A Brooklyn Beer With a Swedish Accent

When visitors get carded during weekend tours at the Brooklyn Brewery in New York’s trendy borough, the company says the most common form of identification isn’t a local driver’s license. It’s a Swedish passport. Soon, Swedes won’t have to travel so far. Sweden, already the craft beer’s biggest market outside the Big Apple, will be home to Brooklyn Brewery’s first overseas plant. In January the company will start producing beer and open a restaurant in an old light-bulb factory in Stockholm.

The beermaker, founded in the 1980s by a former journalist and a banker who wanted to bring good lagers back to New York, claims to export more beer than any other American craft brewer. While it could just keep doing that, the new plant gives the company a priceless asset: local street cred that could encourage its most avid foreign fans to drink even more of its products.