Beer-Stained Letter

Barrelhouse stout & porter, all jazzed up

2012-01-27T10:19:00.003-05:00

Just a quick a calendar item, from Cricket Hill's Friday brewery tour ...

The Fairfield brewery makes its bourbon-barrel-aged imperial stout and a likewise-conditioned sour porter available at this evening's open house.

Time: 5-7 p.m.
Place: Cricket Hill Brewery, 24 Kulick Road in Fairfield
Phone: 973-276-9415

The stuff that helped build brands

2012-01-25T09:14:00.005-05:00

Whenever brewery history and New Jersey are uttered in the same breath, the names Ballantine and Krueger invariably come to mind, two breweries that called Newark home as far back as the mid-19th century.

Come Sunday, you can get a visual taste of that kind of past while you sip the present.

The Garden State chapter of Brewery Collectibles Club of America holds its annual winter swap at the Polish American Cultural Foundation in Clark, an event that promises to connect the region's rich brewing industry past with today's beer fans of all walks. (Time: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Address: 177 Broadway. Admission for general public: $5)

Trays, glassware, signs, tap handles, bottle openers, coasters, labels, and of course beer cans – the tactile stuff that joined forces with flavors to build brands – will be in abundance for collectors to buy, sell, trade, or reminisce over while they sip pints of today's craft beers paired with hearty Polish cuisine.

"I love the craft beer stuff," says Jack McDougall, 64, president of the 100-member Garden State chapter, "but I still like to think back to the days when I was drinking Rheingold or Schaefer. It's got a good feeling to me."

Closing in on four decades, collectors have been coming together for the meets. McDougall, now retired from the Exxon Bayway refinery, remembers his first, in 1977 at Princeton Day School, a gathering that featured 400 tables of memorabilia, or breweriana as it's called.

"It was all cans back then, and trade only, no money changing hands," he says.

A good find back then would have been flat-top cans from the 1950s, like a woodgrain Shaefer can. (It should be remembered that New Jersey lays claim to introducing canned beer to America almost 70 years ago, thanks to the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company.)

McDougall's can collection numbers 1,000, with five times that many coasters (his cans are boxed up, though, not on display at home). Back in the day, a co-worker who was doing some home remodeling stumbled upon some Krueger Ambassador cans and gave them to McDougall.

"It was a premium brand by Kreuger in the '40s and '50s. It had an illustration of Bavarian dancers," he recalls. "When Narragansett bought (Krueger), they stopped brewing it."

No swap would be complete without beer itself, and at this one look for some Magic Hat, as well as some Jersey-brewed offerings from Cricket Hill and Climax Brewing, and possibly others. (McDougall says club members often show up with growlers from brewpubs they made excursions to.)

Climax Brewing owner Dave Hoffmann, a longtime supporter of the event, is sending a sixtel of Bavarian Dark Lager (5.2% ABV, a beer he pulled out of production (it's a dying style, he says) years ago but brewed again recently at the behest of Paul Kermizian, one of the owners of Barcade (Brooklyn, Jersey City and Philadelphia).

"It's like the real deal. It's got that real nutty, chocolaty, malty Bavarian dark lager taste," Dave says. "It's real balanced, easy to drink, and it's real dark. When you look at it, it's like my Nut Brown Ale.

"I used to make it all the time, but all of a sudden it started not selling. So I stopped making it, and Kermizian was all upset because that was one of his favorite beers that I made."

And now for the Mad Men moment:

There yet? Nope, but making progress

2012-01-17T22:44:00.003-05:00

A million-plus bucks worth of custom fabricated steel arrived in Somerdale on Monday and was promptly moved into place, as Flying Fish Brewing makes progress on its move from Cherry Hill, the original home of the craft brewer now widely known for the Exit Series beers.

Folks at Flying Fish project being in business at the new location around May or June. But make no mistake, setting up a 50-barrel automated brewhouse to feed fermenters three times that capacity is no small feat. So that projection is obviously subject to how the installation of everything goes.

The components that arrived on Monday, following a fortnight trans-Atlantic voyage, were the lauter tun, mash tun, whirlpool and kettle, which join a new kegger that arrived a while ago.

About the video: It's a tongue-in-cheek take on the new equipment's arrival, seen through the prism of silent film. Special thanks to Kevin MacLeod of Incompetech, who always seems to have the right music available for quirky video projects.

Something to pore* over

2012-01-13T10:17:00.004-05:00

Via: Rehab International

This tumbled into the InBox last week, one of those offers of use as a way to promote the creators ...

It's visually entertaining, although if you want to quibble, the actual date of the 18th Amendment's ratification (not passage) was Jan. 16th 1919 (New Jersey wouldn't ratify it until three years later, practically bringing up the rear), with the stipulation Prohibition would not take effect until January 17th 1920.

*Yes this is the correct one; it's pore, not pour, in this case.

Sam C, a real advocate for beer, speaks

2012-01-11T14:29:00.006-05:00

By now, you've at least heard, if not read, that Sam Calagione opened a shaken-up bottle of shut-yer-yap, spraying the grousing beer geek-noscenti in a BeerAdvocate post .

Actually Dogfish Head's founder was quite tactful in his takedown of those whose faceless forum commentary on the beers they drink can muddy the point of whether they liked them or not, or turn shrill when they feel the need to opine that something has grown too popular. (Actually, just saying you liked a particular beer can seem like a confession these days.)

