The benefits of ale

Here’s where good beer does good things ...

Come Sunday (Jan. 18), New Brunswick’s brewpub, Harvest Moon, will be buzzing as crowds flock to George Street for the fifth annual Jimmy D fundraiser.

It’s a big event that salutes some hard-to fill boots lost by the New Brunswick Fire Department and honors a legacy of putting others first.

Harvest Moon donates a portion of the proceeds from every pint of Jimmy D’s Firehouse Red to the Children’s Burn Camp of the Connecticut Burns Care Foundation, an organization dear to Deputy Fire Chief James D’heron, whose memory the event pays tribute.

D’heron died after saving 15 people in a September 2004 house fire.

Over it's history, the event has raised nearly $50,000 for the charity, and the Irish red ale is so popular it occupies a taphandle at Harvest Moon year-round.

See more details here. Click on "News from the Moon" at the bottom left of the page.

Iron Hill: Something to look forward to

We’re told the work on a New Jersey location for Iron Hill brewery/restaurant continues.

In a beer conversation last month, we heard the building on Kings Highway in Maple Shade has been gutted, giving IH’s designers/planners/work crew a clean canvas on which to create a stylish brewpub.

A new face in Jersey, as we’ve said before, is a big deal for a state where regulators hamstring brewers with rules not found in neighboring states, like restricting brewers to be production operations and sell to distributors, or hold a brewpub license and make beer for on-site consumption. But never those twain shall meet in the you-can-only-be-one-or-the-other Garden State.

Boxing in brewers like that is part of the reason Jersey poses such rocky terrain for new enterprises. But we digress.

So yes, Iron Hill opening in May 2009 (the target date they’ve specified) is highly anticipated.

With that in mind, as an indicator of what you can expect from topflight Iron Hill, here’s a glimpse of some special bourbon barrel draft beers they’ll serve at their seven locations spread between Delaware and Pennsylvania throughout February. (All month, each location will spotlight two house-brewed beers that celebrate this style.)

Featured bourbon barrel aged beers will include:

• Bourbon Porter, Iron Hill’s award-winning Pig Iron Porter features roasty malt and pronounced bourbon flavors with a vanilla aroma, served on nitrogen tap.
• Bourbon Russian Imperial Stout, a Great American Beer Festival medalist, distinguished by complex malt character, balance, and distinct bourbon and vanilla flavors.
• Bourbon Barley wine, intense caramel-malt sweetness and aroma balanced with distinct bourbon and vanilla flavors.
• Bourbon Tripel, a traditional Belgian-style strong ale with complex aroma and flavor of plums, spice and bananas, with a balanced bitterness.
• Also: Bourbon Wee Heavy, Bourbon Baltic Porter and Bourbon Dubbel.

Makes you wish they were pouring in Maple Shade right now.