Exit 13 release set
The next stop in Flying Fish's Exit Series gets bottled on Friday, with a release event set for 7 p.m. Dec. 7 at the Pub on Passyunk East in Philadelphia.
Folks at the Cherry Hill brewery say the release event for the chocolate import/export stout that is Exit 13 (Port Newark-Elizabeth) may be your only chance for a while to sample the beer on draft.
The chocolate stout – the sixth in series of limited-batch brews that kicked off in April 2009, was made with 580 pounds of Belcolade dark chocolate (the port at exit 13 of the New Jersey Turnpike is the ingredient's entry point into the US), then aged with 200 pounds of cocoa nibs and 12 pounds of of vanilla beans.
The exit brews have been a Garden State study for FF head brewer Casey Hughes, who has dug into the back pages of Jersey to research ingredients for the brews.
With Exit 1, a stout released a year ago that used Delaware bay oysters, the brewery messages on the bottle labels took on a somewhat historical tone regarding the regions the brews represented, and in turn offered craft beer enthusiasts an engaging glimpse into New Jersey culture.
But Casey thinks he's the one with the leg up on Jersey lore.
"I'm learning the most from this, because I probably know more about Jersey exits than anybody now. I can go up the highway and say, 'This happened at this exit, this happened at this exit ...' from just researching all the stuff."
3 comments:
So, all that "Jersey lore" the FF brewer is learning doesn't include "geography"? Apparently (according to Google Maps, at least) the release event is in a place called "Philadelphia" - which is not located in the state that the brewery is happy to exploit in several of their promotional campaigns, including a well-reported controversy with the NJ Turnpike Authority spokesperson over this series' name.
This is a point/circumstance that is not lost on the folks at Flying Fish.
Release events in New Jersey have proved easier said than done, though they have done it (Exit 16 comes to mind).
Part of the issue lies in the bar circuit. Bar owners can be reluctant to put on tap a specialty beer and get skittish about how well it will be received by their patrons, even during this time of craft beer's widening appeal.
Unfortunately, by comparison, Philly has a concentration of bars that are quite ambitious about beer and jump at the new stuff.
Exit 13 is in Elizabeth. Quite a ways from Philadelphia. I'm sure that if they really tried they could have found a beer bar much closer to Exit 13 than Passyunk Ave in South Philly.
Isn't it really that Flying Fish can just generate a lot more buzz in Philly than they can anywhere else? At the end of the day, they're really a Philly brewery. I get that, and it's cool, and they should go out there and move as much beer as possible. But I find the marketing a little disingenuous when they a Philly brewery tries to claim some kind of Jersey cred.
And I'm well aware that Flying Fish brews in Cherry Hill, not Philadelphia. And I'm well aware of the overall lameness of the Jersey beer scene (un-enthusiastic bars and liquor stores, distributor stranglehold, consumer culture that is behind in the times, etc...) But for all intents and purposes, Flying Fish is still a Philly based brewery. That's their base market, that's where they make all of their noise, and that's where you're going to go if you're looking for some Flying Fish on tap.
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