Kieran Brew Bends the Rail With Podcast on Local Life

At the start of every episode of the podcast “Brew’s Cafe,” host Kieran Brew mentions that he grew up in a bar.

His family’s eponymous pub in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan was the sort of local watering hole where everyone who lived or worked within walking distance ended up eventually, many of them regularly, and swapped the stories of their lives, current and past.

Brew says now that he realizes that Brew’s, which the family sold in 2001, trained him to be a podcast host. The podcast, he says wistfully, is the closest thing he can find to reviving the experience of the bar at Brew’s.

“I grew up talking to people — ‘bending the rail,’ as it’s called,” he says. “I don’t have that anymore. I don’t drink anymore, so I’m not even in bars. But I can shoot the breeze. I’m curious about people, and I love hearing what people have to say about who they are.”

“Brew’s Cafe,” which kicked off its third “season” with the 69th episode this week, is its namesake’s way of gradually populating the Manhattan barstools of his memories with all the faces from the South Fork that he would want to bend the rail with if he were still wearing an apron and pouring them suds at the end of a long day.

Brew is a real estate agent for SERHANT., by trade — he doesn’t call the podcast a side hustle, because a side hustle makes money — and a father of two who lives in the family home in Amagansett that he grew up coming to in summers.

The idea of starting a podcast came during the hours-long drives with his oldest son to travel team baseball games.

“We were spending a lot of time in the car, and I started listening to podcasts — the usual ones, Joe Rogan, Dax Shepard, long-form interview stuff — and I started imagining all these people I knew out here who would make for a great conversation,” Brew said. “The company I was working for at the time had just started a podcast, just talking about real estate stuff, and I had been on it a couple of times, and that got me thinking, I can do this.”

After a Google search — “how do you start your own podcast” — and an Amazon starter kit, “Brew’s Cafe” was born. YouTube videos provided guidance on how to approach every component, from the technical down to how to choose guests and conduct an interesting interview.

More than 70 interviews later, Brew says he feels like he’s found a home. He’s spun out a second real estate industry podcast that has garnered some remarkable attention on Instagram — the locally focused “Brew’s Cafe” gets a few hundred listens per episode, but one clip of his real estate interviews got 1 million views.

The guest list has ranged widely, from local chefs and bartenders — his restaurant industry roots building in a bias for conversation he finds interesting — to movie producers, authors and teachers. “Teachers are great, because they know how to fill space,” Brew says.

His favorite guests? “I love all my children equally,” he said, wryly.

“Some people have surprised me though: Randye Lordon, who writes all these mysteries, she was fantastic. Paul Johnson, he hosts trivia night [at Townline BBQ]. Ray Brown, he was a fireman in the city, he told his September 11 story — that was really compelling,” he said.

“Joe Realmuto and his war stories from Nick & Toni’s. My second one was with Rich Burns, the retired superintendent in East Hampton, and he was so good because he had just retired and all of a sudden he could talk about all the stuff he couldn’t talk about before. And Steve Haweeli — having lost him not long after, I was so glad that I got to sit down and talk with him, that I have that still.

“So often you think you’re going to talk about one thing based on who the guest is and what you know about them, but then you end up talking about something totally different — like Nancy Atlas and I talking about tick-borne diseases for the first 10 minutes. And Diane Saatchi, she’s been in the real estate business out here since the ’80s, but we talked about a voter registration drive.”

He added, “The best stuff comes from where you never expect. A friend who is an author told me, don’t ever shut off the mic — because the best stuff will be after you say, ‘Okay, that’s a wrap, thanks for coming.’”

A bartender would never be able to prep for a chat with someone over the copper, and Brew says he does little prep for the interviews — unless it’s with someone who has written a book, in which case he tries to read most of it beforehand.

There have been some bumps in the road. Technical glitches are unavoidable — usually. Microphones are knocked over, cables are yanked, batteries die. “It’s an amateur podcast,” Brew says regularly when a hiccup interrupts a tale.

An entire interview with East Hampton Town Historian Hugh King was lost because Brew had not pushed record. That flub led to Brew adding “the little red light is on” notation at the start of each interview to affirm that recording is happening.

“The biggest frustration is not asking the right questions — the sins of omission,” he says. “I think of something that night, and say, ‘Dammit, I totally forgot. I had Susan Spungen on and we talked about whether to peel asparagus, but I never asked her what it was like to work for Martha Stewart.”

The newest episode, released this week on podcast apps, features Josh Gladstone, former program director at Guild Hall, who is taking over as creative director for LTV. Brian Halweil, the former publisher of Edible East End and Edible Brooklyn magazines, and Brian Burns, a screenwriter for television shows like “Blue Bloods” and “Entourage” are already recorded and dropping in September.

For the foreseeable future, Brew says he sees the podcast staying true to its origins, the local focus with a limited audience is just fine with him. The recognition is the payoff.

“I love it when people see me in the store and say, ‘Oh, I loved that one with so-and-so,’” he said. “There’s nothing more gratifying than someone saying, ‘I love it,’ and asking who is going to be on next.”