Craft Beer Week at Iron Hill

The penultimate day of American Craft Beer Week (May 17-23) at Iron Hill Maple Shade was all about numbers.

The brewpub's Monky business (as in monks, not apes) mug club day on Saturday featured a flight of Belgian brews – single, dubbel, tripel, American tripel, and a round of quads, including bourbon barrel-aged and brett-styled versions.

On top of that, head brewer Chris LaPierre treated the crowd to some 4-year-old Flemish Brown and an early sample of Iron Hill Maple Shade No. 100.

Chris describes the brewpub's 100th batch – a milestone reached in just 10 months – this way: "It's 100 pounds of eight different malts, eight signifying that we’re the eight Iron Hill location. There's also 100 pounds of corn, being in South Jersey, it's kind of corn country. It has 100 IBUs' worth of hops – we used Centennial hops, also for the number 100. There's 100 ounces of finishing hops at the end of the boil and dry hops, and we boiled it at 100 degrees Celsius."

The last part is a joke, obviously, since 100 degrees C is the metric system boiling point for water.

Batch 100 will clock in about 6.5% ABV. Chris says it sort of defies a style category. "If I had to, I'd probably call it an IPA. It's golden to maybe a little bit of light amber ... really, really hoppy, about the alcohol of an IPA. But it's also got rye in there, wheat, corn, a lot of stuff you wouldn't normally find in an IPA."

Look for it early next month.