The early, early morning hours of Oct. 2, 2021, should’ve been quiet. In most of Albany, they were. But if you hung a left off of New York State Route 5 onto Walker Way, you couldn’t miss the line of cars—more than 100 long—that extended well beyond the shuttered garage door emblazoned with a script font reading “Fidens.”
The occasion was the brewery’s second anniversary. Even in the cold morning with a note-quite-yet 50-degree temperature, people seemed content to wait for hours, huddled in front of their car heaters, aimlessly scrolling through apps on their phones until that garage door rolled up. The reward? Up to two or three cases of the available beers, most of them hazy and hop-forward.
Since opening almost five years ago, Fidens has developed an outsize reputation for its IPAs. With nearly 400,000 check-ins and a cumulative rating of 4.38 on Untappd, it is currently the ninth-highest-ranked brewery in the United States. It’s in good company, alongside longtime favorites like Tree House Brewing and The Alchemist as well as other much-hyped producers like nearby Mortalis Brewing Company, Missouri’s Side Project Brewing, and Pennsylvania’s Willow Park Brewing.
With those lines and that fanfare, the scene today still feels like something out of the 2014–era craft beer industry, back when it was common to drive hours, sometimes across state lines, for brewery-only releases of hazy IPAs. In 2024, it means something that people are still willing to sit and wait for Fidens’ beers, regardless of the weather or the time of day.
When Fidens opened in late 2019 in the Albany suburb of Colonie, its co-founders just wanted an outlet for a hobby that was getting out of control.
Steve Parker and Tim Pierce had met through a mutual friend years before—so long ago that they can’t quite pin it down; when you’re running a small business, it’s hard to gauge timelines. At the time, Parker was working as a physical education teacher and Pierce was an accountant. But beer was the passion they shared, and could see leading to a different future.
Over early beers together, including Society and Solitude #4 from Hill Farmstead Brewery (an imperial IPA made with Citra and Galaxy hops), they bonded over flavors they hadn’t thought possible. “It was like, ‘How did they get this to taste like this?’ It was like nothing I’d ever had before. I didn’t understand how you made beer taste like this,” Parker says.
Soon, the two were seeking out beers from other breweries of the moment, including Tree House, Trillium Brewing Company, Bissell Brothers, and The Alchemist. “We fell in love with line culture, the whole scene,” Parker says. “It was a lot of fun.”
Eventually, they purchased some dinged-up kegs, jerry-rigged a homebrew system, and dove in. “I just went crazy,” Parker says. “I became very obsessed with making good beer, from the first batch on.”
After two years of homebrewing, they decided to take things to the next level. Planning for the brewery began in 2018. Parker’s wife, Raquel, came up with the Fidens moniker, noting it was Latin for “courageous.” “[A]t the time, it was just me, Tim, and another partner who is no longer with us,” Parker says. “We all had jobs. We were all doing our own thing. We just needed to have a little courage and to make the jump to make this happen.”
“It was like, ‘How did they get this to taste like this?’ It was like nothing I’d ever had before. I didn’t understand how you made beer taste like this.”
Eventually, they found their site on Walker Way. They knew it was right, Parker says, because it “was the only spot we could afford. It was centrally located, right off the highway, right outside of Albany, and the landlord didn’t ask for a business plan.”
Just a few months later, the pandemic hit.
For some breweries, the pandemic pause created an insurmountable obstacle, but for Fidens, it was merely an inconvenient speed bump. It helped that the brewery was new enough and small enough to stay nimble.
Only four months after the brewery opened, the Fidens crew tore up the freshly installed taproom, removing the taps, tables, and any other vestiges of the public-facing experience. In their place, they crammed in a Wild Goose canning line so they could transition away from hand-filling thousands of crowlers every week, plus more fermenters than could responsibly fit in the space.
Despite the upheaval, a fully to-go model wasn’t too far from their original vision. Fidens’ founders say they never wanted to be a regional beer behemoth—their goal was just to brew enough on their 4-barrel system to supply the taproom each week.
