The Big Picture

Here’s video from last month's Garden State Craft Brewers Festival. To those who inquired more than once about its completion date, sorry for the delay. And to those who paused from their sampling or pouring to do an interview, many thanks.

If you went to the festival, you know the weather pretty much sucked. But thankfully the rain, while poncho-worthy, was intermittent. The guild puts the festival attendance at 630, and the event marked the New Jersey debut of Iron Hill Brewery. (IH co-founder Mark Edelson and head brewer Chris Lapierre took time do interviews for the video.)

A word about the guild fests
We’ll take this moment to repeat an oft-said point (on this blog, at least): Having the festival in Camden, or South Jersey if you want to track it regionally, is fine if there will be at least a second festival, specifically in North Jersey. You could toss in a third for the middle part of the state, since New Jersey is actually and distinctly of three regions, as far as its cultural stylings go.

A single festival in South Jersey becomes forgettable in the long run, and North Jersey folks can be hard-pressed to drum up the desire to travel the distance (a shout-out to Tom Eagan of the Destination Beer blog, who did come down from Jersey City on the 20th and made an admirable daytrip of things). And for argument’s sake, if there were but a single festival in North Jersey, the shoe of disdain would be on South Jersey’s foot.

So two festivals becomes important. At some point, it's about branding, and brand awareness. And by branding, we mean broadly speaking the New Jersey brand, the big picture, collectively the great beers made by the pub and craft brewers inside the state’s borders.

Since the guild’s festival is the only one that’s granted the dispensation to have the beer poured by the people who made it (therefore brewers can really talk to the consumers), it becomes important again to capitalize on that opportunity for face time with the beer-consuming public and remind those folks not just about your beer, but your very existence (you can’t do tastings at the package stores in this state). Because there’s a flood of beer on the store shelves from across the country and around the world, almost too much to choose from, sort of Alvin Toffler-ish/Future Shock-like, when you consider that back in the 1980s, the choices were dramatically narrower. The home team is in peril of being overshadowed by the plethora of labels now. (Yet once upon a time, Jersey had a plethora of labels brewed within its borders.)

It’s good for the consumer, the veritable panorama of choices, but not so hot for the concept of buying local being the new organic.

And that, in the end, is the big picture.

Iron Hill opening on 7/20

Iron Hill is set to open the doors of its New Jersey brewpub to the beer-enjoying public on Monday at 5 p.m., preceded by a ceremonial first pour with the media at 4 p.m.

We'd like to think of IH's opening as a small step for an established and respected brewpub brand that has eight locations spread among Delaware, Pennsylvania and now New Jersey. But you could say it's really a giant leap for the Garden State, which hasn't seen a new brewery/brewpub open in 10 years.

The folks behind Iron Hill – Kevin Finn, Kevin Davies and Mark Edelson – are from New Jersey and have long wanted to return to their home state with the brewpub model they found success with in the First State and the Keystone State. But the big ball of red tape that is New Jersey makes opening a new business, like a brewery, a daunting challenge. (Too much control is ceded to municipalities, and state government does little to encourage business development.)

But Iron Hill is here. Happily.

Cheers.

Fall through

This is a little disappointing, especially if you live in the northern part of the state. But there is some hope on the distant horizon.

The Garden State Craft Brewers Guild won’t be staging a second festival this year, like the one last fall at the Newark Bears minor league baseball stadium. Guild folks say a deal for a venue can’t be nailed down in time to sufficiently advertise a date for this fall to draw a good-size crowd.

That said, guild folks are scouting around for a place to hold an early- or mid-spring 2010 festival in addition to the annual summer festival that has moored itself to the decks of the USS New Jersey. Stadiums at Montclair State University and Somerville (the Somerset Patriots field) are being eyed for a spring festival.

The disappointment here is, obviously, that if you didn’t make it to the battleship this year, you missed the boat as far guild brew fests for 2009 go. It’s perhaps harder on the folks in North Jersey, who have had to travel to Camden for the past five years to sample the brews of guild members in one sitting.

Camden’s not exactly the idea of a dream destination for those folks, and if you talk to some longtime fans of Jersey-made beers who live above I-195, they will invariably bring up the halcyon days of the late 1990s, when the guild festival was held at Waterloo Village. But those days are long gone, and the festival eventually dropped anchor in Camden, to the satisfaction of South Jersey.

Cross your fingers that 2010 will indeed yield two festivals and be the dawn of an era in which the guild keeps a light on in both halves of the state.

Meanwhile, the version 3 of the Central Jersey Beer Festival is set for Sept. 19 in Woodbridge. And, Pizzeria Uno down the road in Metuchen is likely to repeat their cask ale festival yet again during the fall. Stay tuned.

