Steve Hindy

Steve Hindy is co-founder of Brooklyn Brewery, a pioneering craft brewery that has established an international beer brand. Brooklyn Brewery’s distinctive script “B,” designed by legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser, can be found at top bars and restaurants from Paris to Shanghai. Hindy’s evolution as a craft beer baron began in an unusual place, the Middle East. He worked as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press and Newsday from 1979 to 1987, covering the Hostage Crisis in Tehran, the Iran-Iraq War, the civil war in Lebanon, and the Israeli invasion of that country in 1982. Hindy was abducted in Lebanon in 1981 in a nasty incident in which UN peacekeepers were tortured and killed. Hindy was sitting behind President Anwar Sadat of Egypt when he was assassinated in Cairo in 1981.

In Egypt, Hindy met American diplomats who had worked in Saudi Arabia, where alcoholic beverages are forbidden by Islamic law. They were avid homebrewers, and they made good beer. Hindy returned to New York, started working at Newsday, and making beer at home. Three years later, he and his neighbor in Brooklyn, Tom Potter, a Yale grad and Columbia MBA, started Brooklyn Brewery. Hindy is coauthor of "Beer School," about the building of the Brooklyn Brewery, and "The Craft Beer Revolution," a history of craft beer. This fall, he will publish a book about his Syrian Muslim grandfather who immigrated to Europe and America in 1894 at age 12 and ended up owning a general store, cinema, and bathhouse for coal miners in southern West Virginia. He is working on a book about his years in the Middle East.