Quite often that stuff comes across as turgid prose or some flowery mental masturbation to beer porno.

In any case, there's not a lot to add to what Sam says, other than this: fixating on brussels lace and how decanting into sparkling glasses of beer-clean quality, the russet brew produced a rocky tan head (you can substitute tan with alabaster), well that just sucks all the oxygen out of the drinking experience.

Maybe it's time to just count to 10, relax, and simply have a beer. Enjoy it. And back away from your keyboard.

NJ homebrew permit is dead. Kaput. Gone.

2012-01-10T13:01:00.002-05:00

It's official: New Jersey homebrewers are no longer legally obligated to pony up 15 bucks to the state to make their beer.

Governor Chris Christie has signed legislation to eliminate the 21-year-old permit requirement that most homebrewers had said fuhgettaboutit to in the first place, either because they never knew about it, or they had reservations about getting the state involved in their lives and their much-loved hobby.

On Monday without comment, Governor Christie signed the legislation that was introduced in spring 2011. The signing is noted on the governor's web site, amid a collection of other bills also getting his signature that day.

(If you're a craft beer enthusiast in the Garden State, it's hard to ignore the fact that Chris Christie has been a friend to beer since taking office in 2010. Last May he signed a proclamation for American Craft Beer Week in New Jersey; his lieutenant governor, Kim Guadagno, made a trip to Flying Fish Brewing last fall; and now the elimination of the homebrewing permit. That's more than any governor has done to give beer a boost since craft brewing was sanctioned in New Jersey in 1993.)

Homebrewing has had the blessing of the federal government since thoroughbred horse racing last had a Triple Crown winner (Affirmed), when Congress exempted 200 gallons made for personal consumption from taxation. New Jersey lawmakers said yes to the hobby 13 years later, in 1991.

However, there was a catch to Trenton giving its blessing, something that New Jersey homebrewing enthusiast Ed Busch, at the time a member of the American Homebrewers Association board of governors, saw as an unavoidable trade-off for getting lawmakers to go along with the idea officially green-lighting people making beer at home. (It should be remembered that after Prohibition, states were given great authority to regulate alcoholic beverages within their borders, and that Alabama still does not allow homebrewing, while Oklahoma finally relented in 2010.)

Thus the permit was born in the same breath as Trenton's proclaiming that making up to 200 gallons of homebrew per year was legal (echoing the federal law), thus giving Garden State homebrewers cover from overzealous local code enforcement officers who wanted to play revenuer.

Joe Bair, who opened his Princeton Homebrew shop in 1995, on Tuesday applauded the end of the permit, saying Ed had always envisioned it being scrapped at some point. Sadly, Ed died about five years ago, never seeing his intuition play out as reality.

"Ed Busch said it would eventually get changed, and I'm sure he's happy in his grave that it has," Joe says.

The biggest problem with the permit law, Joe says, was never the $15 fee imposed on homebrewers, but rather their taking a hit on their rights against search and seizure. Getting a permit meant state alcoholic beverage regulators could pay a call on you whenever they wanted.

"People were surprised when they got their permits in the mail to find that out," Joe says.

To the state's credit, the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control kept its distance from homebrewers. Still, the existence of the permit requirement, though often obscure, turned homebrewers who knew of the obligation into scofflaws when they ignored it.

"It wasn't because they didn't want to pay the money," Joe says. "It was they didn't want to give up their rights against search and seizure."

Fish brewhouse in trans-Atlantic voyage

2012-01-03T09:50:00.012-05:00

Charging across the pond at this very writing, aimed at the port of New York, are a pair of freighters carrying Flying Fish's new brewery equipment.

That's the brewhouse being loaded at the port for the nearly two-week trans-Atlantic voyage (all photos courtesy of Flying Fish).

Ludwigshafen Express, a German-flagged vessel, departed Hamburg, Germany, last Friday. It has passed through the English Channel, heading into the Celtic Sea, from whence it will make way toward the open waters of the North Atlantic.

Steaming along at 19.4 knots (22 mph), Ludwigshafen has an expected arrival of this Sunday.

The other freighter, Atlantic Compass, flying the flag of Sweden, recently departed Liverpool in the UK and is cruising through the Irish Sea at 16.1 knots (19 mph), en route to the North Atlantic, with an expected arrival in New York of a week from today.

You can track the vessels here and here.

In case it's lost on anyone, there's a coincidental Beatles connection here (if you don't mind dated references).

Liverpool is where John, Paul, George and Ringo were from and got their start at the Cavern Club; they sharpened their act gigging at clubs along Hamburg's famed Reeperbahn nightlife and red-light district.

Not a bad little musical tangent for shipping brewery equipment that is destined to go into a building in Somerdale where LP records used to be pressed.

Meanwhile, of course, in anticipation of the 50-barrel brewhouse's arrival, the concrete pad for the equipment has been poured.

Pale ale christens Tuckahoe's brewhouse

2011-12-24T17:44:00.011-05:00

With a soundtrack of early-1970s Led Zeppelin spinning from vintage vinyl, Tuckahoe Brewing put its gas-fired brewing system through the paces on Friday, a maiden brew day aimed largely at mastering the 3-barrel setup featuring twin units of 1.5-barrel mash tuns and kettles.

For practically any startup brewery, inaugural batches are intended to work out the efficiencies of new brewing equipment and generally ensure the process of mashing grain, boiling wort and chilling it as it's pumped into fermenters goes smoothly and free of leaking connections or pump failures.

