I'm Erica Shea.
And I'm Stephen Valand.
And together we're the Brooklyn Brew Shop.
We create one-gallon, all grain beer-making
kits to make beer something that you could
make on your stovetop.
And we come up with different seasonal recipe
mixes that are inspired from what's at the
farmer's market, what we spot in an Indian
spice store.
We also have written a book and in the book
we just wanted to demystify beer--simplify
it without dumbing it down.
The key is to remember how confused we were
by beer and brewing when we first started
out, and to not forget that and remember that
all of our customers are starting out just
the same way we did.
We always just wanted to make it approachable,
make it something that we can show other people
how to. So Stephen did videos and I did the
written instructions.
We both studied film at BU. I did production,
Erica did screenwriting.
After graduating I moved back to Brooklyn
and I started working on film sets and I worked
in a post-production house.
There reaches a point where you have so many
20 hour days, you then want to come up with
your own idea and take as much energy as you're
putting into that and put it into your own
idea.
With film it's always like how do I do this,
how do I make it happen? And so we kind of
took that same energy and that same hopefulness
to a product and to a company and figured
out how do we do this and how do we make it
happen.
We started the company at the Brooklyn Flea
just with this kit that we were playing around
with at home.
We would just be hand-sawing these plastic
tubes or drilling these rubber stoppers that
we got from a medical supply company because
they didn't exist. And we'd just be doing
that every night until 3 a.m. every night
before the market.
And then there is was; people were buying
it and they were in people's homes and they
were brewing with it and they were giving
us their reactions.
Within four months at the market, we'd been
featured in the New York Times, we'd been
featured in TimeOut New York.
Now we're national in Whole Foods, we're in
Williams Sonoma, we're in Urban Outfitters.
It's just been incredible to have all these
opportunities and within these opportunities
to still be teaching people and reaching more
and more people and getting them excited for
beer.
We always say that if you can make oatmeal,
you can make beer. Which kind of changes how
people think about it.
It's great when it's either us pouring beer
for our friends at home, or us pouring beer
for strangers at a beer festival.
You watch the reaction go from, wow you made
this to, wow I can make this. And there's
really nothing better than watching the bulb
kind of light up in people's heads when they
realize that beer in something they can make
on their kitchen stove.
