When Bushwick Daily last spoke with with the owners and brewers behind Kings County Brewers Collective, it was January and they had just found themselves a home at 381 Troutman Street. Six months later and the guys are brewing their first large-scale batch of beer and aiming to open to the public and start delivering kegs to local bars by the end of the summer.

KCBC is co-owned by Zack Kinnery, Tony Bellis, and Pete Lengyel, all graduates of the American Brewers Guild in Vermont. They were each trying to open breweries separately and came together when they realized with their combined knowledge and different areas of expertise, they could do something really great as a unit.

At the turn of the century, Brooklyn was the brewing capital of the US, home to at least 45 different breweries— but in the early 1900s, there was a major hop blight, which was followed by Prohibition, forcing a majority of the smaller breweries to close. The borough’s largest breweries remained for a few more decades, but the last brewery in Bushwick closed in 1976.