MacabreDaily Talks With NECROMANTIC BREW CO's Ralph Mandarino!

Depending on where you sit, Tarman looks you right in the eyes..  He glares at you from his Trioxin barrel, which has a clear surface you can rest your beer on.   He can be found inside Farmingdale, New York’s Necromantic Brew Co., a new brewery with 2 distinct specializations: gluten-free beer and horror movies.  Lots and lots of horror movies.

While they aren’t the first brewery in the region with a horror pedigree, Necromantic has an atmosphere that horror fans of all stripes can appreciate. The walls are lined with horror posters, genre films play on the big screens by the bar, and the beer menu wall, the crowlers, and even one of the tap handles is a reference to “Phantasm.”  There’s even a “Ghostbusters” corner featuring a proton pack.

In short, this place is not fucking around.

And yes, the beer is good too. A “gluten-free pumpkin sour” just doesn’t make sense when you say it out loud, but it’s exceptional. I sat down with owner and co-founder Ralph Mandarino to talk about Necromantic’s beginnings, but it was admittedly hard to provide eye contact when there was so much awesome horror decor around me. 

So why open a brewery in Farmingdale, of all places?

What makes this place special for me, is that my father owned one of two bakeries here in town.  Where are you sitting right now was the other, so now I have the building that was his competition back when. 

What was your horror “origin story?”

It's so funny, because I've been reading online that a lot of people fit the same mold.  It was actually around Thanksgiving or Christmas that my older cousins were watching “The Exorcist” on TV. There was a big age gar, where they were in their 30s and we were like 6, 7, or 8.  They were like ”let’s watch some TV,”  and of course, they put on “The Exorcist” [Laughs].  Even being that young, there was something so intriguing about it.  It was sick and it scared the lights out of me.

Going forward, possession movies have always been on my list in the sense that I believe it can happen.  It hit me harder than [films] about gore, torture and all that other stuff. Not that it can't happen, but to me it was always possession or supernatural movies that kinda always give me that underlying creepy feeling.

Come drink with us, Danny (Image courtesy of Yelp)

Any favorites come to mind?

Yeah, it's hard to narrow, but I have a 15-year-old daughter and she's very into the “Scream” and “Friday the 13th” films, but we've kind of bonded early over “The Conjuring” universe.  When a new “Annabelle” or “The Nun” comes out, she and I will get together and watch those. 

When you’re waiting for the next great Terminator film (image courtesy of Yelp)

So where did the idea for a brewery come from?  Long Island already has quite a few.

I’m gluten-intolerant and I have all the symptoms of celiac without the diagnosis.  It was 10 years ago next week when I thought I had the flu and I think I lost 20 pounds in two weeks. I couldn't keep anything down.  I thought I was trying to better myself by eating dry toast, crackers, and certain Gatorade, which are all gluten-rich, at least the Gatorade I was drinking, as was and obviously the bread and the crackers. So here I thought I was doing a good thing, and in fact I was making it 10 times worse.

Once I got past that, I didn’t have beer in a very long time.  My best friend Jesse [Silano, co-founder] would come over on the weekends and we would just watch horror movies. He would come by with his craft beer and I would make mixed drinks because that's basically what I could have.  I’d fall asleep on the couch before the movie was over.  So he suggested we make our own beer to enjoy together, but it seemed like it was a daunting task with a lot of money, time and energy involved. I made mention of my daughter, and I have a son as well. I was a stay-at-home parent and I was heavily involved in their lives, and on the weekends I just wanted to mellow out. 

Do you ever wake up on New Year's Day and have one of those “what the hell am I doing with my life?” moments?  It's that sobering moment of “okay, I want to do something for myself now.” So on January 2, we got together and went over to a Karp’s, a local place, where we grabbed the kit, the buckets and all the stuff we needed.  As we were carrying out two big arm-loads of stuff each, I turned to him and said “you're gonna remember this day because when we have our own place, we're gonna look back on this and it's gonna be like the greatest memory.”

I can just imagine the sound of his groan.

Yeah I’m sure he thought I was just talking shit, but I knew if I'm putting money and energy into this when gluten-free beer with a gluten-free taproom doesn’t really exist in New York, we might have something.  IF it can be done well. That was really the key.  For me, it was because I’d since learned how to make gluten-free foods and how to make it taste like regular food. Then we learned together how to use ancient grains, buckwheat, millet, quinoa flakes, and sometimes corn and roasted rice. We were both very unfamiliar with these grains but we learned what they can do. Their different characteristics and different malts, and then we were able to get some delicious tasting stuff out of it.