Video
Speaking of festivals, the video we shot last month aboard the battleship in Camden will be up toward the end of this week. Some people have asked about when they could see it, and we expected it to be up by today. But the computer and a linked pair of external hard drives aren't playing nice with one another. The technical trouble should be resolved very soon.

Cheers.

Time to exit this

MADD strikes a more moderate tone in the Courier-Post of Cherry Hill regarding Flying Fish's Exit Series beers.

Two months of running in place on the same topic ... Now's a good time to shift things out of neutral, move forward and exit this debate, or at least adapt it to the times (see here, and here, page 3 of the table).

Exit to ale ... and so it goes

There's an AP story on the wires and Internet in which MADD gets annoyed at Flying Fish's Exit Series.

Nothing truly new in this, unless you're looking for a release date for the hoppy American wheat ale that will be Exit 11 (it's July 15th, and alas a media event to kick things off is being held in Philadelphia that day, not New Jersey. Sort of flies in the face of the talked-up homage to Jerseyana. But then, Philadelphia is, was and probably always will be a top market for Flying Fish, so there's that to consider). And when we say "nothing new," we mean the very same argument/gripe trotted out in June is being recycled a mere month later. Who cares if it's coming from a different mouth this time?

If you read The Associated Press story, you get the impression that Mothers Against Drunk Driving was contacted for comment (a completely logical thing to do as far as news reporting goes; and honestly, where was MADD a month ago when the chance to grouse about this was on the front burner?), as opposed to MADD getting out its long knives to fillet the Fish with a protest, à la a news conference at the start of a major travel holiday (such as last week's Fourth of July celebrations), something the organization is known to do. Not that we're advocating MADD tee off on a brewery; hardly, since we think MADD, nationally, has become a temperance league – as in all beer, liquor and wine are bad or lead to trouble – and especially since we thought the New Jersey Turnpike Authority needed to lighten up when it was getting fussy last month over this. But it is curious that the freshest news release on the Web site for the New Jersey chapter of MADD is dated 2006. The Exit Series gripe isn't even mentioned on MADD-NJ.

And, if you ask us, The Star-Ledger's headline on the story sort of oversells things. MADD gets second fiddle following some more of the Turnpike Authority frowning and resignation at Flying Fish's First Amendment rights (which the Exit Series wholly is). The balance of the story, aside from more rebuttal from FF, is about the beer series, not about how MADD intends to get madder over this. A mild slam, it would seem.

This item made WCBS radio in New York this afternoon, with audio comment from MADD folks (in which they did indeed slam FF, saying they were "appalled") coupled with some renewed deflection from Gene Muller at Flying Fish in Cherry Hill (he has proffered once before that drinking and driving are an unthinkable combination, something anyone could guess). But oddly enough, WCBS did this same story three weeks ago – after Channel 4 in New York did a take on the Turnpike folks having a conniption, after the TollroadsNews Web site broke the story (if you want to call it that). In CBS' report back then, the station spoke to Gene, but never went after the MADD angle. Hmmm.

And now a news day in the slow lane once again today.

And so it goes ...

PS: One thing about the Exit Series that does come to mind these seven months into FF's program for 2009 and as far as keeping beer denizens far and wide interested: 18 exits, 3 beers a year = 6 years of taking exits. The turnpike's a long road, indeed. Maybe the US Mint has some tips after 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, 52 quarters and 10 years.

River Horse update

There's a brewer change at River Horse to report.

Head brewer Christian Ryan is off to London, where his wife was transferred by her employer. Replacing Christian is Greg Papp, an alumus of Victory Brewing and Shipyard Brewing, and most recently the BJ's Restaurant & Brewery chain.

More to come soon.

Happy Independence Day*

Celebrating the 4th and continued independence from crappy, dumbed-down beer … Budweiser the king of beers? Nay, the beer equivalent of George III, our improvident former overlord who was overthrown.

Now is also a good time to renew a shout-out to Rick Reed’s Campaign for New Jersey Beer, his call to muster pride and support for Jersey-brewed beer.

From Rick: "New Jersey breweries make some of the finest beers on earth and if you are a New Jersey bar then you should serve at least one New Jersey beer. Have some pride in our state, it doesn't matter which brewery from NJ but have at least one!!!"

Small-batch beer is a thread that runs through the origins of this country. Everyone who’s really into beer knows that Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, turned to brewing in retirement from public life. (TRIVIA: Jefferson is among three US presidents who checked out on July 4th, the other two being his rival, John Adams, and James Monroe.)

Jefferson, of course, wasn't alone as a homebrewer. As prominent people of their day, the Founding Fathers were of the means to maintain personal breweries at their estates. If you’re a homebrewer, celebrate your connection to them. It's all about freedom and independence.

*Fireworks display shot July 4, 2009, at Lake Pohatcong in Tuckerton, NJ.