The couple who ferments together stays together? Ten years after starting a commercial brewing project, Lauren and Joe Grimm have an award-winning brewery, a winery, and, most recently, a pizzeria. Or perhaps we should say ah-BEETZ-aria.
The two met in Providence, Rhode Island, where they both went to school. Both studied art. Ms. Grimm studied sculpture, while Mr. Grimm, who’s also a musician, focused on multimedia art. They both went on to get Master of Fine Arts degrees from The Art Institute of Chicago.
What to do with art degrees? Start a brewery, of course. Ms. Grimm sees no creative disconnect there.
“We are curious and interested in making things,” she said.
What was a hobby for them for a decade went pro in 2013. Grimm Artisanal Ales started as a nomadic brewery, using systems at other breweries until, in 2018, they had built enough momentum to open their own brewery and taproom in the Brooklyn borough of New York, with a focus on spontaneously fermented hoppy beers and sours.
Their “large tiny brewery” now produces 8,000 barrels annually and was named New York State Brewery of the Year in 2021 and 2022. In 2022, the Grimms opened Physica Wines in the same building, and just a year later, they were fermenting dough for their opening night.
A Style of Their Own
Lala’s—after Ms. Grimm’s childhood nickname (LAH-lah)—is an open kitchen in the upstairs bar at the brewery/winery.“We had always wanted to serve our own food at the brewery,” she said. Construction began during the pandemic lockdowns, and on July 21, Lala’s Brooklyn Apizza served its first pies. The Grimms had prepared 160 dough balls for the first two nights but served 160 pies in the first two hours on a Friday.
For those not in the know, the word apizza (pronounced “ah-BEETZ”) may appear to be a typo compounded by a mispronunciation. Not so. This is a style of pie particular to New Haven, Connecticut.
“I grew up in rural Georgia and never had real pizza before,” Mr. Grimm said. “To me, New Haven-style is burned in my mind as the definition of what a real good pizza is. Here in New York City, they don’t make anything like it.” He said he sees this as an opportunity to eat the pizza that he loves while showing it to other people “in one of the great pizza cities in the world.”
The Grimms use brewer’s malted wheat in the dough and a sourdough culture that originally came from their sour beers. The process takes 24 hours, with eight to 10 hours of rising at room temperature and then a conditioning time in the fridge—not something you can just whip up on the spot.
New Haven-style is similar to Neapolitan—a thin crust with a quick bake in an oven with a temperature north of 800 F—and originated when Frank Pepe, an immigrant from the Napoli region, opened his Pizzeria Napoletana in New Haven in 1925. He relied on coal for his heat, and the resulting apizza, as it sounded in Pepe’s dialect, still had that thin crust but a deeper char around the edges. The pies are never perfectly round—either oval or misshapen—and initially, a tart tomato sauce was the only topping.
The Grimms start with two basic pizzas: red pies and white pies. The red pie usually doesn’t have mozzarella on it (unless you add it as a topping), while the white pie has no tomato sauce. Every pie is finished with pecorino cheese and olive oil.
To be clear, this is the Grimms’ creative take on the style. “Our pizza is inspired by New Haven pizza, but it is not replicating it,” Ms. Grimm said. “We’ve combined two styles, New Haven and pizza Romana—thin, almost cracker-y crust from Rome.” They roll their dough with a rolling pin, unlike in New Haven, which makes it even thinner than the already rather thin original.
“It’s what Joe and I want to eat,” Ms. Grimm said, “a pizza that didn’t leave us feeling full.” Thus, this is Brooklyn apizza, giving them “a little bit of room to innovate and add on to that tradition,” Mr. Grimm said. “There’s so much room for creativity.”
Unique toppings from New Haven include the white clam pizza with a lot of garlic and a sprinkling of parsley, and a cult favorite: mashed potatoes and bacon. The Grimms added lacto-fermented tomatoes to the latter to create The Cozy Pie. They’re already working on a pizza dough incorporating the dark wheat used in their stout, envisioning the contrast of white cheese on a dark crust.
So what’s fermenting next? Kombucha? Kefir?
“We have a lot of new projects going on,” Ms. Grimm said. “We’re excited to be able to hone our skills and the flavors of our wine. And also the pizza. But no new beverages yet.”