The move to a drive-thru sales model was necessitated by statewide bans on large congregations in public settings. Breweries, however, were listed as “essential” businesses under guidance provided by New York State, so Fidens remained operational. Customers quickly started lining up outside Fidens’ 2,000-square-foot space, often waiting overnight for its Saturday releases. The founders remember getting to the brewery before 6 a.m. and the line already stretching down the block. In turn, they worked to maximize production to meet skyrocketing demand.
“We quickly outgrew our 10-by-12 walk-in cooler, because we were tearing through hops like crazy,” Pierce says. “So we asked, ‘What are we gonna do?’ And the answer was to continue to give people what they want. It was amazing to see Steve get into his element. He was having a blast, enjoying how everything tasted, and to see the lines on Saturday mornings, it was really motivational. It helped us get to the point we’re at now.”
That momentum was fostered in part by an enthusiastic, fast-growing social media following, including in the Fidens Brewing Co: Enthusiasts Group Facebook community, which has amassed about 6,000 members. The lore of Fidens was also helped along by scarcity. In an era when grocery store shelves are jam-packed with quality craft options, most of Fidens’ beers can still only be acquired directly from the brewery.
Even amidst pandemic flux, there was never any question what Pierce and Parker would brew; after all, they’d traveled around the Northeast seeking hazy IPAs for years before Fidens got started.
“Those are beers that we like to drink and those are beers we were passionate about,” Parker says. “Quality always speaks over quantity. I always wanted our beers to taste like Fidens, to have that Fidens feel. And we found a fanbase that is just as passionate about it.”
It speaks to the brewers’ finesse that its beers—which entered the market years after hazy IPAs first felt novel—can still attract such fervor. What sets them apart is a question of balance. Fidens is known for IPAs that are both full-bodied and yet not too heavy or sweet. They might be potently aromatic, but there’s still nuance. Those are all qualities that Parker aimed for.
“Coming from a teaching background, I always started at the end of the process,” Parker says. “Like, ‘What do I want this to taste like?’ I was never a fan of super sweet hazy beer. It needed some bitterness. It was an evolution.”
When asked about process, Parker points to the brewery’s Socratic Questioning IPA series. In the series, Fidens switches up hops, often using new varieties and products; changes yeasts; and experiments with different processes in an effort to educate both the brewery team and consumers. Many of the Socratic Questioning releases have since been re-released under new names and added to the brewery’s rotating portfolio of IPAs.
Customer response has been one sign that that approach—constantly tinkering and experimenting, playing with variables to produce a desired outcome—yields compelling beers. Another has been the brewery’s evolving relationships with hop suppliers.
“We’ve only been hand-selecting hops for two years,” says Parker. “The first two and a half years, it was just about what I could get.”
But soon, Fidens’ beers caught the attention of hop sales representatives. The brewery has since partnered with some of the leading hop producers in the world to obtain hand-selected lots, including Washington’s Yakima Chief Hops, Oregon’s Crosby Hops, and New Zealand’s Freestyle Hops. These days, hop growers send new varieties and products to Fidens before they’ve even hit the market. Parker was especially geeked to discover that one new product was only made available to two breweries on the East Coast: Fidens and The Alchemist.
The beers will certainly continue to evolve, especially as new techniques and new products are introduced. But for now, Parker feels the brewery is in a good stride.
“It has been an evolution of finding the grains and finding the balance and then knowing what hops are gonna do what and how I want to use them,” he says. “You crack that can and you get that smell, that aroma, you get that juiciness, that fullness. Then there is a bitterness and then almost like a dryness at the end. We strive for that. Our beers are purposefully dry, because it helps balance out that sweetness. And then all of a sudden, you’re just ready to go back in for another drink.”
Albany sits at the crossroads between Vermont, the Hudson Valley, and New York City. It’s long been an easy stopping point for those traveling east, en route to destination breweries like Tree House in Monson, Massachusetts. But in the original era of hype and lines, Albany never had a brewery of its own that lured people in. That changed when Fidens opened.
Jeremy Rossi, taproom manager at Avon, New York’s Mortalis Brewing, hails from just north of Albany. When visiting his parents one weekend late in 2019, he got wind of a new spot that was starting to attract the same type of buzz that his brewery—located three and a half hours down Interstate 90—had experienced about a year earlier.