But a launch brew also heralds an entry into the marketplace. And for Tuckahoe, the brew day also set the company squarely on its planned course to launch year-round and seasonal beers into the Garden State's craft beer market.

Striking a mash for a flagship American-style pale ale on the linearly arranged PsychoBrew system marked a few firsts for Matt McDevitt, who will oversee brewing operations for Tuckahoe.

A homebrewer for a decade, with the past six of that time spent sharpening his brewing skills and confidence, Matt hadn't made beer before on a high-end setup orchestrated by pumps, sensors and a control panel.

But Matt reports everything ran smoothly with the inaugural commercial brew of DC Pale Ale, a 6% ABV beer assertively dosed with Columbus, Cascade and Willamette hops. "I love hops," Matt says. DC, by the way, is a shorthand for Dennis Creek, a waterway in the part of Cape May County where Tuckahoe is located. Tuckahoe's beer names, like the accompanying seasonals Steelman Porter and Marshallville Wit, will have local themes; some brews will feature locally sourced ingredients, while some special-occasion brews will get the bomber bottle treatment (most of the beer, however, will be in the draft market).

"As far as the equipment is concerned, everything has gone very well so far," Matt says. "I've been paying close attention to the pumps, the recirculation, just making sure the grain bed is setting, making sure nothing is getting stuck. So far, so good, just a few hiccups earlier. Also, what I've been paying attention to is the control panel; it's the first time I've ever operated this."

Prior to the inaugural brew day, only some preliminary checks had been conducted on the stainless steel brewing equipment – so new and shiny that from across the brewery you could still pick out sharp reflections of Matt and Chris Konicki, another Tuckahoe partner who helped with the mash-in on Friday.

"Three weeks ago, while I was on the phone with the manufacturer of the system," Matt says, "I ran a (test) run with just water in just one of the mash tuns, just to see the recirculation, just to set a temperature, see if it could get to the temperature, see how the regulated gas comes on an off, just to see essentially if it works."

Unlike larger brewhouse setups, the PsychoBrew system's mash tun uses an intermittently lighting gas flame to maintain a preset mash temperature, and pumps to recirculate liquid that seeps below the grain bed grate to keep the sugars developing from the mash from scorching and becoming unintentionally caramelized.

"Earlier one of the mash tuns stopped recirculating, so it was just a matter of opening the ball valve a little more," Matt says.

Founded a year ago as a partnership of Matt, Chris, Tim Hanna and Jim McAfee, Tuckahoe was licensed by state regulators just 10 days ago, making the brewery the latest startup in a very busy growth year for New Jersey's craft brewing industry. (Matt, Chris and Tim are teachers in Atlantic County; Jim is an architect who designed the brewery.)

This year alone, Tuckahoe is the fifth beer-maker to claim the mantle of "New Jersey's newest craft brewery." It's a title not lost on the crew who set up shop in Dennis Township in Cape May County and became that county's second brewery this year as well. (Cape May Brewing was licensed last spring.)

"It's a little scary and surreal," Matt says, "but I'm pretty happy and confident that after getting my feet wet and comfortable with the system, I think we can do something pretty good, and I think a lot of people will enjoy it."

Located in a light industrial building shared by a fish market and a coffee roaster, Tuckahoe Brewing is tricked out with a pair of 3-barrel fermenters in the center of the brewery space. A pair of similar-sized bright beer tanks are situated in a cold box along a far wall, where an array of 60 black, polyurethane sixtels and 20 half barrels are stacked. The brewhouse is moored along an opposite wall and accessible by a low scaffold trimmed with a berm and fitted with drains and plumbing that substitute for a trench drain in the floor.

A flight of stairs leads to a loft office, equipped with turntable and stacks of LPs to create that ever-important soundtrack for brew days.

The brewery entrance opens to a reception area done up in a mural of the South Jersey shore from Sea Isle to Atlantic City painted by an artist friend. Brewery open houses are planned, as soon a the foursome can acquire the necessary permit for the tasting room.

Amid the brew day on Friday, as work friends and neighbors stopped by with well-wishes, Matt, 36, a new dad for the second time (his son Jack was born around start of December), paused to reflect on a parallel between his life and his father's.

"It's funny, when I was born, the same year, pretty close to my birthday, my dad opened a new photography studio," Matt says. "It's kind of interesting and cool that the same month that my son is born, I open up a business. I like that. The continuity of that is kind of cool."

A seasonal on tap

2011-12-21T21:15:00.001-05:00

Tun barleywine through the ages

2011-12-21T19:54:00.011-05:00

It's called Santa's Little Helper* right now, but that name could change.

Brewer Tim Kelly certainly hopes the beer does go through some transformation.

The first-ever barleywine Tim made as the guy who makes all the beer at the Tun Tavern went on tap a couple weeks ago as the seasonal offering at the Atlantic City brewpub.

Barleywines can have a longer pouring life than their flagship siblings at brewpubs, given the specialty beers' higher alcohol content and the smaller-than-pint serving sizes.

Santa's Little Helper clocks in at 11% ABV, so you can expect this brew to hang around and evolve some over its life as a draft beer.

That's just fine.

But Tim's taking a longer-range view. Like a couple of years, maybe half that.

Or maybe even much longer, since it's being left up to you.

