‘I was brewing at home, but my career path was not so great.’

Christian Ryan, Copiague

“My father moved from Ireland when he was 13, my mother from the Dominican Republic when she was 18. We grew up in Copiague. The [minority] representation that we had there at the time was very cool. I grew up on Long Island until I was 9, and then went out to the Midwest for a little bit. Then after college, I moved back to Long Island.

“Coming out of college, I was working in downtown Manhattan for a couple of years doing essentially supply chain management. I was brewing at home, but my career path was not so great. So, I said, ‘I like brewing. I like making beer. There are breweries all over the place, so you got to be able to make a living doing it. I am going to try to switch.’

We do a lot of farmers market sales, and Long Island is a huge place for us.

“But nobody wanted anyone who did not know what they were doing already. So in 2007, I said, ‘OK, if nobody wants to take an unpaid intern, let me go back to school.’ The University of California at Davis has a master’s program. I went back to school, spent six months at an intensive in Davis, California, and came back with a degree in brewing distilling from the IBD [Institute of Brewing & Distilling], which was a springboard into my first brewery.

“I went upstate in New York to start training our employees with the program that I went through at Davis at Blue Point — one of the first craft regional breweries in the U.S. I also started a training program up in Albany, with the idea of bringing a little more education and broaden the work pool upstate, too.

“Right now, I run Springbrook Hollow Farm Distillery [in Fort Ann]. With the amount of people I get up from the Island, it is almost like a second home for a lot of Long Island, which I find very cool. We do a lot of farmers market sales, and Long Island is a huge place for us. We get a lot of support both up here and all Long Island itself. When I was at Blue Point, some of our biggest markets were expat New Yorkers. In the same way that we get a lot of folks in Lake George and from the Island, we are looking to reach our fellow New Yorkers, wherever they have gone, to give them a taste of home.”

Interviewed by Victoria Bell