At North 11th Street in Williamsburg, the Brooklyn Brewery is turning out a beer worth its weight in whisky. The asking price for a bottle of the Saison-style ale, called “Local 1,” is $10.

It’s no small source of pride to the president of Brooklyn Brewery, Stephen Hindy, to produce a beer that fetches that type of money.

“It warms a brewer’s heart,” Mr. Hindy, 58, said in an interview last week.

While Mr. Hindy’s attention has been on his new product, beer critics have rediscovered his classic. This month, the company’s flagship beer, Brooklyn Lager, won a taste test against 31 other beers. The Washington Post sponsored the competition.

Mr. Hindy’s past career as a newsman led him to his current one as a maker of beer. The introduction came while he was covering Egypt for the Associated Press in the early 1980s. He befriended several diplomats and bureaucrats who home brewed their own beer.

Mr. Hindy markets Brooklyn Lager as heir to Brooklyn’s brewing tradition. The borough was once a capital of the beer industry. In the 1890s, it boasted more than 40 breweries. By the time Brooklyn Brewery opened its operation in Williamsburg in 1996, there hadn’t been a major beer manufacturer in the borough since 1976, when Rheingold and Schaefer closed their breweries in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Lager has adopted this history as its own. The beer itself is modeled after the centuryold recipe brewed in Brooklyn by the grandfather of Brooklyn Brewery’s first brewmaster, William Moeller.

“We believed Brooklyn was an undervalued place that did have a good image and would be a great name for a beer,” Mr. Hindy said. “I’m not sure Brooklyn Merlot or Brooklyn Cabernet would make it, but Brooklyn Lager has a nice ring to it.”

The company has taken an outsized amount of credit for its role in assisting Brooklyn’s revival. In a forward Mayor Bloomberg wrote to “Beer School,” Mr. Hindy’s 2005 book chronicling the brewery’s history, Mr. Bloomberg even thanks Mr. Hindy and his co-author, the brewery’s co-founder, Tom Potter, for helping “to make Williamsburg hip.”

More recently, the company has also borne some local criticism from critics of the $4 billion plan to build a basketball arena and high-rise mostly residential towers at Atlantic Yards. Brooklyn Brewery became the target of a much-publicized boycott at a Prospect Heights bar, Freddy’s Bar and Backroom, which stopped selling Brooklyn Lager last year and pledged to replace it with a beer from a country that did not have eminent domain. Mr. Hindy, who serves beer at New Jersey Nets games, has been perceived as a supporter of the plan after he threw a party at the brewery in honor of the team’s anticipated move to Brooklyn under the Atlantic Yards proposal.

“The boycott never really caught on,” Mr. Hindy recalls. “As a former journalist, it irked me that the Brooklyn Papers gave voice to that boycott. It was one guy and his blog calling for a boycott. Is that a news story?”

In an interview, Mr. Hindy described the Atlantic Yards plan as “a very important development for the future of Brooklyn” given that the borough “has lost its industrial base and I don’t think it’s coming back.”

The brewery in Williamsburg is the smaller half of the company’s operation. More than 80% of the company’s beer is brewed in upstate in Utica.

Whether the company’s center of gravity will shift more toward Brooklyn remains uncertain. Mr. Hindy has had long standing plans to move his Brooklyn operation to Red Hook piers and build an accompanying beer garden. That plan is on hold, pending lease negotiations between the Port Authority and American Stevedoring, which currently occupies the site Mr. Hindy wants. Mr. Hindy said if he gets the deal he would consider building a brewery there with a capacity for 50,000 barrels annually. Currently, the Williamsburg brewery has an output of about 10,000 barrels, Mr. Hindy said.

Brooklyn Brewery’s lease on its current building — formerly an ironworks — is set to expire in two years.

This year, Mr. Hindy said he intends to increase operations to six new states, including Maine and Ohio. He also intends to increase the 1,100 draft lines he currently supplies in bars and restaurants across New York. That means pushing north above Chelsea in Manhattan, where the beer has yet to sell as well.

“The typical Upper East sider drinks Budweiser,” Mr. Hindy said. “The Upper West sider goes for microbrews and imports.”