Beer For Beasts Close to Sell Out

Meet Jens. Jens is a beast.

For those of you that have been lollygagging, your ship is about to sail. As of press time, the day session of Sixpoint & BeerAdvocate's Beer For Beasts animal charity event is 100% sold out and only 261 tickets remain for the evening session. GET ON IT! As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I had the unique opportunity to help brew one of the 40 beers that will make a one-time ever appearance at this fest, so as you can imagine I'm very excited about attending and sampling what we made. Last year was a good time so I'm sure this year will be even better.  I'll be attending the day session, so please be sure to say hi.

Today's photo of the magnificent beast known as Jens was submitted by my good buddy Mikey Santoro, who along with his roommates are about the biggest fan of the Sixpoint nanokegs out there. Cheers!

Beer for Beasts will be held on Saturday, March 31, 2012, at The Bell House (149 7th Street), located in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn in New York City. All proceeds to benefit The Humane Society of New York City. Last year's Beer for Beasts raised nearly $30,000 to directly aid the better treatment of animals. Purchase tickets here.

Brewing with Sixpoint for Beer For Beasts

Yesterday I had the extreme pleasure of brewing a beer with Sixpoint for their upcoming charity event Beer For Beasts. This was my first time visiting the Red Hook brewing facility, and it's shockingly small. Some of their brews and their nanokegs come out of the Lion Brewery in Wilkes-Barre, so they've probably saved some space that way. Other than having to take the subway and a bus in order to get to it's remote location, it's a great little brewing concern.

I worked with Pete Dickson who's been brewing with Sixpoint for about a year now. The photo above is the system we used to make the 21 gallons or so of the beer that will be consumed at Beer For Beasts at the end of March.

The recipe was my homebrew "Old Lidblower" scaled up from a 5 gallon batch. We actually missed our OG by a bit, which we assumed was probably because of the large amount of specialty malt (black, chocolate, dark crystal). But hey, that's okay, beer is beer and it tasted great before going into the fermentor.



Here's the mash. It was really nice to have a 3 part tiered system versus what I'm used to in my kitchen. It just makes everything way smoother. It made me really want to purchase a pump instead of using my auto-siphon all the time.

And we have a boil! This is when it really started smelling terrific.

And here we have the label on the side of the fermentor after the brew day was done. We actually put it into a Blichmann conical fermentor which was pretty cool. I'm used to simple brew buckets. 

It was a great time hanging with the Sixpoint guys and also incredibly fun to brew on a larger system with a professional brewer. Do you want to try this beer? Then you have to come to Beer For Beasts!

Beer For Beasts
Saturday, March 31, 2012
The Bell House (149 7th Street, Brooklyn, NY).
All proceeds to benefit The Humane Society of New York City.

Tickets for Beer for Beasts go onsale Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 12pm/ET. Each ticket will be $60 and include access to one session (1-5pm or 6-10pm), beer and food tastings, and entertainment.

Head over to beerforbeasts.com for more info

Beer For Beasts Recap

This past Saturday, Sixpoint and Beer Advocate came together for an event to benefit the NY Humane Society at The Bell House in Brooklyn. Sixpoint brewed over 20 one-off beers to be poured at the event. Along with food from Calexico Cart among other local vendors, it certainly sounded like a recipe for a great time. Well, the event wasn't without its hiccups, but since its all for a good cause, I'll give this event a thumbs up with hopes for future improvements.



It certainly didn't help that I was about an hour late to the event, although comrades informed me that it took quite some time to get in after the doors opened at 1. Beers were organized around the walls of the main room according to the layout of the program. This was Issue #1 as there were no labels or signs indicating which beer was pouring at each station. You would have to either keep track of where you were (which can be difficult while drinking) or continually ask the pourers which one you were about to imbibe.

The beer I was most excited to try at the event was the Baltic Street, which was a collaboration between Sixpoint and my friends Stevie from LadiesOCB and Lee from Hoptopia. Unfortunately by the time I came around to that brew, it was already kicked. This was at about 3pm, only about 2 hours into the event. As it went on, more and more beers were kicked, until a majority of them were finished before 4pm, with still an hour left in the afternoon session. I understand that they probably needed to ensure they'd have enough of each beer for the 2nd session, but it seemed a little early for all of these to be disappearing.


Calexico Cart guys working hard in the cold.

The food situation was also a bit of a problem. All of it was located outside in a cramped, fenced-in area directly in front of the venue. The chefs were making as much food as quickly as they could, but the wait times were still too long to endure in the cold. But once you got your hands on the food, it was quite delicious. I only managed to have a few tacos from Calexico, as I couldn't spend any more time in line with so many beers disappearing so quickly inside.


A bit overwhelmed, but still a happy drinker.

Sixpoint brews some fantastic beers. There were so many that it was hard to really distinguish the subtle differences, especially when worrying about getting around to try all of them before they kicked. Even though I love the rustic feel of The Bell House, perhaps Sixpoint and BeerAdvocate need to find another larger venue to allow for adequate room for the large amount of attendees. Overall, this event was to benefit the NY Humane Society and that is an awesome cause...so all of my petty complaints are still with an appreciation toward BA and Sixpoint. But lets hope they do it again next year with some improvements, because the only thing better than drinking good craft beer is doing it for charity.