Having tapped into the wholesale craft beer business at bars and restaurants in the Hudson Valley region, a startup company is preparing to bring home its Yonkers brand and form roots there with the opening of a microbrewery and tasting room in a historic building on the city”™s downtown waterfront.
Yonkers Brewing Co. L.L.C., founded in 2012 by Yonkers residents John Rubbo and Nick Califano, has leased 4,700 square feet of streetfront space at 92 Main St., a former city trolley barn converted for live-work lofts and retail space across from the Yonkers Metro-North Railroad station. The company this year will build out and equip the long-vacant space for its microbrewery and tasting room.
Yonkers Brewing Co. this month launched a fundraising campaign for its tasting room on Kickstarter, the popular online crowdfunding site, with a goal of raising $35,000 from donors by Aug. 10. As of July 17, more than half of that amount had been pledged by 166 backers.
With the Kickstarter campaign, “We wanted to build a little bit of community awareness,” Rubbo said. The startup also has done that by donating “a tremendous amount of beer,” he said, for business and community events in the year and a half since Yonkers Brewing made its first sale ”“ to The Quarry restaurant in Tuckahoe. “I think it”™s paid dividends,” he said of the company”™s “grassroots” promotional effort.
The Kickstarter goal represents only a small fraction of the roughly $1.4 million investment that Rubbo said is needed for the craft brewer”™s Main Street buildout ”“ an 8- to 10-week project ”“ operating and marketing budgets, equipment purchases and continued development of its wholesale business. Wholesale customers will continue to be supplied through the startup”™s contract brewing arrangement with Thomas Hooker Brewing Co. in Bloomfield, Conn.
Rubbo said the company has grown its wholesale draft beer trade to include about 150 bars and restaurants from New York City to Westchester and Putnam counties and the lower Hudson Valley. Yonkers Brewing at the start of this year struck a distribution deal with another Westchester startup in the booming craft beer industry, Sarene Craft Beer Distributors L.L.C. in New Rochelle.
Rubbo said the company recently began bottling its flagship Vienna lager, which is sold at Whole Foods stores on Manhattan”™s Upper West Side. Stew Leonard”™s in Yonkers has been its largest customer, he said.
Rubbo indicated the several brands crafted by head brewer Sharif Taleb and the company”™s co-founders are not designed for a select crowd of craft beer drinkers with well-cultivated palates. Rather, “We”™ve tried to bridge the gap between the craft beer drinkers and the mainstream beer drinkers.” The latter group includes 89 percent of America”™s beer drinkers, he noted.
Rubbo said the company hopes to employ about 10 full-time and part-time workers with the opening of the microbrewery and tasting room and double that number within two years.
In the third phase of the partners”™ business plan, Yonkers Brewing Co. will replace its contract brewer in Connecticut with its own brewing plant in Yonkers. Rubbo said though there is no fixed timetable, they hope to reach that growth stage within the next five years.
Looking to open their microbrewery on the city waterfront, “It took us some time to find the right space,” said Rubbo, a former public affairs assistant at Yonkers City Hall under Republican mayors John Spencer and Philip Amicone. The high-ceilinged brick trolley barn at 92 Main St. “was the perfect space for us.”
“It”™s been quite a long time coming, but we”™re finally there,” he said.
