Inside: Sixpoint Craft Ales

The Grain Room

Some backstory: When Sixpoint started in February of 2005 it was Shane and his college buddy Andrew Bronstein's pipe dream come to life. In school they said, half joking, "Let's start a brewery," but it wasn't until Shane was halfway through law school that he realized "law school sucked, and that the world had enough lawyers but not enough good beer," and so he decided to actually start a brewery.

How does one start a brewery? Shane had no idea, but he researched and learned everything he could about beer, and went on a "massive home-brewing rampage in Madison [Wisconsin]," his home town. He turned his basement, his porch and his sister's basement into breweries, and was selling bottles of his homemade stuff—$20 for 24 bottles, not bad—to finance "research and development." So he had samples of beer when he came to Brooklyn to look for a bigger place to give Sixpoint Craft Ales an official go.

He found a spot in Red Hook that worked: It was a former brewery, empty since 2000, but still filled with brewing accoutrement, including a revolting beer-filled tank that'd been sitting there for four years. But they cleaned it up, blasting everything gross into the street with a septic hose and a lot of pressure, and ran boiling hot water and caustic soap over the entire place for days. And then they started brewing.