Last week, Tim racked off about 12 cases of the barleywine into 750 milliliter bottles for retail sale.

And that was after conditioning the beer for a month on French oak soaked in dark rum and dry-hopping it.

(As far as the brewing went, throughout the boil he hopped it with Styrian, Nugget, Chinook, East Kent Golding and Fuggles, finishing it off with Cascade.)

"I designed this beer with it being bottled and aged in mind. Little nuances will hopefully develop and come out over time," Tim says.

The beer began its life as an answer to those who remember the Tun having a barleywine on tap but forgetting who made it.

In that regard, Tim's brew harkens back to his predecessor, Ted Briggs, who left nearly five years ago with a big golden barleywine aging in barrels that Tim, as pretty much one of his first tasks upon arriving, racked off into 750's, then corked and capped. (Ted's now brewmaster at Lander Brewing in Wyoming.)

Those bottles (pictured below) have been sold out for some time now.

But now that Tim's barleywine is on tap, and in bottles for sale, a new chapter has been written.

How that plot develops is up to you.

*Yes, Santa's Little Helper is a Simpsons reference, a nod to their race-losing greyhound.

Cricket Hill imperial stout pre-release

2011-12-20T22:26:00.005-05:00

Go big, go imperial, go to Cricket Hill.

Just in time for the yule season and New Year's Eve, the Fairfield brewery will pre-release the Russian imperial stout it produced from the winning homebrew recipe in Cricket Hill's pro-am contest.

The stout is getting the teaser roll-out at brewery tours (5-7 p.m.) this Friday and next Friday (Dec. 30) before hitting store shelves in 22-ounce bomber bottles in January as a Cricket Hill reserve series beer.

Shepherded through production by Assistant Brewer Patrick Lynch and contest winner Bill Kovach, the brew debuts as Reserve No. 16. Bill's entry bested nearly three dozen other submissions in Cricket Hill's 2010 competition to land in the pantheon of Cricket Hill brews. At 10.5% ABV, it's one of the biggest Cricket Hill has made over its decade of existence.

Brewery co-owner John Watts says the stout will be coming back around as Reserve No. 18 after it gets some bourbon barrel time. That version will be very limited and will be available only at the brewery.

Beach Haus to double portfolio in 2012

2011-12-17T10:28:00.003-05:00

After adding a new black lager to its lineup this year, East Coast Beer Company now plans to double the labels under its Beach Haus brand in 2012.

That means a total of four Beach Haus brews in the regional craft beer market for the Point Pleasant-based company, which contracts with Genesee Brewing of Rochester, N.Y., for its flagship Beach Haus Classic Pilsner and the schwarzbier cold-weather brew, Winter Rental.

The company's first entry in the key seasonal beer market, Winter Rental was released in October, a little over a year after East Coast celebrated its one-year anniversary as part of the Garden State craft beer scene.

Sometime next year, East Coast founder John Merklin says, a pale ale and an as-yet-undecided style will join the year-round pilsner and the schwarzbier.

A number of styles are being pilot-brewed to come up with that fourth beer, an approach John says is intended to make the decision-making process as organic as possible. It's a matter of finding the right fit with the existing Beach Haus labels, plus keeping with the company's business model of making brews that are, by turns, accessible to novice palates and interesting and challenging for the more adventurous craft beer drinkers.

Meanwhile, John says, Winter Rental has done well in the marketplace, outpacing expectations. And, as part of the Beach Haus brand, it has even given a some lift to its sibling, Classic Pilsner, as the summer turned to fall and beer tastes and preferences resolve to darker, more robust brews.

About the video
At the Somers Point Beer Festival in October, interviewer Tara Nurin, of the women's group Beer for Babes, talks to East Coast Beer's John Merklin about the milestones the company has observed over the brand's first year in the Garden State craft brew market.

Homebrew permit closer to being scrapped

2011-12-16T17:50:00.004-05:00

New Jersey's homebrewers are a step closer to doing legally what they have done under state regulators' noses with impunity for a couple of decades now – make beer without signing up for a $15 permit.

Lawmakers this week approved a bill that would do away with the oft-ignored homebrewing permit requirement, sending the measure to Gov. Chris Christie for his consideration. Based on the support he has shown so far for the state's craft beer interests – specifically his declaration of American Craft Beer Week in New Jersey last May – there's a fair chance Christie could sign the measure.

The practice of making beer at home for personal consumption was legal even back during Prohibition, when the production and sale of commercially brewed beer, wine and spirits were outlawed. Homebrewing has enjoyed the federal government's expressed blessing since the late 1970s, when President Jimmy Carter signed legislation to that effect.

New Jersey lawmakers officially sanctioned the hobby in the early 1990s. Back then, homebrewing enthusiasts who championed the practice accepted Trenton's imposing a permit requirement as a trade-off for getting it set down in writing that making up to 200 gallons of homebrew per year was legal. In short, it was the best deal to be had, as far as getting state lawmakers to say what the federal government had been saying, and thereby fending off any local code enforcement officers who wanted to act like a revenuers.

Despite the requirement, however, state regulators were never exactly heavy-handed about enforcing the permit obligation, nor the restriction that the beer homebrewers made be served only at the locations where it was made. No one has ever been busted by the Division Alcoholic Beverage Control for not having a permit. And in fact, the number of homebrewing permits issued annually over the past six years by ABC, for example, has barely approached 400, while the Colorado-based American Homebrewers Association says the ranks of Garden State homebrewers on its membership rolls dwarfs that figure.

