If you’ve been searching for an excuse to drink beer for a good cause, we’ve found your best opportunity yet in New York City. The Alstrom Brothers from Beer Advocate will head down I-95 to partner up with Sixpoint Craft Ales for an event called Beer for Beasts. It’s a beer festival featuring the very best of Sixpoint… and a fundraiser with all proceeds benefiting The Humane Society of New York City.

During the event, which will be held at The Bell House (149 7th St., at 3rd Ave., Gowanus), Sixpoint will serve up at least sixteen (!) beers that have never been brewed before. Many of them will be collaborations with members of the community, extending Sixpoint’s locally-focused and locally-mindful mantra. On top of that, there will be food from local restaurants and food merchants, including Brooklyn Soda Works, Mile End Deli, and Calexico - who serves a beer that Sixpoint brewed exclusively for them for their Greenpoint storefront. They’ll also have live entertainment (burlesque, anyone?).

The event will be held on Saturday, March 26th at in two sessions: 1-5pm and 6-10pm. Tickets are $65 and will go on sale this Friday, February 4th, at noon on their site - beerforbeasts.com.

We’ll keep you updated when we learn more about the event… specifically, what unique brews Sixpoint has up their sleeve for this very special day for a very special cause.

UPDATE: Sixpoint tipped us off to one of the beers they’ll be serving at the event this morning - it’s called Decade-ence, a double IPA brewed with 10 different varieties of hops. Thirsty yet?

Here are the beer-related goings-on after work tonight:

• Straight from Hooksett, New Hampshire to Rattle-N-Hum (14 E. 33rd St., at 5th Ave., Midtown) comes White Birch, serving up a tasting of the small brewery’s finest libations, which you can get along with a cheese pairing for $15 from 5-7pm.
• Our good friends at Jimmy’s No. 43 (43 E. 7th St., at 2nd Ave., East Village) will serve up their weekly Ten Buck Tasting tonight at 7:30. This week, it’s Oatmeal Stouts and Rye Ales, including stuff from Sixpoint, Dieu du Ciel, and The Bruery. And as always, you can get acquainted with these styles for only $10.
• Downtown, Greenport Harbor Brewing is at Ulysses’ Folk House (58 Stone St., at Pearl St., Financial District) tonight from 5-8pm, pouring Disorient IPA, Antifreeze (an English Old Ale), Black Duck Porter, and more.
  

In the past couple of weeks, we’ve told you about a Pretty Things beer dinner at L'asso and the fact that Narragansett is now available in New York City.

We thought those things had nothing to do with each other, but sometimes, things can come together in bizarre ways.

L’asso (192 Mott St., at Kenmare St., Little Italy) began serving Narragansett Lager on tap for the first time on Friday, just as the Pretty Things staff was coming into town for the beer dinner. Much to the gypsy brewery’s staff’s surprise, the beer menu had attributed the brewing of the lager to a very different operation:

Photo via PrettyBeer on Twitter

Via Pretty Things’ Twitter feed, they got a kick out of it. “Get on down to L'asso,” they told their followers, “they have an exclusive on the Pretty Things ‘Narragansett’!” Some hours later, they admitted they didn’t have the gall to correct their gracious hosts. “We love 'Gansett. It’s a mix up but we love it. Nobody’s told them yet.”

When you’ve got so many new breweries and beers popping up in distribution channels across the city, these mix-ups are bound to happen. And we’re glad the parties involved have a sense of humor about it, too.

Last year, Rattle-N-Hum co-owner Patrick Donagher and friends had a dream of a massive event that celebrates cask beer… and it came true with Get Real NY, which played host to hundreds of thirsty beer aficionados at each sold-out session last September. Given its success last fall, Patrick almost immediately told us he’d be making it a twice-annual event and would be holding it again this spring.

Sure enough, the date is set, and the next celebration of cask ales will be on March 19th and 20th at the Altman Building in Chelsea. A ticket gets you three hours to sample over 80 different beers, and this time around, they’ve teamed up with Wined and Dined to find excellent food vendors to soak up all the lukewarm suds.

Among the breweries already confirmed to be providing casks: overseas brewers like Ridgeway, J.W. Lees, Williams Brothers, and Thornbridge, American brewers Troegs, The Bruery, Great Divide, and Two Brothers, and local brewers Sixpoint, Defiant, Blue Point, and Greenport Harbor. Take a deep breath… that’s a lot of beer.

Through Sunday, Beermenus.com is offering discounted early-bird tickets. $50 will get you general access to any one of the four sessions, $15 off the regular price of $65. $65 will get you VIP access to the late Saturday or Sunday session, which guarantees you an extra hour of exclusive access to the beers before the masses swarm the casks.

Remember: the early bird catches the worm… or the tickets to a cask beer festival.

Here’s what’s fermenting in the beer world:

• Nocturnalist visits East Coast vs. West Coast Punk Rock Brew Tour at Staten Island’s Wild Goose [City Room]
• The Post discovers vintage beers; opens with obvious reference to wine
• TONY offers their take on previously-visited Porterhouse Brewing at Fraunces Tavern and Keg No. 229
• Long Island adds new nanobrewery to its roster, Freeport’s Barrage Brewing [LI Pulse]
• And another: East Islip’s Ghost Cat Brewing [LI Pulse]
• Walgreens selling its own private-label beer brewed upstate by North American Breweries [Chicago Breaking Business]
• The beer can turned 76 this week [Brookston Beer Bulletin]

For months, we’ve been watching patiently since Sixpoint Craft Ales and Stumptown Coffee hinted at a potential collaboration. Finally, we know what that is: the second beer in their Mad Scientists Series will be the Berserker Coffee Bock. It will make its debut at the fully booked Sixpoint Beer Dinner on February 1st at The Vanderbilt (570 Vanderbilt Ave., at Bergen St., Prospect Heights), but will trickle into New York’s favorite beer bars soon after.

As a bock, the beer uses a lager yeast - different for a brewery that specializes in ales. The brewery added cold-brewed El Injerto coffee extract from Stumptown - whose Red Hook roasting plant is just a few blocks away - into the kegs. Usually, when a beer is brewed with coffee, the coffee is added during the boil. This will make for an especially rich and caffeinated beer. Four Loko can shove it!

The official release date is sometime in February, and then it’s on to Mad Scientists #3, which will be out in April. No word on what that is, but given Sixpoint’s penchant for the unusual, we can be pretty sure it’ll be as unique as #1 and #2.