Part 2: The Community and the Beer

09 Feb, 2013 - Brian Watkins

In case you missed it, Part 1:The Philosophy and the Beer.

Sixpoint’s brewery sits on a ghostly corner in Red Hook, a “place to stay out of,” according to Thomas Wolfe’s aptly titled existentialist story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.” Red Hook’s mythology is anchored by gangsters like Joe Gallo, fallen American heroes like Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, and Arthur Miller’s classic play A View From the Bridge. Miller’s Brooklyn was a borough of dreams deferred, and Red Hook his punching bag for capitalism. The opening lines of A View From the Bridge say it all:

In this neighborhood, to meet a lawyer or a priest on the street is unlucky…

But this is Red Hook, not Sicily. This is the slum that faces the bay on the seaward side of the Brooklyn Bridge. This is the gullet of New York, swallowing the tonnage of the world. And now we are quite civilized, quite American. Now we settle for half and I like it better. I no longer keep a pistol in my filing cabinet.

The Sixpoint crew is a little excited about BKLYN.

Upon first glance, it seems that Red Hook has not quite digested all that tonnage. There’s an elegiac quality to the neighborhood that feels safer to experience from a distance. But get a little closer and you’ll find that the hood has repurposed its roots, a quality propagated by visual artists, chefs and restaurateurs, and craft brewers like founder and president of Sixpoint, Shane Welch. It’s not news that this is happening all over the borough. Brooklyn’s cultural renaissance is well documented. Who knows how long it will last? Welch’s interest is not only in how to keep it going, but how to make it better.

“We are one thread in the fabric of Brooklyn. But we’re definitely a thread that you notice when you look at the patchwork,” said Welch. “And it’s not because we’re doing anything that’s more significant or impactful. It’s because the nature of beer is pervasive. It’s a product that all the other people that are producing in Brooklyn and in New York have an opportunity to try. It’s very accessible.”

This is where Sixpoint’s philosophy really takes shape. The symbiotic relationship between Sixpoint’s beer and their worldview has had an incalculable effect on the community Sixpoint serves. As a homebrewer, I’ve walked down to their brewery to collect yeast – they give it to homebrewers for free – which I pitched into my beer, and many other Brooklynites have pitched into theirs. In exchange, they ask that you bring them a few of your own brews. “You’re perpetuating the culture in a literal sense and a figurative sense… because you have the yeast culture that you’re picking out and pitching into another batch, and you’re keeping that society going,” said Welch. “It’s kind of like your DNA and my DNA; we have the remnants of all these ancient cultures– it’s still in us. It’s just propagated through each generation.”

Welch sees Sixpoint as a cultural steward as much as a cultural innovator. Many of their beers highlight community collaboration. Their ‘Gorilla Warfare Ale’ is made with Brooklyn’s own Gorilla Coffee. During the Occupy movement, Sixpoint supplied kegs of fresh water to the Zuccotti Park residents. A lot of their brews are made with locally sourced ingredients, including many items plucked from their brewery’s own rooftop garden.

It’s not mere coincidence that the locavore movement has clung to craft beer. “Beer used to be incredibly localized,” Welch says. But that changed with the automobile, which mobilized markets, and suddenly beer needed to be shipped. The tricky part was keeping the beer fresh. That’s when the idea of making ‘beer that is alive’ – as Sixpoint does – vanished. Methods of pasteurization and filtering came about, over-saturating the market with lagers like Schlitz and Shaeffer, Budweiser and Miller. Hence the rise of Anheuser Busch, light beers, and beer monopolization. Anyone that’s had a Guiness in Ireland will tell you it’s a different, better Guiness than what you’d get in the States. That’s because imported beers have to be exportable. “An imported beer will sit in customs for three weeks,” Welch says. In other words, they have to take the life out of it. So beer is most alive when it’s localized; the exact phenomena that American culture is repurposing today.

The brewery’s rooftop garden.

Sixpoint’s brand is not successful because of brilliant marketing; it’s because they’re seriously relational. “It’s a reciprocal relationship,” Welch explains. “We love our customers. We appreciate them so much, for their support, and for giving us jobs. But we do it, and we’re allowed to do it because they’re enabling the whole thing. So we try to deliver to them an experience that’s worthy of a standing ovation, and that’s why I think it gets the response it does.”

And it’s quite a response. The release of a new Sixpoint beer is akin to a new iPhone on a local level. When they canned and released their never before seen hop-bomb Resin, social networks lit up with beer-nerding Brooklynites reporting which bodega got a new shipment, what grocery’s shelves were already stripped bare, and general bouts of exultation for the much anticipated new brew.

“You compare a MacBook – design, functionality, look, quality – you compare that to a piece-of-shit Dell, you can tell that one of these products was crafted with love, thoughtfulness, an eye towards good design and a modern sensibility. And the other is this clunky device that you can tell was put together for the lowest amount of money possible. You can tell by the way it works,” said Welch, who spent a whole two years with his team crafting the design of their cans. “I really think that our time on earth is short. We don’t want to be known as people that make junky things. We want to make beautiful things. And not just the beer: the events we do, the images we proliferate, the message we put across. I don’t see any other way than delivering that kind of honest value.”

Beer for Beasts is one of Sixpoint’s many community outreach programs; a charity event in the name of showing compassion towards animals. All the proceeds go to the Humane Society of New York City. “Beer for Beasts is the defining annual event of Sixpoint. It encapsulates and represents so many things that we stand for,” said Welch. The event consists of forty-six new beers, specially brewed for the event, and some of the best food Brooklyn has to offer. It costs Sixpoint a huge amount to put the event on. But, again, Welch says that’s part of their creative philosophy. “If we just showed up with a check it’d be lame. If you’re going to have a cause as a company… it’s about using your creativity and your competencies to do something that’s not commercially available. What I’m saying is that, what if filmmakers only made films and didn’t think about profit? What if chefs cooked food with just raw inspiration in mind and didn’t think about profit? What you’d get is things like elBulli in Spain: a world renowned restaurant that loses money everyday that they’re open but they’re rated the number one restaurant in the world.”

All in all, Welch says that Brooklyn has shaped Sixpoint more than the brewery has shaped the borough. He sees the presence of a high-minded craft brewery not only as an outcome of the culture, but a vital part of its growth. “Brooklyn is constantly innovating but it’s also constantly suffering. We want to show people that things can still be made in this way… and there can be a thoughtfulness and patience and the type of creation that gives them confidence. It’s also really great to see all the young people that are choosing to stay in New York or moving to New York and Brooklyn.”

Sixpoint has become the darling of Brooklyn locavores, foodies, beer snobs, artisans, and epicureans. They are quickly becoming Brooklyn’s most beloved brewery. More and more, they are growing into the role of New York City’s beer. “Other than of course fostering community… I hope that when people look at us they say ‘That’s awesome, I wanna reach in the same way that they reach, I want to look at this brand and walk away with confidence, I get the positive message and I want to embrace it and incorporate it.’”

And as for the future of Sixpoint? “We’re not close to reaching our full potential. And I’m not talking about growth, I’m talking about how we connect with people, what type of message do we deliver and how do we influence that. I always thought that we had an amazing energy. It was just a matter of time before it broke.”