Friday trivia time: Homegrown beer favorites Brooklyn Brewery have a (pretty sweet) journalism connection.

Back in the 1970s and early 80s, Brewery founder Steve Hindy worked as a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press. While working out of the AP bureaus in Tehran, Beirut and Cairo, Hindy was the victim of an attempted kidnapping and saw Anwar Sadat's assassination. While living in the Muslim world, Hindy was forced to learn the fine art of homebrewing. It all dates back to an era of American lushes abroad:

Hindy returned to New York, with family and mind intact, to take an assistant editor post at Newsday. He also brought something else back with him, a hobby that would soon be transformed into much greater. The Islamic countries he'd been living in for 10 years were dry due to Muslim law, and among Westerners working in Middle Eastern countries, home brewing was a popular solution to their booze-free environs. During the 1950s, when American oil workers first went to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the Arab-American Company handed out home brewing pamphlets. The practice of self-manufacturing beer was thus well established by the time Hindy arrived in the mid-'70s. He quickly caught the bug, engaging in home brewing all throughout his tenure in the Middle East, and continuing with it after returning stateside.

So let's thank the Associated Press for some damn fine beers.