Where the hipsters now roam, suds makers like Schnaderbeck once reigned. He was not the largest brewer in Brooklyn in the days before slogans like “my beer is Rheingold, the dry beer” were on people’s lips. But Williamsburg and Bushwick became a home to foam in the mid-19th century, and eventually Brooklyn became the beer capital of the nation, producing one-fifth of the nation’s beer as recently as 1960.

The Rheingold and Schaefer breweries shut down their Brooklyn plants in the 1970s, leaving Brooklyn without beer makers until Brooklyn Brewery set up shop in 1988.

Dr. Bergoffen, an adjunct associate professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology who also takes on projects for architects and developers, says Schnaderbeck’s beer vaults now have the distinction of being the only ones in Brooklyn to have been mapped and photographed by archaeologists — even though Schnaderbeck remains a mystery.

“His career,” she said, “seems to have been respectable but not particularly distinguished.” His brewery did not last into the 20th century. If he drowned his sorrows or drowned in debt — a lager laggard in a time when brewing was prosperous — she turned up no clues.

The most dramatic stories about him, taken mostly from newspaper accounts, have nothing to do with beer. Once a servant in Schnaderbeck’s house mistook arsenic for baking soda. The pudding she made poisoned Schnaderbeck’s family. “Luckily, the doctor arrived in time to save the family,” Dr. Bergoffen said.