Brewery Tour: Sixpoint's Craft Ales

Vacation is over and it's time to play catch up and so here is the long overdue recap of Sixpoints!

The Deacon and I started with a glass of Gorilla Ale at the steadfast Bar Great Harry in Carroll Gardens. Enjoying our favorite blend of coffee and beer, we met Ben and Mike (brothers and owners of BGH) playing pinball with Andrew, a co-founder of Sixpoint's Craft Ales.

With just a few minutes to drink while they rallied the troops, we polished our beers and got into minivans for the short drive to Red Hook where the Six Point Brewery sits behind an unsuspecting garage door. Once there, we gathered in the company's headquarters for a quick QA with our guide Andrew and a big plastic cup full of Bengali Tiger.

The "headquarters" is a small studio apartment space with two desks, a kitchenette, two dining room tables, a piano and a custom built kegerator. It was recently renovated and a big change from the office/garage below which they moved out of to make more room for grain. While standing in the office (which felt more like a living room) we learned about the founder's (Shane Welch) market testing via parties at the University of Wisconsin and his trip to NYC to start a brewery out of his car. Like many good things, Shane got connected with our guide for the evening (Andrew) over a glass of homebrew and the rest is history. Check out BaseNow for a colorful interview with Shane on the origins of Sixpoints.

The garage below the living-room-turned-office now houses several 2-ton bags of grain, a motorcycle, a cat's litter box and the Sixpoint Enterprise (a homebrewer's dream machine for creating new beers). Adjacent to the garage is the actual brewery (I use the term loosely while smiling), which consists of one boiler, a mash tun, 5 fermenting tanks and a keg cleaner. Grain is fed into the process from a small chicken-coup-like space built on the roof and the whole brewing process happens in this one cozy space. Because of storage constraints, all the beer is packaged into kegs and shipped out as quickly as possible. To say the least, the operations are modest for such a well known and highly respected New York beer.

Keeping things casual, Andrew richly explained where different beer flavors come from and proved himself to be far from a beer snob providing us several memorable quotes such as: "People ask what type of beer Righteous Ale is. They say, 'Is it a pale ale or something else,' and I just tell them it's a really good beer that people like to drink a lot."

The tour ended with a full cup of double IPA (11% ABV straight from the fermenting tank) and a leisurely, yet frigid, walk back to the comfort of BGH. Several beers deeper than we had left, we made friends with our fellow tourists learning of breweries they had visited and how to get there. It was a night full of learning about how to make good beer, the growth of a small brewery, entrepreneurship driven by passion versus money and how many people love this stuff.

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Your 12/17 deacon pick of the wick

*the beer deacon's pick of the week can be a new brewery, beer, bar, or any saint-blessed thing he wants it to be, so long as it pertains to beer culture in the city. Look for his pick on thursdays, what college kids call "thirsty thursdays," or to cite from the brew hop bible, "and on the fourth day the disciples drinketh...early and often."

This isn't technically a "weekend" pick, unless you consider between now and New Years one long extended holiday which I do. Next Tuesday, 12/22, Bar Great Harry is leading a Six Point Brewery tour and after party, taking a lucky 25 of first RSVPs for an exclusive tour of the guerrilla indy brooklyn brewer located in the heart of Red Hook:

BGH and Sixpoint are teaming up for a special holiday event. The evening starts with everyone who signs up meeting at BGH at 6PM. We will take vans down to the Sixpoint Brewery. There we will hang with the Sixpoint folks, get a little tour, and drink fresh Sixpoint beer right from the tanks!

At this point the plan gets a little weird. If it is snowing, we are going to get to-go cups from Sixpoint and walk up to BGH. Sounds like fun in the snow, no? However, if it is not snowing, or if it turns silly cold, then we will just get vans back. At BGH we will have a few cool Sixpoint beers on draft. And they will be cheap.

You can RSVP after the jump. I've already RSVPd with a friend and fellow Six Point fan, and having been to their keg night at BGH i can personally vouch for the quality of their extremely fresh, extremely local brews. They offer a slate of A range graded beers on BA, including their popular Bengali Tiger IPA, Belgian IPA, Abigale Belgian, Brownstoner (my personal favorite), Grand Crue (a mega strong Belgian dark ale) and the amazingly unique Sixpoint Gorilla Warfare Coffee Porter, which is brewed with extremely expensive fresh microroasted coffee grains from Gorilla coffee (the only microroastery in NYC). If you find that baby on tap, you win.

the deacon's weekend

"Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel ashamed - Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, 'It is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver.'"

