Sixpoint Craft Ales

Sixpoint Craft Ales are a pretty new brewery located in Brooklyn, with their first beers rolling off the production line in 2005. They shipped some beers to Massachusetts but for production reasons they apparently weren't able to keep up with demand, and we caught the beers on their comeback launch tour.

Shane Welch, the brewmaster/co-head honcho, was at Cambridge Common when we visited to try out the five different Six Point beers they had on tap. It's always fun to try so many beers from one brewery, to get a sense of what they are about. We especially liked their Bengali Tiger IPA (it's nice to get an IPA that isn't just hops), and their Sweet Action, an American Blonde style, with hints of honey. They have a wide variety of other styles, too, and Shane seemed to imply that they would continue to produce an unusually large number of different beers compared to other craft brewers.

It was fun to get to chat to the brewmaster for the beers we were drinking. He was eager to share his enthusiasm for beer, giving us an account of his beer background and his plans for the future, as well as the intrigue of the craft brewing industry! He got his start as a brewer while in college, getting into homebrew in a big way, and hosting big parties at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. That was only his first step, though, and he dropped out and pursued his own beer education and eventually landed up in Brooklyn with the keys to his own place. It sounds as though they are in the midst of a big expansion and we're hoping that their beers will be more reliably available in Massachusetts henceforth.