaus.
Kever: Well, it’s a punk house in Brooklyn. Tons of people have stayed here. It’s like an old-fashioned step on a bum’s path, like a hobo travel point. There’s a sign with a little picture of a chick rocking out with a guitar, a dude with a bindle, some space cleared out on the floor.
Rudi: People stop by and say, “Someone who used to live here like three years ago said we could stay here.” When we moved in it was really cheap, and we had plenty of space for people to sleep on the floor. Right after we moved in, the RNC took place, and there were all these people nobody knew staying here. We had all this soundproofing foam from the people who lived here before us, so we just laid it out and had pretty much one floor as a giant bed.
K: I like the idea that we were housing people who were going to the RNC to fuck it up, to protest.
R: It was cool being a part of that. At that point I didn’t have much of a mind to protest, so I stayed home and gave people towels and directions to the beer store, or I called my roommate’s mom to be like, “Dave’s in jail again, just letting you know. Don’t worry, he’ll have a vegan sandwich when he gets out, thanks to the Anti-Capitalist Kitchen,” which is what Food Not Bombs was called then.

brooklyn spaces: Has there been trouble over the years? Has anybody come in and fucked shit up?
K: Yeah, there’s been pains in the ass, but nothing too crazy. There’s been no theft of property, to my knowledge. No violence, really. It hasn’t been bad enough that I think people should be afraid to have a house like this.

brooklyn spaces: Did you set out from the start to have a space like this?
K: Yeah. But our landlord and the neighbors are a big reason that it’s been able to go on for so long.
R: We’ve always paid rent, and there’s always been someone the landlord could go to and say, “Don’t let your friends sleep on the roof,” or “No live music. Have a party, but don’t have live music.” Of course we’ve had live music anyway, but if there wasn’t a complaint, it didn’t really matter.

brooklyn spaces: How about the running of the space, like buying toilet paper or cleaning the kitchen. Is it all collective?
K: It is all over the place. We had house meetings for a little while, but they were the worst fucking thing in the world.
R: It just kind of became whoever buys toilet paper buys toilet paper.
K: The pains and joys of communal living.
R: I’ve left many notes, but I gave up. I have a different outlook on it now than I used to.
K: You learn to expand your comfort zone.
R: It’s not a bad thing. You know when you walk into a room where there’s cigarette butts all over the floor and beer cans everywhere? That means someone had fun. Probably ten people had fun.
K: Beautiful, Rudi!

brooklyn spaces: What’s your relationship with the neighborhood and the community?
R: I’m very proud to be a punk kid who has lived in southern Brooklyn for a long-ass time. I didn’t move here because there was a cool café or a hip bar nearby. I’ve seen the neighborhood change a lot; there’s not a lot of hipster-driven stuff here yet, but it’s coming. I’m glad that I lived here when I did because I think I got a much better feel of living in Brooklyn, like Brooklyn Brooklyn, not just an offshoot of the Lower East Side. I don’t know if that’s an asshole thing to say, but it does give me a sense of pride. I’m also glad that I lived in a place that had so many people being creative, even if they were just making a zine or trying to change the world by not bathing. A lot of weird people have lived here and had a lot of unsavory professions and made a lot of weird art and music, and I’m glad that they had the space to do that.

brooklyn spaces: So why is the Jerkhaus ending?
K: Our landlord’s selling the place.
R: The building is in considerable disrepair. A couple of months ago we were having toilet trouble, and when the landlord and the repair guy came in, they were like, “We have to fix the toilet right now because the floor is rotting out under it, and if someone sits on the toilet, it might fall through the floor.” The place was cheap when we moved in because the building was not in the best condition, and we obviously didn’t care. We just keep paying rent anyway. We’ve had bedbug infestations and all this other stuff, and the landlord has just been like, “Well, tough noogies. You’ve got horrible roommates.”
K: Right after we moved in, one of our roommates was like, “Hey guys, look what I found! Just lying in the street!” It was a mattress. So from the beginning of the whole thing we had bedbugs.
R: At the time you had to go to Washington Heights to get bedbug-specific killer, because bedbugs weren’t such an epidemic yet. Of course, since then, everyone and their mother has them.

brooklyn spaces: So you’re saying you had them before they were cool?
R: Pretty much, yeah. We pretty much started the trend.

brooklyn spaces: Is anyone going on from this to create the next incarnation of the Jerkhaus?
K: Fuck no. Others because they don’t have the ambition, and Rudi and I because we’ve already gotten all the love and joy we can get out of this place. We sucked it all right out. The burnout rate in this job is pretty high. I’m surprised I held it for as long as I did.
R: You’re the patron saint of Jerkhaus!
K: I’m the biggest jerk!

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Like this? Read about other communal living spaces: Hive NYCTreehaus, Dead Herring