The past few years have been difficult for craft brewers, but you wouldn’t know it from talking to the crew behind Strangebird. It’s not that the cofounders are blithe to those challenges; they’re just earnestly positive about their ability to meet them.
Eric Salazar, Micah Krichinsky, and Jeff Ching possess a buoyancy and energy that appear to have rubbed off on all of Rochester. They’re building something they believe in, and everyone’s invited.
Fueling their drive and positivity is the fact that they all have ownership in Strangebird—financially and creatively. After decades spent brewing at New Belgium (Salazar) and Dogfish Head (Krichinsky), the team is clearly eager to create a brewery that belongs to them. As a result, they’re not ceding control: They’re self-distributing, operating a well-regarded kitchen, and even managing their own run club.
At a time when some brewery owners bemoan all the hats they have to wear to keep the lights on, Strangebird’s founders appear energized by these multiple roles.
“Everything that we do in any facet of this place, we try to do it all the way,” Krichinsky says. “This is something that’s a dream separately for all of us, and we’ve come together to realize that dream.”
Local Roots, Stacked CVs … and Results
The energy has proven infectious. Rochester embraced Strangebird almost as soon as it launched in January 2021. Originally, Strangebird didn’t plan to package its beer, but the pandemic pushed them into selling to-go cans before the brewpub opened later that year. Locals flocked to it, partly because of hometown pride: Both Ching and brewery president Dena Krichinsky—Micah’s wife—grew up in Rochester and have been friends since middle school.
Yet a large part of the early interest in Strangebird was due to the founders’ resumes.
Krichinsky brewed at Capitol City in Washington, D.C., and Dogfish Head in Milton, Delaware, while Salazar had brewed at New Belgium for decades, eventually becoming director of its wood-aging program. Ching was behind some of Rochester’s best-loved restaurants, including the Playhouse, Swillburger, Pizza Wizard, and Owl House, where he also employed Strangebird head chef Nate Stahl.
In a Rochester Democrat and Chronicle article on the brewery’s opening, local writer Will Cleveland referred to the team as “a beer and culinary supergroup.” The following year, in 2022, Strangebird won Brewery of the Year at the New York State Craft Beer Competition.
“I’ve profiled every brewery that’s opened in Rochester in the past 10 years,” Cleveland says, “and with Strangebird, there was a different sense of ‘Holy shit, these guys are potentially going to put Rochester on the map.’ I could feel the energy already.”
Four years in, their momentum continues to build. In 2024, Strangebird bought its own canning line—a used one that neighboring Genesee didn’t need. The team also won a World Beer Cup bronze medal in a hotly contested category for Unfettered Soul, their hazy double IPA—then another bronze at the Great American Beer Festival for Bird Light Yuzu, their citrus-infused light lager. Longer-term, the team has set a goal to brew about 5,000 barrels of beer—more than double their current annual production of about 2,000 barrels.
“In each department, at each phase, we have really experienced people, and that’s given us a really good base to start this new business,” Ching says. “Plus, we’re all very excitable and love new projects.”
Time has been an asset to the brewery founders. Not only did they have decades of previous knowledge on which to draw, but they also had seven years to hone their vision from the time Krichinsky drafted his initial business plan until it came to fruition.
“Strangebird was unique from the very beginning in terms of how thoughtful they were with their business model,” says Paul Leone, executive director of the New York State Brewers Association. “They brought together experienced partners on the brewing side, barrel-aging side, restaurant side, and business side. They combined all of that in a section of downtown that needed a boost and, because of that, they draw large crowds that are reflective of the city itself.”
Old Wood, New Tricks
Given Salazar’s pedigree, barrel-aged wild ales have to be a component of Strangebird’s offerings. Yet the crew isn’t naive—they realize that demand for these beers is modest. Right-sizing the barrel program, as well as finding interesting applications for mixed-fermentation beers, has helped ensure that it sticks around.
“Keep ’em small, but keep ’em coming,” Salazar says of his wood-aged batches.
“Blended IPAs” have been one of those successes. They’re a mix of Strangebird’s barrel-aged, Belgian-style golden strong ale, which tends to present tropical aromas and flavors, with a hazy double IPA that shares similar characteristics; then, they dry hop the blend with complementary varietals.
One such blend was Wild Riot, a collab released in August. Strangebird blended its oak-aged golden ale with Mass Riot IPA from Prison City in Auburn, New York, then they dry hopped the blend with Talus. Salazar says that it’s some of the most creative blending he’s done in his career and that continuing to find marriages between hops, barrels, and fermentation-derived flavors has been energizing for him. (Krichinsky, meanwhile, is eager to try a resinous West Coast–style IPA blended with some more tannic barrel stock.)
They speculate that it’s the familiar hop flavors that make these beers intriguing to drinkers who otherwise might not roll the dice on a wild ale. “We try to push the envelope just a little bit,” Salazar says, “but always give them something that they know, something that’s a bit familiar.”
