Brooklyn's Only
Anti-Authoritarianism
Brewery.

Participation Trophy Brewing was built on a simple conviction: if you're going to make beer, you might as well say something with it.

The foundation of Participation Trophy Brewing was laid in the shadow of a changing Brooklyn, born from a visceral reaction to the sanitized, algorithm-driven culture of the modern city. Founder Jedd McCormick spent a career dissecting the mechanics of influence in the corporate world, only to realize that the most potent messages were being drowned out by the noise of performative branding. He saw a landscape of craft breweries that looked like laboratories but felt like gift shops, and he decided to flip the script. Jedd’s vision was to create a "tactical taproom"—a subterranean sanctuary where the beer was loud, the location was quiet, and the ideology was non-negotiable. The brewery became a vessel for the "Unfiltered Truth," a project dedicated to the idea that being a citizen requires more than just residency; it requires active, often uncomfortable, participation.

The "Participation Trophy" moniker was salvaged from the wreckage of a heated argument with a skeptic who dismissed Jedd’s early activist-labeled homebrews as "entitled posturing." Jedd saw a profound irony in the insult; he realized that democracy itself is the world’s most significant participation trophy. It is a set of rights—freedom of speech, the right to dissent, the expectation of privacy—given to every individual simply for being part of the human experiment. By reclaiming the phrase, Jedd turned a slur about mediocrity into a mission statement about inherent worth. He built the brand on the conviction that every person has the right to live freely and without fear of government overreach, and that a tap handle is as good a podium as any for defending those liberties.

We're taproom-only and we keep it word-of-mouth. We found that building our community that way — slowly, organically, through real connections — made the space exactly what we wanted it to be. If you're here, someone trusted you enough to tell you about us. That matters to us.