Daniel Acosta
LIC Beer Project | Queens, NY
February 2017
Just more than a decade ago, Daniel Acosta was working in construction as a project manager and brewing beer in his garage in Westchester County, New York. He’d recently returned from a backpacking tour of Europe, where he experienced Belgian beer in its birthplace, and a passion was ignited.
By 2006, he had made some life-changing decisions, enrolling in the brewing science program at the Siebel Institute in Chicago. After that he went on to study and practice brewing at Doemens World Brewing Academy in Munich, Germany, just to be thorough.
Back stateside, Acosta couldn’t find a brewing gig that paid the bills, so he went to work as a consultant for largescale breweries, lending his technical, mechanical, and construction expertise to his clients. Bringing together 10 years of beer exploration, Acosta wrote a business plan for an experimental brewery and taproom specializing in Belgian-style beers with an in-house coolship that he would design and fund largely on his own.
LIC Beer Project was founded July 2015 in an industrial area of Long Island City, Queens. Acosta and his team turned four walls that previously housed cigarettes and candy destined for bodegas into a homey brew-space with a bucolic, farmhouse vibe that reminds him of what it was like to walk off the cobblestone streets into a functioning brewery in Belgium.
In less than two years, LICBP has experienced explosive success, adding more than 300 accounts in New York City and points northward, attracting the city’s top chefs and beer enthusiasts with its tradition-inspired, experimentally progressive barrel-to-bottle and canning programs.
