How Two Unlikely Beer Entrepreneurs Took the Leap And Launched Their NYC Creative Business
Buildings, Beer, Basil, and Kevin: it's all you could want in a New York brewery story. Image: Finback.
New York City is generally known to have everything you could want. Well, almost everything.
For a long time, the city didn’t have one of the most important things of all — good, local craft beer. Sure, there was Brooklyn Brewery, but one spot for eight million people didn’t feel like the right ratio.
But all that changed in the early 2010s when a host of entrepreneurs, creative thinkers, and beer lovers started making great suds right here in the city. Among those leading this charge were Finback Brewery co-founders Basil Lee and Kevin Stafford.
Lee wasn’t the typical beer company founder – he was an architect – but he saw an opening to launch a creative business. Lee focused on the brand and design, while Stafford, a graphic designer at the time, decided to brew the beer. In 2014, after a long search combing through back streets, along canals, under bridges and industrial no-mans lands, and braving collapsing roofs and cardboard box jungles, they launched their brewery in Glendale, Queens (near Forest Hills). Today, they have three locations, including one in Gowanus and one on Long Island City. They described themselves as “kind Brooklyn, sorta Queens.”
Here, Lee and Stafford share why they made the jump from buildings and design to beer, when they worked lean and scrappy in the early years, and how they’ve learned to trust each other’s “bad” ideas.
We at Creative Factor love beer, but since we have the word “creative” in our name we have to ask: why design and beer
Basil: I grew up in the restaurant business. My family immigrated to the U.S. with a typical American Dream story, trying to make their way in this country, and they opened restaurants. I always had this love for food, culinary, and hospitality, and I wanted to venture on my own and do something entrepreneurial and creative. I ended up pursuing and practicing architecture for 10 years, which I liked in many ways. But during that time I forgot how culinary is hugely creative — just in an entirely different way.
Kevin: I was a graphic designer for 10 years, and it’s always been my big passion. I couldn’t not bring my love for design to Finback. But I’d been home brewing for about nine years and really loved it, whether I was reading about it or trying to make my own. I decided I wanted to turn it into a job and get some professional experience in brewing, so I started working at two breweries in New York and New Jersey. But throughout that time, Basil and I always tossed around the idea of opening up a business together. Whether I opened a design studio or Basil built a literal building, we always kind of had the idea of being business partners in the back of our minds.
Basil, why did you decide to take the career leap from buildings to beer?
Basil: Even from my early school days I was always drawn to true creativity. So I found it in art and became an architect. Looking back, though, architecture is a hard-working profession where creativity is a marathon instead of a sprint. It’s long hours and, in some ways, it’s a little old-fashioned — it takes time in that field to be creative. You want to try to do something in the beginning that anticipates getting to that finish line. And there are so many people collaborating throughout the process — the architects, the engineers, the contractors — and negotiating how to communicate an idea or sketch to bring it to the finish line. Each moment kind of diminishes the purity of the design. Which is pessimistic, but it just wasn’t for me.
I think the beauty of beer is that it’s like two to six weeks and we’re done, and if the design’s not good, or if we don’t like the name, we can just make another one and change it. Whereas the building is like, there is more pressure in some ways. At Finback, we are trying to come up with systems and studios that have a system of cohesion.
How did you choose your moment and open Finback?
Kevin: Around 2014, New York City was kind of “ripe” for a new craft beer business. Back then, it was the early days of the craft beer movement and there weren’t many breweries in the city. And actually, one of the first things I said when I moved to the city back in 2005 was, Where are all the breweries? One day, Basil and I were out and we were chatting, dreaming about opening up a brewery. And the next week, I met up with Basil, and he asked me, So you know, how far have you gotten? He was asking me if I’d actually started looking into things. And I was kind of shocked, because I thought we were just joking around; we’d been out for beers when we had that idea, afterall. But he was serious. And I was like, Okay, if you’re serious, I’ll be serious.
Besides having good beer, your label designs set you apart almost immediately. What was your intention behind the sleek and smart labels that feel cosmopolitan?
Basil: The traditional model has always been for a beer company to create a label that is based on a place, like a mountain, or show ingredients or something. Big beer companies use traditional imagery with like three SKUs that are going to be distributed far and wide, and they depend on a sales team to understand the concept and talk about it, so they can’t do wildly weird or different things.
Our approach was the opposite: to be small, radically different, and sell directly to the consumers. In the beginning, we had no core beers. For the first three years, we probably had three new beers a week. That meant three new beer names and labels. We’re talking about hundreds of labels, and that necessitated a certain kind of iterative process. We were undisciplined at times, just like, How do we churn out lots of labels and quickly? That allowed us to be creative quickly, but in a dumb and cheap way. It forced us also to look at it ourselves, forcing us to sharpen our own visual skills with the labels.
Tell me more about that experimentation in those early years. Did it ever flop in your face?
Kevin: For the first kind of five or six years, we were kind of living in this golden age of beer, where New Yorkers were just going nuts for hazy beer. But we were lucky, too, because we didn’t have to come out of the gates in a new brewery with the best beer — people were very forgiving. When it comes to IPAs and double IPAs, I’m always trying to layer hop flavors and aromas that seem like they would be harmonious. I might pair Citra, which has a citrus quality to it, with Amarillo, which has some orange qualities to it. And sometimes it completely fails. I think the worst style of beer we did was one that was very trendy for a minute. It was a brute IPA made with champagne yeast. We had a Canadian brewery down from Toronto, and it was their idea. It was the worst style in the world. I don’t think people make them anymore.
What did you learn about starting a business with each other?
Basil: People often start a business with the best intentions and the belief that the hardest part is starting. But inevitably, things won’t always go well, and when that happens, you might test the limits of the relationship you have with your co-founder. But my partner and I were aware of that. We practiced patience when we disagreed on things. We’d say things like, This one is yours, the next one is mine.
Kevin: When we started working together it was very intuitive — I knew what he was good at and he knew what I was good at. We just kind of hit the ground running, and went our ways and did our thing. So we hardly disagree, but when we do, we’ve come to trust the other even if we think they’re completely wrong. There was one homebrew beer that we made together called Double session. It was a whip beer, kind of experimental in terms of ingredients — ginger, szechuan peppercorn, chamomile and orange zest. I thought it was a good beer for a home brew, but Basil really wanted to brew it on the large system. And I told him that we would absolutely not do that. I knew it would be really hard to sell. But he eventually wore me down, and we made a batch. Next thing you know, we’re brewing it constantly. Bars were telling me it was their favorite beer and highest seller. Sometimes it’s the same with my labels; he’s uncertain about my designs, but once they’re printed, he sees what I saw when I was making it. But yeah, it kills me when he does that.
You’ve come up with a lot of names over the years. How did you decide on Finback?
Basil: Kevin and I are both from New England, so we always wanted to do something nautical. We grew up with New England, hazy IPAs and we wanted to reference that. While we were in the process of opening the brewery in New York City, we encountered many hurdles and felt defeated all the time, like we couldn’t even find a space. We thought we would have a space in eight months, and it took us two years. At that point, we almost gave up, thinking that we wouldn’t be able to open a brewery in New York City. Then there was a big finback whale that came up to a beach called Breezy Point in Queens. Originally, we were looking in Brooklyn for a space. But then we realized Queens could work. And we took the name Finback.
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