603 Brewery decorates for the season
It isn’t unusual for businesses to put up a Christmas tree during the holidays. For the 603 Brewery at 42 Main St. in Londonderry the “tree” is made of beer kegs. The keg tree varies in size each year, but this season it is made of six tiers of beer kegs stacked on top of each other, with the widest tier on the bottom and successively smaller tiers to form a vaguely conical tree shape that the staff has decorated with oversized ornaments, garlands and a huge red bow.
According to Kellyn Thompson, 603’s Creative Content Manager, the 12½-foot-tall tapered stack of kegs has been a tradition at the brewery since 2013.
“They needed a little holiday cheer at our old location on Liberty Drive, and it’s stuck with us ever since,” Thompson said. “Every year around the holidays, our owner team takes a day when we’re usually closed so people aren’t witnessing the assembly of the keg tree. There’s actually a fair bit of math and science and physics to make sure that the kegs are stable.”
This year’s keg tree is made of between 45 and 50 kegs, Thompson said.
“They are regular half-barrels, and skinnier ones called sixtels.” (A half-barrel, which is usually called a “full-sized keg,” holds 15½ gallons of beer when full. A sixtel, or sixth-barrel keg, holds just over 5 gallons of beer.)
“I don’t know if you’ve ever lifted a keg, but they’re not light. So to get this together is really hard, a kind of a feat in itself because you’ve got to get all the kegs in one place, and then you’re stacking each layer. They’re not full, but even the keg itself is really heavy. We bring a scissor-lift in here so they’re going up and down and zip-tying, and this year [there are] wooden discs we added I think for extra support, so, yeah, it’s a lot of work. It takes a full day.”
“Our goal each year is that it looks cool and that it’s tall enough to be its own spectacle,” Thompson said. “We’ve put it in a bunch of different places over the years. The largest keg tree was in 2019, but it took up so much space we couldn’t seat many people around it. Then we scaled back a little bit to put it in our vestibule, so it was probably two tiers smaller than you’re seeing now. And then this year I really pushed for them to bring it back out on the main floor [of the brewery] where they could make it a little bit bigger. The Beer Hall ceilings are roughly 24 feet tall at their peak, so this year’s tree matches the space. With as grand as the space is, we needed something to match. My first Christmas here, it went almost up to the HVAC system.”
“In past years we’ve decorated [the keg tree] with cans,” Thompson said. “Sometimes we put wrapped boxes up there. It’s a fun thing; the office staff comes out and decorates it once it’s been assembled. It’s not just a giant Christmas tree — it like really kind of embodies who we are and what we do. It makes for a cool photo op, too.”