But it's hardly suckers and scaredy-cat homebrewers who chose not to be scofflaws with regard to the state permit requirement.

Historically, most of the people who apply for the permit are those who make use of brew-on-premises businesses, like Brewers Apprentice in Freehold, or Brew Your Own Bottle, in Westmont. And with good reason: Brew-on-premises operations are sitting ducks for enforcement, and the owners risk their businesses by not having patrons sign up for the permit before making beer at their sites.

Nevertheless, despite the apparent history of non-existent enforcement, a sponsor of the measure still struck a dramatic and populist tone about the need to dispatch the permit requirement. (And for the record, it's a good thing Trenton has stuck up for homebrewers, even if there is a hint of naiveté to it.)

"Homebrewers should not be viewed in the same light as the bathtub gin makers, moonshiners and swill brewers from Prohibition, nor are they running speakeasies out of their homes," says state Sen. Joseph Vitale of Middlesex County, home of the WHALES homebrew club. "Today's homebrewers and winemakers take up the hobby to produce a product for their own enjoyment and which they can share with their families. Getting rid of this permit requirement is the right thing to do."

Vitale goes on to say: "For the person who wants to simply try to reproduce their favorite beer at home, or the enthusiast who wants to make a high-quality beer of their own, the state shouldn't treat them as it would a commercial brewery. It's about time we clear out this unnecessary and unenforced permit requirement from the books, and lift the scofflaw status from thousands of residents who simply want to lift a pint of their own creation without fear that the state's peering over their shoulder."

In fairness to the ABC, the agency had the authority to peer over homebrewers' shoulders but chose to keep its distance. The bigger sin has been the $15 fee the law demanded (though never actively pursued), which you could interpret as a tax on homebrew.

And for the record, the American Homebrewers Association has said Trenton lawmakers have the right idea about scrapping the permit, but the wrong notion about striking homebrewing from the state's books. The AHA prefers language declaring homebrewing legal and exempt from taxation be put on the state's books, just forget the permit.

Also what's lost on Trenton, apparently, is the close tie homebrewing does in fact enjoy with commercial brewing, the former being a feeder system to the latter. As is the case across the country, there is a large number of commercially licensed craft brewers in New Jersey who jumped into business based on their homebrewing prowess. And many more are considering following suit.

Nonetheless, Trenton has given beer enthusiasts in New Jersey something to toast.

Tuckahoe becomes NJ's newest brewery

2011-12-14T18:08:00.005-05:00

Tuckahoe Brewing became New Jersey's newest craft brewery today, getting the green light to legally make beer from state regulators who inspected the company's facility in northern Cape May County.

Matt McDevitt says he and his three partners, Tim Hanna, Jim McAfee and Chris Konicki, celebrated the moment by having some beers and making plans for Tuckahoe's inaugural brew on the company's 3-barrel Psycho Brew setup. That magic moment of striking the first mash is tentatively set for the latter part of next week.

Matt, the brewer of the foursome, says a run-through on the brewing equipment was conducted using water and that some technical details were being addressed ahead of firing up the system for the first brew.

Tuckahoe Brewing plans to enter the Garden State craft beer market with a triad of flagship brews: DC Pale Ale, Steelman Porter, and a Belgian brew, Marshallville Wit.

Located in Dennis Township, Tuckahoe becomes the fifth production brewery to be licensed by the state this year, coming in behind Carton Brewing in Atlantic Highlands in Monmouth County. The state signed off on Carton and its 15-barrel brewhouse during the mid-summer.

Two other breweries in development, Flounder Brewing in Hillsborough and Turtle Stone Brewing in Vineland, are on pace to follow Tuckahoe.

Craft beer tally & geography
By any measure, 2011 has been one of the busiest years for craft brewery start-ups in New Jersey, which now has 24 licensed craft breweries – 13 brewpubs and 11 production breweries of varying size scattered throughout the state.

If you're into the trivia and geography of it all, Tuckahoe now puts Cape May County into the class of five counties that host more than one craft brewer. (A few miles south, in Lower Township, you'll find 1.5-barrel brewer Cape May Brewing, which was also licensed this year.)

Elsewhere, there is Hunterdon County with a pair of craft breweries (Ship Inn brewpub in Milford and River Horse Brewing in Lambertville) and Essex County (Cricket Hill in Fairfield and Gaslight brewpub in South Orange; you can exclude Budweiser in Newark, since it's not a craft brewery).

The distinction of hosting three craft breweries each goes to Middlesex County (brewpubs J.J. Bitting in Woodbridge; Uno Chicago Grill and Brewery in Metuchen; and Harvest Moon in New Brunswick) and Monmouth County (Kane, with a 20-barrel brewhouse in Ocean Township and also licensed this year; Carton; and Basil T's brewpub in Red Bank). There is talk of Triumph opening a new location in Red Bank, a move that would bump Monmouth County into the lead in the brewery count.

The state's oldest craft brewers are Ship Inn and Triumph brewpub in Princeton, both in their 16th year of operation. The oldest craft production brewery is Climax in Roselle Park, which opened in 1996, a year that also saw the opening of five other breweries, notably among them Flying Fish, the state's largest craft brewery.

The western front

2011-12-13T21:08:00.004-05:00

Once upon a time, you'd never pour a Flying Fish beer hopped with Cascades.

