This week’s Beer of the Weekend was brought to you by the good people of Sixpoint Brewery of Brooklyn, New York, and the number four.
I picked up a four-pack (see what I did there?) of this brew on a flyer this past Friday after the weekly beer-tasting at Cork and Fork of Gainesville, Virginia (Facebook link, because even though they don’t know an IPO from a hole in the ground they currently define social media). The sampled beers were a gamut of interesting (the Scottish dark brew aged in single-malt Scotch barrels at $12 per 12-ouncer) to “meh” (the forgettable Oktoberfest) so I took a stroll along the wall of beer, settling upon a variety of offerings from Sixpoint Brewery. I selected Sweet Action, their first, and now I need to discover their entire line.
Sixpoint’s Sweet Action is an ale of ample malty sweetness, balanced by enough hop bitterness to remind you that 1. the reinheitsgebot specifies four ingredients and this example provides plenty of each, and 2. hops don’t mean your beer need taste of grapefruit.
Sweet Action is a yummy (yes, yummy is the right adjective. You beer geeks know what I mean.) beer good for a late summer afternoon when you’ve put another hurt on your body painting the bathroom ceiling and just want to unwind before heading back to those weekday bastards, when dinner is still just an idea and there are good tunes on the satellite music channel and the Internet is full of interesting things to read and you’re pondering 1. the arrival in your home of Apple’s next generation phone and 2. the kidney-rattling, fear-inducing roller-coaster ride that is modern air travel to a far-northern, perpetually under-the-glacier destination you’ve paid to “enjoy” in a few weeks. It’s good for run-on sentences. It’s good for relishing the brewer’s art. It’s just good.
I think I could make Sweet Action my house beer. It’s a rounded brew dialed up to eleven, a reminder that beer should foremost be a taste sensation and a labor of love. You should taste the love. I taste that in Sweet Action. I know these guys are downright proud of this beer.
Look for Sixpoint’s brew in pint cans (yep, cans) at your better beer merchants. I like it, and if you like beer you’ll like it, too.
A Random Stroll 