New York-Based Industry Veterans Launch Return Brewing

Love everything about this, and the fact that it'll be only 45 minutes away from me most of all.

 

Had the pleasure of working with all of these fine gentlemen at Sixpoint. Can't say enough good things about their passion and dedication. They're gonna crush it.

 

Are there many folks who were originally working at Sixpoint prior to the ABV acquisition still working for the merged Sixpoint? Or are the Sixpoint beers solely being brewed by Victory/ABV personnel?

Cheers!

@rotsaruch

 

Don't hold me to this as I don't know exact numbers, but I'm confident the brewing team has almost completely turned over, and other departments aren't that far behind that statement. Point being, there are not many pre-acquisition crew members remaining. That's also not a knock on who's there now and/or what they're doing, as I can't speak to any of that directly having not worked there now for three years, but I can say I'd do just about anything for and to help out 99% of the people who were a part of my era(s) there. Shane consistently put together an awesome team of genuinely good people.

 

That has been my experience as well.

I suppose the 'disintegration' of the new Sixpoint branded brewery intended to be built in Gowanus (Brooklyn) was not helpful in retaining heritage Sixpoint staff.

I have not had a Sixpoint beer since ABV acquired Sixpoint so I personally have no perspective on the state of Sixpoint beers today. I did visit the Sixpoint website earlier today and I was personally disheartened that the first visual I saw was a promotion for Hard Seltzers:

“Sixpoint Party Poppers Hard Seltzer
The “Official Party Seltzer”

I suppose just another reminder of the sign of the times!?!

Cheers!

 

Is that officially canceled? Until recently I lived right by there and work was ongoing for a while but stopped at some point last fall and it's been quiet ever since. Collective Arts was also supposed to be building a brewery near there but that work site has been quiet for a couple years now.

 

The principle reason I visited the Sixpoint website this morning was to see when the Gowanus brewery was scheduled to open but I was not successful in this endeavor.

I heard from a fellow BA in a conversation that this project was cancelled but I have been unable to find anything in writing (e.g., the internet) on this topic.

Maybe you have the ability to confirm things here since you are a New Yorker?

Cheers!

 

For what it's worth, I'd suggest steering this back toward a discussion on Return Brewing and anything/everything they've got in the pipeline over the next several months (and then some) as it becomes public.

I know Mikey kind of took over and jumped in here on BA with Sixpoint-related comments/posts/answers after I left, and more importantly after Shane sold (as Shane was the primary voice anyway), so I suspect he'll chime in here at some point to talk all things Return!

 

I wish Mikey Lenane, et. al., best wishes for the success of Return Brewing.

Cheers!

 

"quality-forward styles"

I'm really glad they'll be brewing beer in those styles.

To be honest, by the time I got to that point in the press release, I was ready to throw in the towel due to the language (intersections, paradigms, and other)... but I'm glad I kept reading mainly due to the mention of Eastern European "farmhouse ales." I'm really looking forward to that... hopefully w/o pretense and pretension. I'm not trying to be mean, just giving an honest reaction.

 

Hahaha. Yes good tasting beers are definitely the best styles.

JMH you are right that I love to chime in!

Jack thank you very much and I hope you get to taste some of our beers in the future!

Researching the Eastern European beers became something of an obsession for me while cooped up during quarantine (totally normal behavior...) and I'm so so excited to dive into these in earnest. We did a number of trials at Sixpoint but they never saw the light of day, and weren't really ready. But I think I've figured out a number of things we were doing wrong, or really just wholesale philosophical misunderstandings of what we were trying to do. Basically we tried to blend techniques of NEIPA with the Scandanavian beers and it didn't make much sense or achieve what we were going for. Was still fun. Anyway, the intention with these will be more to take the native ingredients of the area and brew raw ales in a somewhat traditional way. At their best these should be really smooth and highly drinkable beers served at reasonable prices and drank right at our tavern. Depending on how shelf life trialing goes they may get into package as well.

Cheers!

 

Good or bad odds for kegs of this to NYC for draught?

 

If you do package, highly recommend sending to Delaware Supply in Albany. This is so perfectly in their wheelhouse. They just got in a bunch of fresh Taras Boulba and have a side-pull for Czech lagers if that gives you an idea on what they're about.

 

In case this is useful info, given the situation with their importer, I’d be quite surprised if that Taras Boulba was fresh. But if I was at Delaware Supply and it was fresh, you could say I’d be “pleasantly” surprised. Please let me know if you have info that states otherwise.

 

It appears that Lime Ventures got TTB COLAs for both the bottle and keg labels in late March/early April.

 

Yeah, but I’m curious if that product is already in NY via Lime.

 

I can't give first-hand verification but given that bar and its owners I just can't imagine its not. They're meticulous about what they have on tap, how its served, etc. And they're also a place that has a side pull, serves kolsch on kranz's, gets casks of Bluebird Bitter, celebrates Orval Day, etc.

 

Yeah, that's a murky topic for me but I think beer importers & foreign breweries do a lot of drop-shipping, so that, in this case, LV in California is responsible for the logistics and the "owner" of the beer on paper, but the beer itself goes from the port, through Customs and then to the local distributor(s). I never looked into too much but I know an import company like Heineken USA (granted, much larger) while being headquartered in White Plains, NY ships its containers from Holland to numerous ports on the East Coast and Long Beach, CA.

 

Thanks for the tip! That has been on my list of places to go. We haven't even begun to really spread the word in Albany yet but that will happen in the next couple weeks.

As for raw ales in NYC in keg: I think this is totally feasible. They will obviously need to go in and out extremely quickly - I anticipate about a 6 week prime drinking window. After that you start to get amino acid flavors from the excess proteins in the style which are not all that nice. This timing isn't that different from our standard hopping rate NEIPAs, which we believe have a prime window of about 10 weeks. (We have an all nelson trial NEIPA that is still tasting quite good after 7 weeks right now. Different than fresh, but still good. Extremely high hopping rates we've noticed can have surprisingly long shelf lives). All that being said, we are probably going to try to send down like a pallet at a time and let people know on social where they can find it. You can also always shoot me an email - [email protected].

Cheers!