When the brewery first started sending beer out the door back in 1996, ESBs dosed with Cascades were the rage and found all over as the craft beer market started taking hold in New Jersey. You couldn't swing a mash rake without hitting one, and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale taught a lot of people what the most widely used craft beer hop tasted like.

But Flying Fish steered clear of the ubiquitous West Coast hop for its ESB, opting instead for a combination of Chinook and Mount Hood. (Their ESB now uses Magnum, Fuggles and Yakima Golding).

And lo, these many years Cascades have never been a signature flavor in a Flying Fish beer.

But there's an end point to everything.

So for the first time ever, Flying Fish will put Cacades in a beer, in fact christening 2012 with a draft-only hops-happy red ale at 7% ABV that will round out its flavor profile with Columbus and Chinook hops.

In a note on their website, Flying Fish promises this reddish-hued January release will have a piny nose, malty background and big hop finish, calling it a West West Coast hoppy red, once for the hops, the other for the brewery's location on the west side of New Jersey.

Turtle Stone entering home stretch

2011-12-07T09:07:00.005-05:00

Turtle Stone Brewing next week expects to collect the public financing it obtained recently with the support of its host city of Vineland.

In addition to closing on the low-interest loan and banking the $50,000 from the city's Urban Enterprise Zone program, the brewery also anticipates approval of its brewer's notice from federal regulators in a few days. The notice, of course, is one of the big governmental hurdles to be jumped.

Ben Battiata, who's launching the brewery with his girlfriend Becky Pedersen, says the two have found some kegging equipment, a key piece of hardware they have been shopping around for that the UEZ cash will help fund. The brewery will initially be turning out draft beer only, but Ben says they're still scouting for bottling equipment to widen Turtle Stone's market reach.

About the video:
At the Somers Point beer festival, Becky and Ben talk to interviewer Tara Nurin, of Beer for Babes, about the timeline for launching Turtle Stone Brewing and the beers, made with some locally sourced ingredients, that the drinking public can expect.

New site for planned Pinelands Brewing

2011-12-06T12:09:00.006-05:00

Another one in the Cape May County area in deep South Jersey ...

Pinelands Brewing, an in-development 1-barrel brewery, is getting its project back on track, scoring a new location and making plans to push the paperwork through federal and state regulators.

Founder Jason Chapman says money has been put down as rent on the new spot in Belleplain, a location in the northern Cape May/Cumberland County area perhaps more familiar to the Garden State's camping, fishing and hunting crowd who flock to the state forest there.

Plans right now call for a spring opening, and Jason says this winter will be spent securing federal, state and local approvals.

Pinelands opted for the Belleplain location after a site in Egg Habor City in Atlantic County, once home to the now-gone Cedar Creek Brewing, fell through. If successful with the new location, Pinelands will join Cape May Brewing and Tuckahoe Brewing as beer-makers in the Cape May County area.

About the video:
Jason and his partner, Luke McCooley, explain more to interviewer Tara Nurin, of the women's beer group Beer for Babes. Pinelands had an informational stand at the Somers Point Beer Festival back at the end of October, pouring some homebrewed beers made from recipes on which their commercial offerings will be based.

Time to retire the nano label

2011-12-06T00:06:00.004-05:00

Shakespeare famously mused about what's in a name, in flowery Elizabethan prose, suggesting that a name is merely packaging, not contents.

Given that, it's probably apt to send the descriptor nanobrewery packing. It's a small point, but one worth making.

Sure, the label has served a short-term purpose, speaking to a growing craft beer industry circumstance. Lots of folks have been jumping into commercial brewing via the very small scale, not because they're so enamored with their brewing sculptures that to part with them would be sweet sorrow when they began making beer for sale.

Rather, the driving force has been the fact that start-up costs are more attractive to get licensed making 1 or 2 barrels of beer at a time – more affordable steel, more affordable building.

But then we're accustomed to labels.

Microbrew used to be beer-speak as much for "I don't drink Bud any more" as it was to describe the approach for making the beer that some of us older drinkers were giving up Bud for.

And lest we forget, yesteryear's micros came in varying sizes.

Bell's Brewery in Michigan (alas, not distributed here in New Jersey, but in Pennsylvania by the case) started on a half-barrel set-up almost 30 years ago. Bell's has come quite a long way, now brewing almost 1,000 times its first-year production of 135 barrels.

Climax Brewing here in New Jersey started at 4 barrels, small – by two-thirds or more – compared with several other craft breweries that launched in the Garden State around the same time. But Climax has ably grown, and founder Dave Hoffmann has more growth in store for his Roselle Park brewery.

So therein lies Rub No. 1.

Brewers who start very small don't do so to stay very small. Sounds obvious, but it seems like that point gets lost in the nomenclature shuffle, as if nanos will be nanos. It's a safe bet they intend to grow as large and quickly as their successes will provide. Success meaning people drinking the beer.

Which brings up Rub No. 2, what Shakespeare said, contents vs. package.

There is, and will be, good beer coming from breweries that make 1 barrel at a time, just like there is from breweries making 10 or 20 times that.

And you can judge that in ways big and small, by the pint in fact.

So bye-bye nano. Big of you to move on.

Tuckahoe planning for ABC inspection

2011-12-05T15:54:00.007-05:00

Tuckahoe Brewing Company is one step away from joining the growing list of craft breweries making beer in the Garden State.

