IN the summer of 1986, my then-girlfriend Karen and I moved into an old wood-frame row house on the ragged eastern edge of Boerum Hill. The neighbourhood was pretty rough. Lots of SRO rooming houses (bedsits), hookers, crack dealers, decay. On the plus side, if the wind was right, it smelled like fresh-roasted coffee. In the summer, though, and this is definitely on the minus side, if the wind was wrong, it smelled like sour, rotten cheese. There was a reason for each: up on the next block from us was Farinon coffee roasters; down on Bergen Street was the Icco pizza-cheese factory. The old Brooklyn, of which Farinon and Icco were holdouts, had been home to lots of such places.

In fact, old Brooklyn was awash in local drinks. The part of Gowanus that real estate agents would eventually carve off and rename Boerum Hill was known for its coffee roasters. Williamsburg and Bushwick were known for breweries – in 1900, there were at least 45 of them in the city (yes, I know Brooklyn was no longer an independent city after 1898, but it will always be a city, not a borough, to me), with at least a dozen of them in "Brewers' Row", a two-block stretch of Scholes and Meserole Streets in Bushwick. Schaefer and Rheingold were big national brands.

There wasn't a lot of wine made for sale in Brooklyn, although once Italians and Jews from Eastern Europe started flooding into the city in the late 19th century a tradition of backyard winemaking took root in some neighbourhoods, and kosher winemaking in others. Whiskey and gin were another story, though. The "City of Churches", as Brooklyn was known, had plenty of distilleries, too, many of them centred around Fulton Landing. In the early years, they ranged in size from the large, and rather noisome, Cunningham & Harris, which was turning out the equivalent of 20,000 bottles of "pure spirits, whiskey gin and brandy" a day and whose system of auctioning off their spent grain to cart drivers often blocked Front Street, to the mom-and-pop Thomas H Redding & Co., which made 20 kinds of cordials and bitters in a storefront on what's now Old Fulton Street. After the Civil War, the city worked to banish distilling. That effort's success can be judged by the New York Evening Telegram's 1871 claim that "every time they put up a new church in Brooklyn, a whiskey distillery is constructed, showing what attention Brooklynites pay to the spirit". Most of those new distilleries were illicit, and raids were frequent. Nonetheless, small, underground distilleries flourished until Prohibition, at which point they became large, underground distilleries.

Ironically, Repeal saw the end of the industry as the new licensing laws were onerous and legal whiskey from Kentucky and Pennsylvania and Maryland and such was cheap enough to compete with the illegal stuff on price and easily exceeded it in quality.

Brooklyn's drinks weren't all alcoholic, of course. Seltzer works and other soft-drink companies were scattered throughout the city. One or two of them even made it through to the 1980s: in our early days on Dean Street,

Karen and I put away an awful lot of the ironically-named Manhattan Special coffee soda, made in Williamsburg since 1895 and available at every bodega in the neighbourhood. But that was pretty much the only Brooklyn-made product we drank. Schaefer and Rheingold, the last two local beers, had gone away in 1976 (and, as I recall from my high school days, weren't so very tasty by then anyway). There certainly were no local whiskeys, gins, or rums. The very idea would have been preposterous; since Repeal, opening a distillery involved such an arduous and expensive legal process that only a dipsomaniac billionaire would chance it.

The 1980s marked the end of a long process of industrial consolidation and homogenisation that saw quirky local manufacturers forced to either expand and de-quirk their products or shut down entirely. Once quality or local taste were off the table, products had to compete on price alone, and Brooklyn was just too expensive a location to do business in, in every way – taxes, labour, transportation, construction, you name it. It wasn't just Brooklyn that was affected by this – the sad history of Baltimore Pure Rye, whose 150-year-old tradition was utterly extinguished in the 1950s, is proof of that – but it hit Brooklyn harder than most.

The first sign I saw that the conversation was changing came in the spring of 1988, when my local bodega began stocking a new beer with a big, bold Milton Glaser "B" on the label. Brooklyn Lager actually tasted like something, and it was locally owned (and, soon enough, locally brewed) and we drank it when we could afford it. It cost a little more than the usual domestic beers, but it tasted a lot better. Brooklyn had a strong inferiority

complex back then, and here was something that was not only good on its own, it was (we thought) better than Manhattan's New Amsterdam Amber, introduced a few years before. It would prove to be a harbinger of change.

Nonetheless, for quite a while Brooklyn Lager was pretty lonely on the shelf. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw Brooklyn struggling with crack and decay. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that things began turning around, and suddenly you saw new restaurants and bars cautiously opening their doors for business. In the fullness of time, these helped to retain the young, creative types who, in decades past, would have stayed in Brooklyn only until they could afford to move to Manhattan. Instead, they took advantage of the then-reasonable commercial rents the city had to offer and began opening interesting things.

First came breweries—Red Hook's Sixpoint, which opened in 2004, was a harbinger of this second wave of revival. Then we got the distilleries: changes to New York State liquor laws in 2002 and, more significantly, 2007 made it possible to run a small distillery almost anywhere in the state, as long as you used raw materials grown in-state. In 2010, the Kings County Distillery began making whiskey in tiny batches in East Williamsburg. 2011 saw the New York Distilling Company open, also in Williamsburg, and the innovative Industry City Distillery opened in Sunset Park. The next year – well, they keep opening, to the point that it's hard to keep track of them.

Brooklyn even gained a commercial winery, when Red Hook Winery started vinifying back in 2008.

And of course, it's not just alcohol. One day way back in 2002 I was walking down Fifth Avenue near my house and I noticed a new coffee joint, with a glowering red gorilla on its sign. Ten minutes later, jolted to the core, I knew that the neighbourhood was back in the coffee game, and how. As with the distilleries, I can't even keep track of all the local coffee roasters and sodaworks, not to mention the kombucha-fermenters, bitters-smiths, and what-have-you.

It feels good. Brooklyn used to be a dynamic city of its own, in Manhattan's shadow, but not in its shadow, if you know what I mean. Now, it's back. Hell, with all the big towers flying up downtown, the condos in Williamsburg, the new construction everywhere, that's plain. But that's Manhattanification. It's the small-scale, interesting little businesses that represent the real Brooklyn revival; the rebirth and reinventions of traditions that go back to Dutch times. So bring 'em on!

This is an extract from Made In Brooklyn: The Definitive Guide To The Borough's Artisanal Food And Drink Makers, by Susanne Konig and Melissa Schreiber Vaughan; Photography by Heather Weston, published by powerHouse Books: powerhousebooks.com/