liquids | hip hops
Meet New Albany’s Two Newest
Breweries I
BY ROGER A. BAYLOR | PHOTO BY ANDY HYSLOP
n 1906, thirsty residents of New Albany had the choice of three local breweries to visit
when it came time to refill pails gone dry. Paul Reising’s plant was the granddaddy of them all, taking up a whole West End city block, where Bavarian-style beers had been brewed on-site since just after the Civil War. A half-mile away, Virt Nirmaier crafted a well-regarded “common” beer at his brewery on State Street, the western route out of New Albany, up Buffalo Trace and through the Knobs. Nirmaier’s Common sold to taverns for $1.25 a keg or $5.00 a barrel. His charge for smaller quantities is unknown. Near the present-day high school on Vincennes Street, the Nadorffs brewed beer and cut ice in winter from a pond on their property. In 1907, the family stopped brewing and opened a wholesale beer distributorship, which survives to the present day. Soon the scourge of Prohibition descended, ending the first great era of American brewing, but in truth, our failed national temperance experiment merely hastened the passage from independent local brewing to larger economies of scale regionally and nationally. Pendulums have a fortunate way of swinging back, and brewing returned to New Albany in 2002, when the New Albanian Brewing Company first mashed in. Then, in 2015, there was an abrupt tripling of numbers: Donum Dei Brewery and Floyd County Brewing Company (FCBC) both opened, and while it may seem novel for such a small city to have so many breweries, this pattern is being repeated all across the country.
14 Spring 2016 www.foodanddine.com
Late last year, the Brewers Association reported the existence of 4,000 breweries in America — more than in 1906, and in fact, the most ever at any point in the nation’s history. New Albany’s two newest breweries typify this upward arc. They’re independent, small and family owned. You can have a pint, grab a bite and take beer to go. Donum Dei is on the north side, down the road from Indiana University Southeast, and FCBC lies a short caber toss from the downtown YMCA. Let’s take a look at these two local brewing start-ups.
A “Gift of God” Rick Otey is a 50-something electronics engineer who didn’t like the taste of beer until work took him to Seattle during the 1990s. There Otey enjoyed a transformative encounter with Red Hook Extra Special Bitter (ESB), inspiring him to brew at home and seek craft beers on his own turf. Facing a career juncture in 2014, Otey and wife Kimberly