Matt McDevitt, Tim Hanna, Jim McAfee and Chris Konicki – the foursome behind what is poised to become New Jersey's newest brewery and Cape May County's second craft beer-maker – expect state regulators to swing by their site in Dennis Township next week for an inspection of their brewing setup and facilities.

Barring any hitches, Tuckahoe Brewing will be licensed, and thus, legally able to make beer on the 3-barrel system it has installed in the light industrial park building it shares with a coffee roaster company and a seafood market. (First up will be DC Pale Ale, Tuckahoe's flagship American pale ale, and Steelman Porter, a cold weather seasonal.)

Matt says all the brewery's equipment is in place, save a few odds and ends; a CO2 installation is set for this Wednesday, and a week from that, officials with the state Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control will make their pass through the brewery, capping an almost-yearlong endeavor by the four to enter the craft brewing industry.

Tuckahoe will join Cape May Brewing as the two craft brewers operating in New Jersey's southern-most county. Cape May was licensed back in the spring and has been sending beer out its doors since July.

Meanwhile, the folks at Flounder Brewing, in Hillsborough in Somerset County, on Monday – the 78th anniversary of the 21st Amendment's ratification and consigning of Prohibition to history's ash heap – received word of approval for their federal brewer's notice. The notice is essentially the federal OK for commercially making beer.

The blessing from the Alcohol, Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau clears the way for Flounder to concentrate on getting its state licensing. Jeremy Lees, one of the principals in Flounder Brewing, says he's optimistic the 1-barrel brewery will have the state ABC's approval, too, before the calendar turns to 2012.

Rivaling 1996, the year that several of New Jersey's now-established craft brewers got into the game, 2011 has proved to be a wildly busy year for brewery start-ups, a pace that hasn't gone unnoticed by some of those Class of '96 brewers, who note the time it's now taking to get licensed has become somewhat compressed.

Since the beginning of the year, four production breweries have been licensed, with, aside from Tuckahoe, two more waiting in the wings. And that doesn't even begin to count the handful of planned breweries, still more embryonic on the drawing boards, that have reached out to the Colorado-based Brewers Association, the craft beer industry trade group.

Nationally, the Brewers Association, citing a count from 2010 (its most current statistics), puts the number of breweries in the United States at 1,759, the most since the late 1800s. Of that figure, 1,716 were craft breweries, the beer industry trade group says.

Interestingly enough, the number of production breweries in New Jersey is about to pull even with, and even on pace to surpass, the number of brewpubs, which total 13. For a while in the state, brewpubs, which by law can only sell beer on their premises, have enjoyed a numerical edge over production breweries, which sell their beer through wholesalers.

One reason for the lag in brewpub start-ups (the most recent was Iron Hill's Maple Shade location in 2009) is the high cost of bar licenses in the state. Those licenses, tied to population, can run upward of six figures and are issued by municipalities, then subsequently held in private hands.

About the video:
From the Somers Point Beer Festival, interviewer Tara Nurin of the women's beer group, Beer for Babes, talks with Tim Hanna and McDevitt about Tuckahoe Brewing.

Flying Fish announces Exit strategy

2011-12-02T20:54:00.005-05:00

Remember these numbers: 4, 9, 10, 13, 16, 17.

The Pick-6 Lotto, they're not. But they are winning numbers, nonetheless.

Two of them are Saturdays – Dec. 10 and Dec. 17. The other four are Exits from the Cellar.

A shortage of brewing capacity and plans to exit Cherry Hill for bigger digs in Somerdale, about 10 miles south, have iced any hopes of Flying Fish releasing this year's trio of brews under the Exit Series banner, as was the per-year plan when the brewery began releasing the specialty brews in 2009.

This year, it's been Exit 9, and Exit 9 alone, that saw release.

Alas.

But with everything that's been going on at Flying Fish, something had to give. So the brewery has come up with another Exit strategy.

Which means, Flying Fish is digging into its private stock of previously released Exits, namely Exit 4 American Trippel, Exit 9 Hoppy Scarlet Ale, Exit 13 Chocolate Stout and Exit 16 Wild Rice Double IPA, and making the 750 milliliter bottles available for purchase during Saturday tours of Dec. 10th and 17th.

As most everyone knows, Exit 4 is available in six-packs these days. But in the big bottle, with the ruby-red wrapping on the top, it's the original release.

Exits 1 (oyster stout), 6 (Wallonian rye) and 11 (hoppy wheat), sadly, are history.

Time for a second round?

2011-12-02T01:32:00.006-05:00

Could New Jersey Breweries, the guidebook to the Garden State's craft brewing scene, be in line for a second edition?

Maybe so.

That idea is being floated to the publisher, Stackpole Books, says Mark Haynie, who with co-author Lew Bryson, wrote the 148-page region-by-region look at the pub and production brewers of the state.

With good reason.

A lot has changed on the state's beer landscape since the book landed on the shelves during the summer of 2008. Not only have the ranks of homegrown craft brewers swelled, but industry trends have shifted, with the notion of small-batch brewing taking on a new meaning, and growlers of take-home beer no longer existing as the province of brewpubs and breweries. Then there's the matter of the state's bar owners gravitating to and embracing craft beer in general, adding taps and putting on beers that were unimaginable a few years ago.

