Brooklyn Brewery’s Steve Hindy on the Rise of Craft Beer and Butting Heads With Boston Beer’s Jim Koch

Steve Hindy’s fellow journalists thought he had lost his mind in the mid-1980s when he left his job at Newsday to start Brooklyn Brewery in New York. They must feel differently now. Today, Hindy is chairman and co-founder of America’s ninth-largest craft beer maker and is recognized as one of the leaders of a rapidly growing industry. He writes about his experience in The Craft Beer Revolution: How a Brand of Microbrewers Is Transforming the World’s Favorite Drink, which arrives in stores today.

Hindy’s book is a straightforward, entertaining account of his industry’s battles with larger competitors such as Anheuser-Busch InBev, its growing pains, and its internal squabbles, including Hindy’s long-running feuds with fellow craft beer pathbreaker Jim Koch, chief executive officer of Boston Beer. The two go back to the ’90s, when they fought over which of them had the right to advertise their beers as winners of the Great American Beer Tasting. I talked to Hindy this week about why he decided to return to writing, at least temporarily.