Brewing with a Purpose
Sarah Real and Mike Dell’Aquila
Sarah Real and Mike Dell’Aquila spent a lot of time in their cold Brooklyn condo during the pandemic thinking about what they wanted to do for the next chapter in their lives — a “second act,” as they called it — and where they wanted to do it.
At the time, they both had corporate jobs, Real as a consumer insights and media research expert, and Dell’Aquila as a creative marketer and fiction writer. But starting in the early 2000s, when they were students at Penn State, both of them, and especially Real, developed a real passion for craft beer that led to home brewing — and thoughts of making beer their next career.
By the way, the condo was cold because the gas had been turned off due to a code violation, one that forced that home brewing to be conducted on a hot plate, a reality that would eventually inspire the name for the venture they would undertake in downtown Pittsfield.
It was there, after much introspection — and research, which revealed, among other things, that there were very few breweries in that area — they decided to embark on a mission to create not just a brewery, but one with a purpose.
A multi-faceted purpose.
“I began thinking, does the world really need another brewery? How are you going to differentiate yourself?” Real recalled. “I don’t want to brew beer just to brew beer. I want it to have purpose. I want it to be interesting. I want to push boundaries.”
In many respects, they’re doing all that, while also playing a lead role in the ongoing reimagining and revitalization of downtown Pittsfield, a central business district that was, as everyone knows, decimated by the loss of General Electric roughly 35 years ago now, and has been reborn as a center for the arts, culture, fine dining, and, now, a craft brewery that is, indeed, making an impact on many levels.
“I think we’re starting to leave behind that novelty act of … ‘it’s a Mexican-American woman making that beer,’ to the fact that Sarah’s just a brewer who makes good beer. We’ve gotten over that hump.”
Start with the fact that it’s one of the very few Latina-led breweries in the country. Fewer than 1% of American craft breweries are owned by women of color, a statistic that has led many visiting the School Street home of Hot Plate, a sporting-goods store a few decades ago, to conclude that Dell’Aquila is the genius behind such offerings as Rockin’ the Gold Tooth, Agent Cooper, Countess of Flanders, and the ever-popular Capable of Anything, a chamomile blonde ale that has become quite popular with women.
He is proud — and quick — to correct them.
“It’s been fun to be a gender-inverted team in that way and play with people’s expectations,” Dell’Aquila said. “People will come in with assumptions about who does what; very often I have to make the joke that Sarah does the hard work, and I’m just the pretty face, and that always gets a laugh.”
But as the Hot Plate story becomes more known, and as its beers rack up more accolades — its Italian Pilsner and Belgian Golden Strong ale were recently recognized, for example — fewer people need to be corrected, and the brewery has in many ways moved past the gender prejudices and the ethnicity stats.
Sarah Real and Mike Dell’Aquila say there’s a story behind each one of their beers.
“You can use some level of differentiation by who made it and what they look like, but if the beer’s not good, it’s not going to work,” Dell’Aquila said. “I think we’re starting to leave behind that novelty act of … ‘it’s a Mexican-American woman making that beer,’ to the fact that Sarah’s just a brewer who makes good beer. We’ve gotten over that hump.”
In the meantime, Hot Plate has made inroads with other aspects of its overall mission to push boundaries and make an impact. This includes work in the community, specifically support of neighbors and mission-aligned organizations, as well as intentionality and acting as good social and environmental stewards through responsible sourcing, usage, and disposal.
In the community, the brewery has partnered with an interfaith group on a fundraiser helping local families pay for heating oil — an initiative inspired in part by nights in that cold Brooklyn condo, which raised $13,000 that went to more than 200 households.
Hot Plate has also been involved with many of the initiatives to bring more people, and vibrancy, to downtown Pittsfield, including the taking of a lead role in the return of First Fridays, street festivals focused on the arts and dining.
Meanwhile, Hot Plate has put a special emphasis on locally sourced ingredients, said Real, noting that both its hops and malt are from Massachusetts producers, and such buying brings attention to the expensive, and not-so-eco-friendly, supply chain within the brewing industry.
Add it all up, and Hot Plate has earned a designation you don’t hear often in association with a brewery: change agent.
Lager Than Life
Returning to Brooklyn for a minute … it was there that Real and Dell’Aquila were witness to the transformation of that borough into a sought-after zip code and one of the hottest real-estate markets in the country.
And it was there they saw the broad impact that breweries, restaurants, and other hospitality- and culture-related ventures could have on the revitalization of neighborhoods.
“We had seen how an underutilized area could suddenly come back to life through interesting shops, stores, and retail places, but also bars, restaurants, and breweries as well,” said Dell’Aquila, adding that a desire to make such an impact — somewhere — was one of the things they talked about while cooking dinner, and brewing beer, on a hot plate.
They were inspired by what they saw in Brooklyn, but quickly ruled out the borough because of the high cost of setting up shop there. They explored the Catskills region of New York, but after several visits to the Berkshires, they settled on Pittsfield because of the population of that city and also the relative dearth of breweries. Thus, they became part of an entrepreneurial exodus of sorts to the Berkshires during and just after the pandemic, bringing their corporate jobs with them, but immediately setting about starting that aforementioned second act.
They were able to sell their condo as it was at market value — testimony to that hot housing market — and relocate in the summer of 2021. After a thorough search for a location, they settled on the School Street site, which lacks parking, but is otherwise well-situated, and opened their doors in early 2023.
