Ahoy! Brooklyn Brewery will move its Williamsburg headquarters and build a 50,000 barrel brewery at the Brooklyn Navy Yard by 2018.
The company, which earlier this year had hinted that it might vacate its current Williamsburg location by 2025, yesterday announced plans to open a new brewery, corporate offices and rooftop beer garden overlooking the waterfront within the Navy Yard’s newly-renovated Building 77.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Brooklyn Brewery will lease 75,000 sq. ft. of space inside the building — a 1 million sq. ft. industrial warehouse that the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp. is spending $185 million to redevelop to allow for public access.
Although the exact terms of the lease were not disclosed, Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp. president David Ehrenberg told the WSJ that the brewery’s 40-year lease agreement includes provisions that would keep its rent from growing exponentially.
Brooklyn Brewery already has a barrel-aging facility in Building 269 at the Navy Yard.
In a public statement on its website, the brewery stressed that it had no intention of leaving its original location in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Brooklyn Brewery’s current lease in that space is not set to expire for another nine years, and the company hopes to continue using it as a production or retail space.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard location is the latest expansion project that the nation’s 12th-largest craft brewery is currently working on. The company reaffirmed its plan to develop a new production facility on Staten Island in yesterday’s announcement, though it declined to give details on the venture’s progress.
Brooklyn Brewery co-founder Steve Hindy told the WSJ that the company’s current expansion efforts in New York constituted “the largest industrial project in 30 years in the city.”
The company is also in the process of opening its third international brewing venture, Jeju Brewing Company in South Korea. It had previously partnered with Danish brewer Carlsberg to rebuild the historic E.C. Dahls Brewery in Norway and to open Nya Carnegiebryggeriet — New Carnegie Brewery — in Stockholm, Sweden.
Artist renderings of the new location are included below.
