Strange Brew in Brooklyn

Not as strange an idea as you might think. But strange nonetheless. An item I wrote for NYT Diner's Journal:

Something in the Air Is Brewing

By Robert Simonson

It seems that no part of Brooklyn can be left untouched by its ever-striving culinary scene, even its microorganisms.

As part of his ongoing “Mad Scientist” series of limited-release drafts, Shane Welch, the founder of Sixpoint Craft Ales in Red Hook, plans to tame the wild yeasts swirling about New York Harbor.

“I was enjoying a crisp evening in the fall on the roof of the brewery,” said Mr. Welch. “After a couple of beers, I was looking out at the harbor and thought, ‘You know what I should do? I’m going to make a malt solution and put it in a sanitary petri dish and place it on the roof and see what kind of stuff comes into the harbor and grows in the dish.’” He did just that. Soon after, he was peering at the findings through a microscope. “It was amazing,” he recalled, “the blend of crazy, wild yeast. A very interesting spectrum of critters.”

Most of the time brewers employ carefully cultivated strains of yeast in the creation of their brews, but the use of wild yeast is not unknown. The lambics of Belgium are routinely produced through exposure to wild yeast, and other American brewers are trying similar approaches.

Still, the idea of conjuring beer out of the little beasties riding the Red Hook breeze does give one pause. Mr. Welch, however, has no qualms.

“Air that comes in from the harbor is hardly the air that you breathe when you’re riding your bike behind a New York City bus,” he pointed out. “You’re pulling the live microorganisms that might be living in the air, and you’re fermenting the beer with that. It’s not like you’re extracting the pollution.

“You get a lot of ocean currents,” he continued. “You get air from all over the country. It’s a sort of natural, ambient soup that is circulating in New York Harbor, which is a very interesting confluence of currents, because you have the East River, the Atlantic Ocean, the Long Island Sound and Harlem River. It stirs up a lot of interesting wild yeast.”

Moreover, Mr. Welch said he wanted to “get in touch with the flora of where we are” and work with a genuinely indigenous strain of yeast.

The brewing process will begin sometime in the next two months, with the beer to be ready this fall. “With these type of beers,” he said, “they generally take longer.” He will likely used a grain base of malted barley and wheat.

Once the beer is ready, Mr. Welch plans to put some of it in stainless steel tanks and the rest of it in barrels, as is common practice with lambic beers. Sixpoint is using some charred oak barrels custom made for the brewery. Mr. Welch expects the result to have some lambic-like qualities.

The beer does not have a name as of yet, which is unusual at Sixpoint. “Normally I think of the name and concept first and then work on the beer,” he said. “But I don’t have the nomenclature yet.”

John Dory 2.0 to Have Own Six Point Stout

It's almost become a badge of honor among restauranteurs, to have Six Point Ales make you an exclusive brew.

Joining that select circle, which including Frankies Sputino and Bark, is John Dory, the April Bloomfield-Ken Friedman fish restaurant that reopens this week. It's called Six Point Oyster Stout. Oyster stout is stout filtered through oyster shells. I got an early taste of it at the Eater Awards on Monday. It's incredibly dry, with a great, almost metallic aftertaste, and I could see it going splendidly with oysters.

Sasha Petraske is doing the cocktail list and he's paring the drinks with food (not a trend I support, unless you like to get smashed before the entree comes).

Sixpoint Beer, Now Made in Pennsylvania

Sixpoint Ales, the massively popular brewer headquartered in Red Hook, has made a career out of marketing its Brooklyn roots, becoming the darling of Kings County locavores over the past few years. It's well-hone image—not to mention its many excellent beers—have led to soaring demand. So much so that it long outgrew it tiny digs on Van Dyke Street. Since late 2007, many Sixpoint ales have been brewed at the larger Green Point Beerworks, on Waverly Avenue in Clinton Hill, home of Kelly Taylor rival Brooklyn brew-line Kelso. But that was still Brooklyn.

Now, for the first time, some Sixpoint beer will be made outside of the borough. Eater reports that owner Shane Welch has moved a portion of Sixpoint's production to the Lion Brewery in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Welch confirmed the move. "Shane also tells us that they are considering two other options and that there is a 'different and unique project on the horizon' but doesn't reveal any details."

The development is particularly interesting because Sixpoint has often boasted of their utter Brooklynishness, faulting competitor Brooklyn Brewery for not really being a Brooklyn brewery because much of its bottled product has been made by contract in Utica. I suspect Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett Oliver is having a good laugh over this.

The Modern and Sixpoint to Handle Some Hot Rocks

A team of staff members from The Modern will be heading down to Red Hook's Sixpoint Craft Ales brewery to take part in a two-day beer-making class. The result will be the Manhattan restaurant's third proprietary beer with the Brooklyn beermaker.

The beer already has a name: Dr. Klankenstein. (A bit clunky, but memorable.) It will be a "stone" beer, an ancient brewing technique that entails superheated rocks being thrown into the mash to caramelize the malt.  It will be Sixpoint's first stone beer.

Look for Dr. Klankenstein (ask for it by name!) in May. On tap, of course. Because Sixpoint doesn't do bottles.