-Jack Handy

Friday's: Brooklyn Bowl's Gaslight Anthem concert was epic. "As always, every week night features 30$/lane/hour bowling specials, Brooklyn-brewed beers, and our custom menu with food by Blue Ribbon," Brooklyn Bowl advertises, which would bring in a lot more church goers if we'd only put it up on the sign, as I keep arguing with Minister. He sort of rolls his eyes, faithful witness will not lie, etc. But it doesn't need to be a lie! Sigh...

With the A- rated Bengali Tiger IPA on tap (along with nine additional local brews from Six Point, Brooklyn and Kelso) the deacon and stephen the head won on every level.

Saturday: More crazy shenanigans. Final Fantasy VII on one 42 inch TV, college football on the other, a 4-pack of delicious Allagash White and one fancy schmancy big bottle of Great Divide's Imperial Cherry Saison. Needless to say the deacon was one cool kid growing up.

Heavenly. I love that the clear coffee table doesn't come out in the picture. It looks like a ginormous bottle of Southern Tier is floating in my living room, which is pretty awesome if you think about it philosophically. I sort of went into Carroll Gardens' American Beer Distro. with the intention of finding and reviewing some seasonal offerings and went home with this instead. "Wait, when did we get that in!?" I heard the Distro's hyper-knowledgable co-manager yell as I was checking out (in between mutterings about healthcare reform from the Distro's other, hyper-wingnut co-manager). Having just homebrewed with pounds and pounds of cherries, i didn't think anything I could buy would be able to compete with the thick aroma, but boy was I wrong. This is a rich, heavy, complex Saison with a bevy of flavors absolutely underlied, overlied, you name it with Cherry. Delicious. I passed out on the couch with both TVs on. And yes, we do have two 42 inch TVs in our living room. Why not?

Sunday: Football at Cobble Hill's Downtown Bar & Grille, ye pub of the 5 billion different beer selections. I actually went to the bathroom and saw on their Sierra Nevada shelf, three separate versions of the Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Barley Wine (from 3 different years, with different labels) which just about says it all about their selection.

DB&G gets flack for being a bit overpriced (for the area...it's no more expensive than Blind Tiger) but every day they have 1 or 2 $5 specials of some totally cool, totally random bottle or brewery. Yesterday's was the Royal Extra Stout from the Carib Brewery (Trinidad):

RES was inherited from a merger with the Walters Brewery in Port of Spain (Trinidad) in 1952. More a dark pilsner than a dark stout, there's little trace of roasted barley. It's much sweeter, and thinner, than deceoptively strong: 6.6%. The taste was a little bizarre, certainly unique, very drinkable like coffee with an unfamiliar but tasty sweetener.

Anyway pretty cool to have a deal like that at a bar I went to for football. And I had Oktoberfest's off tap from Brooklyn, Spaten, and Sierra Nevada. And the Pats won 59-0. Not a bad Sunday, not a bad Sunday at all.

deacon's funtime pick of the week

I'm obviously not a good enough person to make the 7 hour trek cross state to The Southern Tier/St. Susan OktoBENEfest, so for selfish reasons I'm doubling up on this week's pick: Brooklyn Bowl, the (somewhat) new bowling in Williamsberg that aims to compete with the always jampacked Gutter, where the deacon will watch righteous jersey rock band Gaslight Anthem tonight. Apart from being a bowling alley and rock venue, Brooklyn Bowl's restaurant is a venture from the ridiculously tasty Blue Ribbon, and like any self-respecting hipster venue their beer list is hardcore local: three Sixpoint taps (Sweet Action, Righteous Rye, Bengali Tiger IPA), five Brooklyn taps (Lager, Pennant Pale Ale, Weisse, Oktoberfest, and and the recently debuted and totally punkrock awesome DIPA Brooklyn Blast), and two Kelso taps (Nut Brown Lager, Pilsner). I also appreciate the small touch on the menu in describing their localness:

Six Point: "just down the way in Red Hook"

Brooklyn: "right through the wall on n. 11th"

Kelso: "a stones throw away in Clinton Hill"

Totally subjective points for not having Sixpoint's fabulous Brownstoner on tap. Ave maria, mate, it's fall, why's no one carrying this brew anymore!? Hopefully it'll be back in the winter...

Anyhow, I've been delinquent in throwing on my skinny jeans and pretending to like PBR for too many months now, I'm psyched to get back to Billyberg for a cool show and some fresh local brews.

Finally, weather alert: the last (and largest) free ride of the NYC cycling season, Transporation Alternatives "Tour de Bronx" on Sunday, is still open to registration...though Weather.com is calling for rain and a high of 47. Hmm. That should help me shake my hangover?