Last Day at Sixpoint

Man, I am going to miss these guys!

This past Saturday marked my last day as an intern at Sixpoint. I was incredibly sad to go, but I really have to move on, and to concentrate on moving out of NYC, I need to have the rest of my weekends free. We had a great day at the brewery though. We were scheduled to do a double brew, but they ended up fermenting the last beer one day faster than they thought it would take, so the double brew was done on Friday instead. We spent the day kegging up 28 barrels of Bengali Tiger and doing some cleaning.

My friend Forrest stopped by to take a brewery tour with a couple of his friends who are in the planning stages of opening a brewpub in Trenton, NJ. So we got to show them around, and hopefully we helped them with some planning ideas. We also had a nice hombrew tasting session on the upstairs patio at mid-day. After that, we were starving, so I picked us up some papusas and chicharron from the Red Hook soccer fields.

I should provide a bit of an overview of my time at Sixpoint:

First off, it only amounted to a total of 13 Saturdays, and I wish I could have been there for more. But in that time, I was able to do the equivalent of 3 weeks of full-time brewery work. That is definitely an accheivement, and it means that I won't be a total noob when I walk into my first real brewing job. Coupled with the theoretical knowledge I've picked up through 7 years of homebrewing, I personally think I will be a more knowledgable beginning brewer than at least some of the people coming out of brewing schools.

Secondly, I'm greatly appreciative of the opportunity I was given to learn to brew. Even after I let them know I would be leaving, Craig and Evan still made it a point to include me in the brewing process and teach me new things. Shane, the brewmaster and owner, gave me a really great letter of recommendation, and he has given me some advice on where and how to look for a brewing job.

Most importantly though, I consider it a great opportunity to have gotten to know Craig and Evan, and they are true friends to me. I think it's going to be very hard to find a brewing job where I can work with two great brewers who are so friendly and fun to hang out with. I really hope I can, and luckily this field is made up of generous and friendly brewers. I wish them both the best in their time at Sixpoint and eventually, opening their own breweries.

I still have so much stuff to do before I leave the city, and we still don't know where we are moving to! And what the hell do I do with all my brewing stuff, sell it here and re-buy, or pay an enormous amount of cash in moving expenses? I guess I will figure it all out in the upcoming weeks. Sorry, no brewing posts until I get situated in the new town, wherever that may be.

Beer Quest Shoots Brooklyn

Craig & Steve at the helm

This past Memorial Day weekend, my friends Jon And Kieran from Beer Quest did some filming both at Sixpoint and in Ray's backyard. I was pretty stoked for this not because I'm a media whore (which I am), but because I think a little web-available video footage would be a great addition to my brewing resume, especially when it comes to sending that resume out to breweries that are out of town. I already got a little press coverage in a really swanky beverage magazine called Imbibe Magazine this past January, and let me just say that I was the only guy featured that was wearing flip-flops and a T-shirt. Mostly Imbibe features columns about $15 mixed drinks with names that I can't pronounce, so homebrewing seemed to be an interesting and off-kilter feature for them, but I thought it was a well written article that fit the magazine pretty well.

The film crew at Sixpoint along with Kieran, Steve, myself, and Jon.

Anyway, Jon and Kieran, their crew, and their host Steve have been concentrating on the Brooklyn craft brewing scene for their pilot episode of Beer Quest. The show is going to feature a different city or region for each episode, and try to really delve into the brewing culture of each city, not just hit a few of the big breweries and call it a wrap. I wasn't filmed in the Sixpoint segment, which would have been cool even if it was just for a few seconds just to show that I was both homebrewing and doing an internship. However, when they came over to Ray's on Sunday we really got to cut loose, show them some homebrewing, and have a lot of fun. Most of the footage we shot will probably end up on the cutting room floor, or in extras because it's pretty much a bunch of dick and ass jokes interspersed with some brewing tech-talk and a little beer philosophy, and for some reason they have to keep the show pretty mellow in order to appeal to a wide range of potential channels.



Here's a short sample from the video: You can't see much homebrewing in this part, but we are sparging out the grainbed as we are cracking into our first homebrew. Shortly after the clip, I explained the importance of having a good "panty dropper" recipe in your repertoire, i.e. a beer that is around 8% and has a sweet or fruity profile that will appeal to the ladies. Then we had a little discussion on the use of corn, rice, and other adjuncts in beer, how these ingredients are being accepted by craft brewers and not the maligned substances they used to be, and also the general concept of what effect macrobrewers have had on our concept of beer as a culture. Personally I think that artisanal and local are the buzzwords of American food, and the beer scene is slightly behind the food movement in this regard but catching up quickly. Macrobrewed lagers are the Velveeta cheese of the beer world, and I'm glad to see we are stepping out of the TV dinner and canned lawnmower beer astetic that has reigned supreme for too long in this country. That being said, I did swill a tallboy of PBR at a local dive bar after my last Sixpoint shift, so it's not like they don't have their place...sometimes.