“It has been cool to see the whole Albany area get put on the [craft beer] map,” Rossi says. “You’d always see this attention for New York, Portland, New England, the big cities. We’ve never been one of those cities that got all the acclaim. To see your hometown on the map and everyone wants to come and see it, it’s really cool.”
Rossi joined the Fidens line during his first visit. When he later shared his beers with Mortalis CEO Paul Grenier, the experience was akin to a religious epiphany. The first hop-saturated whiff transported Rossi and Grenier to those halcyon days when they’d feel lucky to leave the Monson line with two or three growlers or six cans.
“Those first crowlers literally felt like we were drinking Tree House 2015 for the first time,” Rossi says. “It was nuts how, even in crowler form, it still tasted like fresh hop oil and everything.”
“The aroma literally exploded out of the can,” Grenier adds. “Immediately, it filled the taproom and I was like, ‘Wow, there is something special here.’”
Rossi’s first visit planted the seeds for a fruitful friendship, one filled with collaboration beers (including a Fidens hazy DIPA named after Rossi, Rossi’s Axe), festivals, and knowledge-sharing. Mortalis’ team passed along their secrets for brewing adjunct imperial stouts, while Parker was open with his hazy IPA knowledge, and introduced Rossi and Grenier to various hop farms and suppliers.
“It has been cool to see the whole Albany area get put on the [craft beer] map. You’d always see this attention for New York, Portland, New England, the big cities. We’ve never been one of those cities that got all the acclaim.”
In December 2020, Fidens hosted Mortalis’ first mobile can sale. Rossi and Grenier recall feeling a creeping sense of dread as they drove a U-Haul to Albany filled with 350 cases of beer. Dread that the heavily fruited sours would freeze en route, but also that no one would show up to buy beers from a little brewery based just outside of Rochester.
They needn’t have worried. “We couldn’t even see the end of the line,” Rossi says.
As it has grown, Fidens has continued to collaborate with a number of other breweries, including the inventive Swedish brewery Omnipollo Brewing, the Massachusetts-based Trillium, fellow New York craft producers like Evil Twin Brewing and Equilibrium Brewery, and English breweries like Northern Monk and Track Brewing Co.
Another high-profile collaborator is Other Half Brewing, which has championed Fidens since the start, according to Tim Heath, the brewery’s executive director of operations. Other Half has long prioritized collaborations, especially with the aim of using its platform to amplify friends and industry newcomers.
“They share a similar passion for the style of beer we make, primarily New England IPAs,” Heath says. “I think we’re equally passionate about that style. There is probably a little bit of perceived customer fatigue in that domain. But from our vantage point, we’re seeing such innovation on the yeast front, on the hops front, there is still a lot of potential for innovation within the style. Fidens is equally committed to that level of curiosity and seeing where they can take things.”
People lining up “still shows that quality is the discriminator,” he adds. “They’re passionate about their product and they’re very passionate about having all of their team engaged in quality. There is still discernment there, and customers are going to excitedly seek out products that they feel are cutting-edge and innovative and worth the effort and worth the time.”
Heartened by early support, and also already exhausted from doing everything on their own, Parker and Pierce knew they needed help. They’ll be the first to admit that they lucked out in finding Allen Willbrant and Anthony Dana.
Willbrant was one of two original employees to join Fidens in late 2019. He’d previously worked as a Volkswagen technician, and while he didn’t have any industry experience, he had helped run a local Facebook beer-trading group that put on numerous events and shares to benefit charities.
“The community in craft beer was the driving factor that really solidified that I belong in this industry,” Willbrant says. “The people still mean everything to me.”
Willbrant worked in a number of different roles before settling into his current position as creative director, including label designer, chief photographer, and social media manager. Eventually, he became a co-owner after pouring untold hours of sweat equity into the brand.
“They share a similar passion for the style of beer we make, primarily New England IPAs [...] There is probably a little bit of perceived customer fatigue in that domain. But from our vantage point, we’re seeing such innovation on the yeast front, on the hops front, there is still a lot of potential for innovation within the style. Fidens is equally committed to that level of curiosity.”
Other Fidens employees have experienced a similar career trajectory. Anthony Dana, now Fidens’ head brewer, was working as a special education teacher when he was told about a new local spot that was making quality IPAs. “I came into the taproom as a craft beer fan and after that first sip, I was like, ‘Wow, this is gonna be something special,’” he recalls. “I kept coming back.”
