[Photograph: Stephanie Klose]

After meeting at a food-focused book club, Erin Patinkin and Agatha Kulaga decided to start a business together. Their kitchen experiments led them to develop high-quality bar snacks, the kind of food you'd find in a bowl next to your beer, but made with better ingredients and a sense of fun. Their company, Ovenly, was the result. And while plenty of actual bars carry their snacks and baked good, four of the snacks are also available from retailers like Eastern District, The Brooklyn Kitchen/Meat Hook, and the Brooklyn Brewery.

"Our packaged snacks pair well with wine and beer," Patinkin says, either because they play off the flavors in the booze, or because they're made with it. Ovenly's sweet/savory Spicy Bacon Caramel Corn uses Brooklyn Brewery Pennant Ale in the caramel, along with bacon from pasture-raised pigs, and organic popcorn. It was one of the first snacks they developed and was tremendously popular from the start, which left them with lots and lots of bacon fat to use up somehow.

So Old Salties were born out of necessity. Patinkin explains that she and Kulaga roasted peanuts in the leftover bacon fat, then added "every single savory ingredient we like," including Old Bay, Worcestershire sauce and plenty of spices. Maple Thyme Pecans and Honey Almond Corn both land firmly on the sweet end of the spectrum, though in a nuanced, aromatic way.

The snack line will be expanding soon, starting with a "totally savory, not sweet at all" jerky-based snack in collaboration with King's County Jerky as well as beer marshmallows. And in further expansion news, Patinkin and Kulaga are working toward opening a retail space of their own in 7-8 months. Asked for a hint about where their snack mecca might end up, Patinkin shares that they "would love to go back into Greenpoint. That's where we started."

For a full list of products and vendors, visit OvenlyNYC.com.