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