Soon after, he saw a social media post from the brewery seeking part-time tasting room help, but knew it wouldn’t fit his teaching schedule. Still, “It stuck in my head,” Dana says. “I really wanted to be part of this. A few days went by and I just decided to email them anyways. I ended up coming in and talking to one of the owners and got hired as some extra help in the taproom.”
Dana transitioned into filling crowlers before and after his teaching hours. Eventually, Parker asked if he wanted to get into brewing. “I started reading all the books he had,” Dana says. “I devoured them at a very quick pace. [...] Eventually, I got all his brewing stuff and I was making some batches at home. I brought those in for Steve to try. He was impressed with those. I moved up and started doing more and more cellaring. Steve kept teaching me the brewing side of things.”
Along the way, the founders nurtured Dana’s passion and curiosity, encouraging him to learn new roles and expand his responsibilities. By the time Parker stepped away from brewing two years ago to focus on operations, Dana had been fully trained in the Fidens school of brewing.
When he officially moved into the head brewer role, he was also given an ownership stake in the brewery.
“My wife always said that if it was anyone else running this company, she never would’ve trusted me to take this leap of faith and give up a teaching job that was steady and dependable,” he says. But Dana found that stability in Fidens, and he found a new calling.
With its original Colonie space permanently devoted to production following the pandemic, Fidens began exploring additional expansion opportunities in 2022. Eventually, the brewery settled on a renovated property in Albany’s Warehouse District, roughly 15 minutes away. It outfitted the 11,000-square-foot industrial space with wood, lots of plants, and artwork from the brewery’s labels. The venue also contains a full kitchen run by chef Josh Herring, where it serves a menu of elevated pub fare, including a Cubano sandwich, crispy fish panini, wings, a range of hamburgers, and tacos.
The taproom is now the brewery’s hub for all beer releases, which are announced the day before on social media; customers can reserve beer online or chance it by visiting the taproom. Gone are the days of miles-long lines of cars on Walker Way, though the hype hasn’t abated. Many fans of the brewery have Fidens Instagram notifications turned on so they don’t miss out on a single release.
“We had to get back to the people,” Pierce says of the new space and new system. “One of the things we missed was the connection. When you can see someone’s reaction or people trying your beer for the first time, it’s the best.”
Opening up an off-site tasting room and restaurant—one equipped with 30 draft lines—has also pushed the brewing team to explore new styles. In addition to the ever-present hazies, they now make Fidens lagers (poured from two Lukr side-pull faucets), sours, and other styles ranging from blonde ales and West Coast IPAs to imperial stouts.
The range and chance to experiment are fun, Dana says. But “I’d imagine the hazy beers are gonna be our bread and butter for a long time.” He estimates that the brewery has made “a couple hundred” different IPAs during his tenure. Jasper with Nelson—a hazy DIPA made with Citra and Nelson Sauvin hops—is “my favorite since the first day we brewed it.”
For now, the future remains hazy. It’ll probably include a bigger brewhouse. But Fidens is unlikely to begin distributing its beers more widely when it can control the entire process by selling out of its own front door. “Expansion is something we talk about,” Parker says. “For us, it’s just about expanding when it’s necessary—and we’re definitely reaching that point. [...] But it’s gotta be right. It’s gotta be the right spot, the right location. But definitely, we’ve gotta get a bigger brewery at some point in the future.”
“We had to get back to the people. One of the things we missed was the connection. When you can see someone’s reaction or people trying your beer for the first time, it’s the best.”
Running a brewery that’s still fueled by hype is “surreal,” Dana admits. But even after years in business, the owners try not to get too accustomed to it.
“I still think back to those first couple weeks, and I was standing inside that taproom and we were open for 45 minutes and there was one person there,” Pierce says. “I looked up at Steve and said, ‘Where the hell are all the people?’ In order to stay grounded, I try to appreciate that moment, when we walk out and there’s a big release and we’ve got 80 people in line. Without that moment, 80 people in line doesn’t mean anything.”
Words by Will ClevelandIllustrations by Colette Holston
