Inside a craft brewery boom: How New York’s beer business works [Video]

Three years after he and his partner Mike Paetow opened a small Syracuse brewery, Mike LeRoy finally quit his full-time job at a local veterinary clinic.

“I was learning how to work without a lot of sleep,” said LeRoy, who opened Stout Beard Brewing Co, with Paetow in 2015. “Now I can come into the brewery fresh and ready to brew.”

Paetow, meanwhile, still has a “regular” job. He is a supervisor at the Veterinary Medical Center on Bridge Street, where he and then fellow employee LeRoy met and bonded over beer.

Now, with at least one partner in the brewery full-time, Stout Beard can increase  its volume and more easily fill the 16 taps at the tasting room it opened last spring on Westcott Street in Syracuse. Perhaps, at some point, they’ll expand sales to bars or stores.

This is how it works for many of the booming number of craft brewers in …