The Roar of the Growler, the Smell of the Beer

My latest assignment for the New York Times allowed me the pleasure of driving my wife crazy by saying the word "growler" around the house several times a day. You have to admit, it's a amusing word, and a lot of fun to say. Nor was it a burden to visit several growler purveyors and invest in a few jugs of their delicious, fresh-pour, craft beer drafts. And, of course, any drinking prop with a pedigree that goes back centuries is of particularly interest to my drinking arcana-hungry brain.

The New Old Way to Tote Your Beer

By Robert Simonson

BY midafternoon on a recent Saturday, Bierkraft, the beer emporium and grocery on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, was half-filled with customers, many of them parents with babies or toddlers in tow. They were browsing the more than 1,000 varieties of bottled beer or surveying the listing of selections available on the 13 taps and 3 cask lines. Some carried a good-sized satchel.

Diaper bag? Gym clothes?

No. It was a tote for their growlers.

Growlers — 64-ounce glass vessels that look like a moonshine jug — have become the beer accessory of the moment. And the jugs, filled at taps in bars and stores, are not just the toys of the bearded, flannel-shirt, beer-geek set.

“In the beginning we tried to figure out, ‘Who’s going to be our market?’ ” said Ben Granger, 32, an owner of Bierkraft, which began filling growlers in spring 2006. “We thought, mullet-heads and beer-bellied dudes. But the first run was ladies with strollers. They will tell you they’re buying them for their husbands. Three weeks later, they’ve got two. One’s his and one’s hers. The next one that caught me by surprise was dads coming in with their kids. Then there’s the beer crowd who’ll rush in to get on this or that before it’s gone. There’s no age limit.”

Michael Endelman, a journalist at Rolling Stone, is one of those growler-loving fathers. “I don’t go to bars too much anymore,” he said, gesturing to his baby daughter Mimi. “It just seems like a great way to be a beer geek without going out.”

Some customers appreciate growlers for reasons of economy (refills range from $8 to $20 or more) or ecology. And as more craft brewers choose not to bottle their products, many fans like the idea of getting fresh beer that until recently was sold only in specialized bars.

Liz Thorpe, vice president of Murray’s Cheese, said she had two to four growlers at home at any given time. “Good beer makes everything more special,” Ms. Thorpe said while stocking up for a recent National Football Leauge playoff game. “I like me some football, but I don’t like me some Coors Light. So I’m ensuring I will be happy this afternoon.” Barely a week has passed in recent months without some bar or beer store in New York City trumpeting the arrival of growlers, which are typically embossed with the name of their business. Even the Gristedes grocery chain has gotten in on the act; the University Place store in Manhattan began carrying them in November.

Offerings can change daily, even hourly.

Some new growler users believe they’re getting in on the latest thing, but beer lovers know better.

“Growlers have been around since Christ was a child,” Mr. Granger said. “We’re not doing anything new.”

In the late 19th century and the early 20th century, both The New York Times and The Brooklyn Eagle regularly published contentious stories about the containers, which then took the form of small galvanized pails. The articles cataloged the complaints of saloon keepers, who thought growlers cut into their profit, and those of temperance groups, who hoped to curb home drinking.

“Rushing the growler,” connoting children hustling pails of beer for adults from bar to table, was a common expression. The curious name is thought to be inspired by the rumbling noise escaping carbon dioxide made as the beer sloshed about in the pail.

In more modern times, growlers could be found at brew pubs like Heartland Brewery, which has served beer to go since opening in 1995. The jugs — which, according to the New York State Liquor Authority, have always been legal at both retail outlets and bars — have proliferated lately, said Heartland’s founder, Jon Bloostein, because there are more interesting beers to go in them.

“People’s palates have become more sophisticated,” Mr. Bloostein said. “Look at the number of beer bars in Manhattan, and especially Brooklyn. And the offerings at regular bars are leaning toward craft beers.”

The Whole Foods beer store on Houston Street began its program in 2007. The chain’s first to carry the vessels, it has done as much as any store to introduce New Yorkers to growler culture. The manager, Jeff Wallace, said he saw other reasons for the trend.

“It’s basically a really good way to promote recycling, because you bring back your jug,” Mr. Wallace said. “And it’s a cheap and affordable way to get fresh draft beer.” He said growlers made up half the beer store’s business. Whole Foods stores in TriBeCa and on the Upper West Side also offer beer for growlers.

That much-vaunted freshness, however, depends on how the bottle is filled.

“There’s always the possibility that someone may not fill the growler properly,” said Shane Welch, founder of Sixpoint Craft Ales brewery in Brooklyn, which sells its products in stores in growler form. Most stores and bars run the beer straight from the tap to the bottle. “If you don’t fill it to the top, if you don’t purge the air out of there, when you close the container it will be stale beer,” Mr. Welch said. “You probably have to drink it that night.”

Mr. Granger, who says growlers constitute a large percentage of his sales, has tried to avoid that possibility. He has a system in which bottles are filled under pressure through a plastic hose to keep out oxygen. Filled that way, he said, they could stay fresh for months unopened, and three to five days when opened.

“Ergo, no flat beer,” he said. “No oxygen in the bottle, no foaming beer, no waste."

No bar tab, either.