The brewing team also has been barrel-conditioning lagers in the warehouse during winter months—something they’re not able to do during the summer because of a lack of climate-control. The results have been nuanced: a slight softening of flavor edges, some aromatic pickup. Yet those subtle refinements have been enough to convince Strangebird to keep at it—the brewery recently released Cathedral Windows, a Czech-style pale lager initially fermented in stainless, then lagered in barrels for four weeks.
Conventional wisdom among wine producers would be that the lager shouldn’t pick up much in the way of vanillin from the oak, but Salazar believes there’s something there. He perceives its influence as less of a vanilla note than a rounding of existing flavors. Strangebird serves Cathedral Windows off its Czech-style side-pull faucet, a necessary step in serving a beer meant to celebrate foam: Its name was inspired by Charlie Bamforth’s assertion that beer lacing should leave the glass looking like cathedral windows.
As they do for most breweries, Strangebird’s hop-forward beers sell fastest. (A retail buyer recently told them he’d take whatever their seasonal double IPA was, sight unseen.) Yet the brewpub’s two dozen taps are always eclectic, with a lineup that can include—as it did on a recent spot check—everything from a Kentucky common to a fresh-hopped saison to a barrel-lagered märzen.
“What’s nice about them,” Cleveland says, “is that despite Eric’s background, they don’t beat you over the head with the wild-ale program. You’re not going to see 10, 12 wild ales available, but maybe three or four at any time. There’s never a question of variety.”
From the Kitchen, Comfort and Flair
Drinkers don’t need to go to breweries to find good beer anymore, and the “park a food truck and they will come” days are pretty much over, too. The winning play now is to offer food that’s as much of a draw as the beer, and Strangebird was ahead of that curve.
Cleveland says Strangebird’s food is better than its beer—“that’s not a diss to the beer,” he says. “That’s just how good the food is.” A Yelp review from August 2024 backs him up, saying in part: “We are not drinkers, so we had not visited previously, but we will be back. You can tell that a lot of thought and care has gone into this place.”
The pandemic-related kinks that delayed the brewpub’s opening turned out to be a blessing. That gave the culinary team extra months to fine-tune the balance of quality and approachability that would come to define Strangebird’s menu. What stuck? Beer-friendly food, such as a fried chicken sandwich with chili oil, fries with aioli, smoked maple Buffalo chicken wings, and a roster of pizzas. (What didn’t make the cut? An eyebrow-raising—though probably delicious—octopus corndog.)
Ching says his experience in operating full-service restaurants as well as a counter-service kitchen inside a “barcade” helped to inform Strangebird’s middle ground: The bestsellers will always be burgers, pizzas, and chicken wings, but the kitchen should still be able to get creative.
“We pared down that initial menu to have a simple day-to-day menu that everybody can count on,” Ching says, “and then we opened ourselves up to having specials that we feel like can kind of push and get us outside of the ‘food factory.’”
Specials often incorporate local ingredients, which this fall included a toasted-farro salad with honeynut squash, pickled delicata, and smoked-gouda espuma; a pork-shank pizza; and a smoked al pastor sausage served as a hot dog.
Cleveland says he appreciates that Strangebird feels special enough for date night yet casual enough for a quick family dinner; it’s the first restaurant he took his kids to after they were born.
Ching says that offering compelling food—and a full bar—are “vital” for a brewery of Strangebird’s size to survive.
United Front
Strangebird currently sells about half of its volume on-site and the other half in self-distribution. Without a wholesaler, the company makes decent margins on both sides of that coin.
Yet self-distribution has been the brewery’s largest operational challenge in terms of finding the right pricing, markets, and accounts. For example, it turns out the volume makes it worthwhile to distribute to New York City, Buffalo, and Syracuse, but not currently to Albany.
Krichinsky says he believes there’s enough demand to propel Strangebird to its annual production target of 5,000 barrels—a size that creates efficiencies without necessitating out-of-state distribution. However, that’s a target that would require more fermentation tanks, some upgrades to the 15-barrel brewhouse, and more than one sales rep. An in-house lab is one thing Strangebird hasn’t rushed to create; luckily, Genesee Brewing allows Strangebird to use its facilities to run basic tests.
As the brewery grows, its founders say they hope to cultivate a sense of agency among all staff. It might have been Krichinsky, Salazar, and Ching who shaped Strangebird’s initial vision, but they say they want employees to feel like they also have a stake in the success of the business.
So far, turnover has been relatively low, thanks to the company’s offer of paid vacation, a retirement contribution, and healthcare—through the state’s Healthy NY program for small businesses—for employees who work 20 hours per week or more. Employees earn a base of $15 minimum wage, sharing gratuities on top of that between front and back of house.
“We have very low turnover,” Salazar says. “The people here just strengthen the culture. People work here for a long time, and they believe in it.”