Hip Hops

Having ridden freight trains and managed a record label, Brooklyn’s spirited Jesse Ferguson faces his newest adventure: running NYC’s next great brewery and distillery.

- Josh Bernstein

ON A RECENT WEEKDAY MORNING IN BROOKLYN’S ANYTHING-GOES EAST WILLIAMSBURG neighborhood, where delivery trucks commandeer bike lanes and forklifts skitter down sidewalks, a potpourri of auto exhaust mingles with steamy corn emanating from a tortilla factory, welding’s metallic tang and … is that apple cider?

The scent wafts from Interboro Spirits & Ales’ stubby brick warehouse, where brewer-distiller Jesse Ferguson— wearing shorts, New Balance sneakers, a hole-pocked Other Half–Trillium T-shirt and the kind of gray-speckled beard you grow when you’re working start-up hours—is Spider-Manning around a copper still, twisting knobs and taking measurements and filling glass jugs with clear distillate. Cider’s excursion into brandy is sound tracked by the still’s hiss and the muddied thump of … what’s that hip-hop track?

“It’s Bushwick Bill and the Geto Boys, ‘Mind Playing Tricks on Me,’” says the 40-year-old Ferguson, lamenting, “I don’t have a real solid sound system yet.”

A killer sound system might seemingly rate low on a brewer’s wish list. Then again, not every brewer ran record labels’ guerrilla promotions, hustled hip-hop mix tapes, hosted a raucous radio show at a punk squat and managed influential underground hip-hop label Definitive Jux. That was before Ferguson swapped beats for beer, becoming founding brewer at New Jersey’s cultish Carton, dialing up Other Half IPAs, and finally going solo with Interboro, delivering flavor-bombed IPAs like La Dee Da Dee (named after the Slick Rick song), punchy pilsners and herbaceous gins. “He has a reputation that precedes him,” says Interboro co-founder Laura Dierks. “He is very good at what he does.”