The interesting thing about filming homebrewers is that I think we really got to show them a side of brewing that would not have been available from a commercial brewery. I think because the batch size is smaller, people can relate to it more. It's not that far off from the scale of cooking a large meal. Also, instead of all our processes being inside of large stainless steel vessels and moved around by pumps, they are in coolers, carboys, and things you can look into to see what's happening inside. Everything is moved around by hand and by gravity. And because it involves drinking, having fun, and joking around, it's kind of a mix between a party and a work day. I hope in the end we got to add something to their beer experience and that it makes a great segment for their show.

Viva La Homebrew...
Senior Wonton

By the way, here's the recipe That Ray, Vlad, and I brewed on Sunday:

"BQ" IPA: Recipe is for 14 gallons pre-boil, 12.75 gallons post-boil

O.G. 1.068 F.G. 1.014 ABV 7.2% IBU's 75

27 lb. 6 oz. Glen Eagle Marris Otter malt
(Once again, this is a very dark malt at 5-6 Lovibond, almost like mixing a portion of crystal and munich into a base pale malt)

Hops: All whole hops were added in bags because we did not have a way to filter them out.

43 gr. Horizon 10.9% pellets 60 min.
36 gr. Chinook 13% whole 60 min.
56 gr. Columbus 12.3% pellets 15 in
65 gr. Amarillo 8.2% pellets 10 min.
112 gr. Centennial 8.5% whole 0 min.

Dry Hops: 38 gr. each Amarillo, Centennial, and Columbus pellets.  Added loose in the primary after 12 days and left in for 1 week before racking to keg.

Mash: 8.5 gallons H2O + 3 tsp. gypsum. 150 degrees for 1 hour.
Sparge with 170 degree H2O to collect 13.5 gallons at 1.066. This was way over our expected efficiency so we added 2 quarts of water.

Boil 1 hour with hops as noted, whirlfoc at 15 min, yeast nutrient at 10 min.

Chill to 68 degrees, whilpool, and rack to 2 carboys.
Aeration: 90 seconds of pure O2 per carboy.
Yeast: Slurry of Wyeast 1056 from a previous pale ale batch. Pitched entire slurry from a 5 gallon batch.
Ferment at 68 degrees.

Brewery picture of the week

Jasmine, the Sixpoint kitty

Not much going on here of notable interest. We brewed another double batch of Bengali Tiger on Saturday. I feel like I'm actually picking up some skills at Sixpoint, so that I can jump in on certain projects and do them on my own. For instance on Saturday I cleaned and ran the sanitation cycle on a conditioning tank with only a little supervision, shoveled out grain from the 1st mash, stirred in the 2nd mash, and washed 5 pallets of kegs (among other things).

On Saturday evening we had a San Diego beer tasting at my place, and a lot of the beers were truly excellent. Doug brought over some Stone and Lost Abbey beers to implement what I had already brought. There was only one stinker in the batch, an infected or stale Left Coast Torrey Pines IPA. It smelled like rotten feet & cheese. The Left coast Hop Juice double IPA was in pretty good shape though.

Looking forward to brewing up a batch next Sunday, possibly a pale ale to grow up some Cali yeast and use the homegrown hops that Chillindamos gave me.

Cheers, Happy brewing to you all.
Sean

First Brewday at Sixpoint: Double batch of Bengali Tiger IPA

Just a few pics from the first brewday I helped out with at Sixpoint.  It's a long day, but really fun!  I stirred in the second mash.

This is the grant setup, where the wort recirculates before being directed to the boil kettle.

Here's the hop cone after a 5 minute whirlpool, 10 minute rest, and about 45 minutes to transfer the wort through the heat exchanger into the fermenter.  I'm thinking about rigging some kind of diverter plate in my homebrew system, because it's really amazing what a well-defined cone they get.  Not much wort loss at all.

In other news, I just brewed my starter for an all-brett beer with WLP 650 Brett Bruxenellis.  It will be a 2-step starter, this first step was 1 quart.  The yeast tube smelled lemony and funky in a  spoiled fruit / dumpster sort of way, with some barnyard.  I tasted the yeast dregs and it was extremely sour in a good way!

San Diego, Sixpoint, & Saison

Don't forget to pack your beer koozy to the beach!

I'm going out to San Diego on Thursday with my girlfriend for 5 days! This is my first real vacation in a year (besides going home for Christmas, which doesn't count) and my first time to San Diego. We'll be staying with my homebrewing friend "Chillindamos" and his wife. So, I'll take lots of pics and hit some breweries and get back to you with a blog update afterwards. This is sort of a "what would it be like to live here" trip. For some strange reason, I don't want to live in NYC for my entire life!

In other news, I've been continuing the Sixpoint internship, and really enjoying it, although I still haven't been there for an actual brewday. This Saturday, we bottled about 30 gallons of various Sixpoint beers for samples. In the past, they've actually done this from a bottling bucket with priming sugar! I'm sure you homebrewers can imagine how labor intensive this is. Also, I think that by bottle conditioning with priming sugar, the beer is subtley different from the force-carbonated & kegged product. So, Craig asked me if I could bring down my Blichman Beergun to make the job easier , and I was happy to oblige.