Opening a brewery itself is one thing, but a gluten-free brewery just sounds like you’re begging for a challenge.

We knew what was on the market locally. There are gluten-free breweries all over the country, but what was available locally was scarce. It was mostly the bigger guys like Anheuser-Busch, which isn’t very tasty.  If it had been, we never would have thought to make our own.  To his credit, Jesse said “nah, we’ll make better stuff ourselves and we can still watch horror movies.” So we got us a projector and an eggshell-white shower curtain from the dollar store, and we would watch the movies in the basement while the beer would brew.  That was the evolution.  We knew we wanted to bring the basement to Main Street, which is a little challenging because it's a business, too. You're not gonna create a basement environment on a Main Street location no matter where you are, so it has to be “basement-esque.” 

Inviting, but not smelling like laundry and stale Cheetos.

[Laugh] Unless you’re into that.

Were there any other surprises along the way as you were putting all this together? 

Well, the pandemic definitely hit us hard. We were unable to get people in, and then we were told it would be 6 to 8 weeks for construction, which turned out to be 6-8 months.  Our license was supposed to take 20 weeks, but it took 1 year and 20 weeks. 

I’m getting hives just hearing this.

I definitely can relate to the hives [Laughs]. The last thing was the C.O. [Certificate of Occupancy] we needed in order to open the doors, and then that was suddenly taken away, as well. So we were finally able to get things open on October 28, 2022,  having signed the lease in March of 2020, three days before they shut the state down.  It was a long haul, but as you can see, it was worth everything.  To be here now, to have customers here with the product is good as it is, it's definitely satisfying.

Plus, you have all this great memorabilia, and even a table made of license plates from horror movies.  Is it just a matter of finding some old posters, or do you say to yourself “this ‘Demon Knight’ poster has been in my garage for 20 years and goddamnit, people need to see it?’”

[Laughs] Well, it's a little of column A and a little of column B. We knew we wanted it to be inviting.  There are definitely movies that we would've liked to have represented, but then the poster or the sentiment of it may not have been universally regarded. 

I know you do get families in here, so maybe you don't want kids asking “Mommy what’s ‘Cannibal Holocaust?’”

Right.  We always say we would prefer 21 and over, just for the fact that we have an umbrella license to play full features.  We say to the parents, “if you're OK with it, then I'm OK with it,”  because again, my daughter started watching horror when she was younger, but I'm her parent and that's what I feel is OK. 

As far as the decorating is concerned, we wanted to have some universal appeal.  We’ve got a  whole section for “Ghostbusters,” and there’s some “Gremlins” and “Aliens” stuff. We had to have “Army of Darkness.” While we had the pick of the litter with “Friday the 13th” posters, we went with part 8 because of course, we're in New York. 

The menu board, I recommend “No False Pumpkin.”

Another big influence for us was “Phantasm,” so if you look at the board, that's actually supposed to be the Tall Man's mausoleum. We even have a silver sphere as a tap handle on the far left.  Even the bathrooms have stuff in them.

Love the 3 seashells and the Sleepaway Camp light-switch, by the way.

Just recently, the director of “Sleepaway Camp” Robert Hiltzik, himself came in. He works as an attorney nearby.  He came in with his family and signed some of the artwork for us.  Great people.

L-R: Co-Founder Jesse Silano, “Sleepaway Camp” director Robert Hiltzik, Co-Founder Ralph Mandarino

You mentioned showing features, and I noticed Deadly Games just finished up on the monitors behind at the bar. You also have Joe Bob’s Drive-In Oath as you walk in. What are your plans to have screenings here?

We've been in contact with several people about screenings.  We love independent films and we donate our share of funds on Indiegogo, so we’re very into anybody that would want to do that here.  We have a 110-inch shower curtain, which we’ll be hanging up as a screen in the far corner, as well as a lithium ion battery-operated projector that’s Bluetooth-enabled, which we're going to put up. It’s something fun I’d like to do. 

What other events have you been hosting?

This past November, we had a “Thankskilling” marathon.  We showed “Poultrygeist,” and we've got the ugly Christmas sweater party coming up, where we give out prizes.  We have horror trivia once a month, and we’ll have a New Year’s Eve masquerade.  

MacabreDaily would like to thank Ralph for talking to us and we hope to hear more great things from this horror loving brewery soon.

Check out Necromantic Brew Co. for more.

Interview edited for length and clarity. 

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