“We wanted a model where we’re supporting our community, but also have a foot in a much larger sandbox. We can help show that you can build a mission-driven brewery that is trying to attack the problems of sustainability, conservation, and a lack of representation among marginalized communities.”
Since then, the venture has consistently added new beers to the portfolio, evolved and expanded offerings — including the addition of coffee, tea, and pastries to appeal to non-drinkers and draw traffic more hours of the day — and address all aspects of its broad mission.
Indeed, as noted earlier, they didn’t come to Pittsfield just to open a brewery, but to create a venture that would be impactful on many levels and in many ways.
“We wanted a model where we’re supporting our community, but also have a foot in a much larger sandbox,” Dell’Aquila said. “We can help show that you can build a mission-driven brewery that is trying to attack the problems of sustainability, conservation, and a lack of representation among marginalized communities, and really combat the notion that this is an either/or proposition — you can either be mission-driven or you can make a good product that is successful in the craft-beer world. To me, that’s a false dichotomy; you can do both.”
And they are, as evidenced by the growing list of accolades they’ve earned.
Indeed, Hot Plate has been recognized as everything from one of the “Best 19 New Breweries in 2023” by VinePair magazine, to one of the “Places to Check Out If You Have 36 Hours in Berkshire County” by the New York Times. Meanwhile, the brewery was selected as one of the Imbibe 75 by that publication in early 2023, a compilation that features “individuals, organizations, and businesses that are dedicated to creating a more positive, sustainable, inclusive, and equitable drinks world.”
It has also won a Silver Impact Award from MassEcon for making an investment in one of the Commonwealth’s gateway cities, and it’s been recognized by Berkshire Pride and the National Alliance on Mental Illness for its work in the community.
The Hot Plate location on School Street in downtown Pittsfield has become a gathering place for everything from concerts to trivia to meetings of the Silent Book Club.
Meanwhile, the brewery has become a gathering spot in downtown Pittsfield and a big part of the revitalization efforts there. Hot Plate has brought a variety of different bands to the site — Dispatch played there before a performance at Tanglewood, for example — while also hosting food trucks, trivia and open-mic nights, tarot readings, and meetings of the Pittsfield chapter of the Silent Book Club, which gathers members in public at bars, cafés, bookstores, libraries, and online to read in quiet camaraderie.
All these honors and efforts to activate its space speak to that change-agent quality that Real and Dell’Aquila emphasized.
Draught Choice
That phrase certainly applies to what they call their Community Line, which features collaborations with a rotating list of mission-aligned nonprofit organizations and raises money for a variety of causes. Proceeds from these collaborative beers go directly to the charitable organizations with whom they are partnering.
“We know that one of the things that makes beer special is its ability to bring people together,” Real said. “With our Community Line, we really believe that we can show that craft beer can also be a force for good.”
Such is the case with the partnership with the interfaith community to help families in Pittsfield pay for heating oil.
“When we found out about this program, it really home because we lived without heat for a few winters,” said Dell’Aquila, adding that Hot Plate has a beer on tap called Kardia, a habanero chocolate stout; $1 for every pint sold, as well as proceeds from each four-pack sold, are donated to the program.
“This year, our goal is $20,000, which will meet the needs of the entire community,” he told BusinessWest, noting that, in Greek, Kardia translates into ‘heart and hearth.’ “It’s a recipe that’s based on Mexican hot chocolate, so it’s a nod to Sarah’s ancestry; it’s a fundraising beer, so you’re drinking for good, so to speak; and it’s helping households in the community directly. So it’s a way to bring all those multiple layers of impact full circle.”
“I’ve tried to partner with a lot of local people, or more craft maltsters, if you will, where I can go to the farm to get their grain and meet that farmer. It’s pricier, so there’s a balance between going to big grain as opposed to Valley Malt in Hadley, which is one of our providers.”
Hot Plate is also a force for good when it comes to sourcing of its ingredients, with a hard focus on buying local when possible, both to support local businesses and make their own supply chain more eco-friendly.
“I’ve tried to partner with a lot of local people, or more craft maltsters, if you will, where I can go to the farm to get their grain and meet that farmer,” Real said. “It’s pricier, so there’s a balance between going to big grain as opposed to Valley Malt in Hadley, which is one of our providers.
“You can’t have a fully local beer because Valley Malt, unfortunately, cannot sustain every brewery in Western Mass.,” she went on. “So there has to be a balance, and it’s important to understand how we partner with them, and what are the best recipes for partnering with them.”
“A lot of the sexy new hops are coming from New Zealand,” she went on. “And I just think about how fresh that is when they’re making that plane ride — that huge carbon footprint, just to go down the drain.”
Other initiatives in this broad realm include recipes that don’t require large amounts of hops, which cannot be reused, thus reducing waste, as well as ‘dry hopping,’ the use of dried, pelletized hops in New England IPAs and other offerings, further reducing waste.
Also, in addition to having local farmers pick up spent grain, which would otherwise go in the trash, Hot Plate has experimented with drying out spent grain, milling it down into flour, and making products such as dog treats.
Real and Dell’Aquila will use their own taproom, as well as social-media channels, to educate the public about the importance of conservation, buying local when possible, and the fact that it takes four square feet of grain to make one pint of beer.
That’s just one example of how they’re not just brewing, but brewing with a purpose, and a strong desire to be what few brewers can become: change agents.