After using the Beergun to bottle 30 gallons of beer, I can officially give it a thumbs-up review. It took a while to figure out the pressure settings to eliminate foam. We attempted to bottle the beers at room temperature, but we experienced some pretty bad foam-up till we moved the whole operation into the walk-in cooler. After that we just hung out in the walk-in for hours, and once we got everything dialed in, our actual beer waste was less than 12 oz. per 15 gallons of beer bottled. It's not fast, but if you had 2 going at once, it would be a very efficient operation. Sixpoint is going to order 1 or 2 for bottling at the brewery now.

Then on Sunday, Ray and I brewed up a saison in his backyard. The weather was great, and Doug joined us to hang out and help brew. Both Ray and Doug had some excellent witbiers to drink during the brew session.

Saison with Demerara Sugar (all grain)
13.5 gallons pre-boil, Pre-boil gravity: 1.045 before sugar
12 gallons post boil gravity, O.G. 1.058
IBU's 30
Efficiency 71%

19.5 lb. Durst Pils malt
1 lb. Wheat malt
12 oz. Armoatic malt
8 oz. raw spelt
8 oz. flaked barley

2 lb. organic demerara sugar (like sugar in the raw, but slightly darker)

25 gr. German Magnum pellets 13.6% 60 min
28 gr. Styrian Goldings pellets 3.5% 15 min
28 gr. EKG pellets 4.8% 15 min
56 gr. Styrian Goldings pellets 3.5% 0 min
28 gr. EKG pellets 6% 0 min

Wyeast 3724 Saison yeast from previous batch

Mash in 6 gallons at 130, rest 15 minutes
Add 1.5 gallons boiling water to raise to 146, rest 90 min
Sparge with about 8.5 gallons, collected only 12.75 gallons.

Topped up to 13.5, added sugar at 90 minutes.
Boil 90 minutes, hops as noted.
Added 1 tab whirfloc at 15 min, 1 tsp. yeast nutrient at 10 min

Chilled, whirpooled, and collected 10.5 gallons
Oxygenated for 1 minute per carboy. Pitched yeast at 68 degrees.
The beer is taking off a little slowly, so I think the yeast was a little on the low-pitching side. But I'm pretty sure it will be just fine.

One of the coolest things about this beer was watching the amazing, stringy protein break due to the protein rest and the raw grains used!

1st Day at Sixpoint

As I've told friends and stated on this blog, I'm trying to slowly edge my way into professional brewing. I'm going to be blogging on this, and I think it will be interesting to look back on my experiences in a few years and see where it's taken me. In January I lined up an internship with Sixpoint Craft Ales, and although there were some setbacks in the schedule, I'm finally in there and I should be helping out on most Saturdays. As far as my specific goals, I would love to be offered a job there, but even if that doesn't happen, I'm sure learning experience will be crucial, and can only help me get a job at a brewery somewhere else.
On Saturday I went to Sixpoint to help Craig and Evan keg up some Bengali Tiger IPA. They weren't brewing, which meant we would have a fairly easy day and finish up by around 1:00. I arrived at a shockingly early 7:00 a.m. The sun was just rising in the industrial harbor neighborhood of Red Hook. While waiting for Craig and Evan to arrive, I sat outside and finished a delicious bacon egg and cheese bagel. A songbird sang in the morning from the deck, celebrating the incoming warmer weather. A feeling of excitement surged through me, as I contemplated the first truly exciting thing I have done in a while. I felt like I was like stepping into a new chapter of life.
I've known Craig for a little over 2 years now and he has worked his way up to head brewer at Sixpoint. Evan started as an intern and works there part time. Both these guys are outstanding dudes and they are avid homebrewers on the side. We sampled a beer made by Craig and his girlfriend using chilies that she had grown. It was spectacular. I didn't bring any beers this time, but I'm planning on bringing samples of the Deliverance Kentucky Sour, and our IIPA.
Most of the kegs were clean already. Once the keg washer was warmed up, we got set up to wash a few remaining kegs. Evan showed me how to do this, and it's a multi-staged cleaning with about 6 unmarked valves to memorize. As we were doing this, Craig brought the double batch of Bengali Tiger to the proper carbonation and set up the keg filler, which is a homemade sci-fi looking contraption which hangs from the ceiling with 8 fill lines coming down to sanke taps. From this we filled 6 and 1/2 pallets of kegs, and a 7 gallon keg of beer.

What was really interesting for me was that even though kegging is not really a romanticized brewing practise, this is totally new ground for me, using new equipment that I have never used! As a homebrewer, this was incredibly rewarding. Quite frankly my homebrewing system doesn't change much, and there is a certain repetitiveness to that. I'm sure part of it was the good company, but I really had a lot of fun cleaning and filling kegs, getting a little dirty and getting some IPA sprayed on my jeans. And I can say without a doubt, the Bengali was tasting great off the conditioning tank. It was rewarding to drink a beer that I had just helped keg.

At around 11:00 Shane, the owner & brewmaster stopped by just to check in. Then Ray and Mary stopped by for ingredients, so at one point it was kind of like a social hour. After that we finished up moving the pallets of beer out and cleaned up. Next week should be a double brewday. As I understand it, this will be done in 2 shifts of 2 workers, with a little overlap in the middle.

Can't wait to see what the future holds!

Sean