At the time New Jersey Breweries hit print, the Garden State had just under a dozen and a half craft breweries, with the newest one being Krogh's, the Sussex County brewpub that began teaming house-brewed beers to its restaurant offerings back in 1999. Now, the brewery count numbers closer to two dozen.

The change began as a trickle, then a gush.

In 2009, Iron Hill brewpub, the Delaware-based restaurant and brewery company started in 1996 by a trio of Jersey guys, ended a decade-long drought of new breweries opening in the state. It was a homecoming that saw Iron Hill launch its eighth location in Maple Shade. (Iron Hill is poised to open its ninth location in Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia. A second New Jersey location is also in the works.)

New Jersey Beer Company followed suit a year later as a production brewery based in North Bergen in Hudson County. This year alone, there have been three new production brewers – nano beer-maker Cape May Brewing became licensed in May, with Kane Brewing and Carton Brewing doing likewise over the summer. Meanwhile, Turtle Stone Brewing, an in-development production brewery in Vineland, is targeting a late 2011 or early 2012 opening.

Speaking of nanobreweries, the industry trend of tiny breweries serving local niche markets, took off big in the Garden State in 2011. Besides Cape May, Great Blue in Somerset County became licensed, while Flounder Brewing in Hillsborough and Tuckahoe Brewing continued to wend their way through the regulatory maze, and also looked to open soon.

But wait, there's more.

Flying Fish, the state's largest craft brewery and a Cherry Hill fixture for all of its 15 years, bought a new building in nearby Somerdale and made plans to triple its production capacity. In 2009, Flying Fish also began a well-received lineup of specialty beers. The Exit Series was referenced in New Jersey Breweries as part of the brewery's plans.

Elsewhere, Climax Brewing in Roselle Park, the state's first production craft brewer, began packaging in 12-ounce bottles in six-packs, retiring the signature half-gallon growler jugs that had long given its ales and lagers a presence in the state's bottled beer market.

Speaking of growlers, the jugs most often associated with brewpubs, started showing up as offerings from taverns and those packaged goods stores lucky enough to have licensing held over from the days of when they included a bar under their roofs.

Indeed, the Garden State is a different place for beer now, even from just three years ago.

About the videos:
Above, Mark Haynie talks with interviewer Tara Nurin, of the women's beer group Beer for Babes, about growth in the New Jersey craft brewing industry. Below from 2008, New Jersey Breweries co-author Lew Bryson talks about the book's release.

Cape May cuts ribbon on tasting room

2011-12-01T17:20:00.005-05:00

Joined by local government dignitaries, nanobrewer Cape May Brewing on Thursday christened its tasting room at a special weekday open house.

But perhaps the bigger news for the tiny brewery is that once again it is looking to grow. Cape May Brewing is in talks with the Delaware River & Bay Authority to take over some space adjacent to the brewery, located in a building on the grounds of the DRBA-owned Cape May County Airport.

Ryan Krill, who started the brewery with his dad, Robert, and college friend Chris Henke, says the discussions are in the early stages. The brewery is also doing some preliminary work toward boosting capacity again, he says.

Cape May shed its start-up half-barrel brewing system a few months ago, moving to a 1.5-barrel setup.

"We're pricing stuff out and scaling things out right now and seeing what's going to be appropriate," Ryan says. "That's the whole goal, to be able to have more than four accounts. We want to sell beer, we want to have a lot of fun doing it. We're going to try to find a sweet spot and a good scale for us."

In addition to its tasting room, Cape May Brewing has three bar accounts (Cabanas, SeaSalt and Lucky Bones Backwater Grille, all in Cape May) for its brews – a flagship IPA, a sweet stout, a porter (made with locally produced honey) and a wheat beer. Upcoming is a dunkelweizen, as well as an 8% ABV imperial IPA with Centennial hops that was brewed this week for release around Christmas.

At Thursday afternoon's open house, dignitaries from Lower Township and the DRBA took part in a ribbon-cutting for the tasting room where Cape May Brewing has been welcoming visitors since July.

Ryan says the brewery plans to hire a couple of staffers to help out in the tasting room and with retail sales of glassware, hats and shirts from Saturday tours and tastings.

About the video:
Cape May Brewery's Ryan Krill talks with interviewer Tara Nurin of the women's beer group Beer for Babes at the Somers Point beer festival held Oct. 29.

This chocolate's hot

2011-11-29T21:36:00.007-05:00

Iron Hill writes another chapter in its ongoing sponsorship of competitive homebrewing, tapping a chipotle pepper-cocoa-cinnamon porter Monday night created by Camden County homebrewer Michael Bittner, who claimed the 2011 Iron Brewer title.

It's the second year for the contest at IH's Maple Shade location, continuing a tradition that started at the brewpub's West Chester, Pa., site a half dozen or so years ago and takes its name partly from the Iron Chef television show.

Claiming his top prize of making beer on a commercial scale, Michael, an Audubon resident and member of the Barley Legal Homebrewers club of South Jersey, brewed the 9-barrel batch of Aztec Ale Nov. 5th under the supervision of head brewer Chris LaPierre, who scaled up Michael's 5-gallon recipe.

(Last year's Iron Brewer beer was a coffee stout called Luca Brasi, brewed by Barley Legal members Jim Carruthers and Scott Davi, winners of the inaugural Maple Shade competition.)

Aztec Ale has a chocolaty aroma and taste, with a finish of gentle pepper heat; there's a bounce of vanilla in there, too. The cinnamon was prominent on the palates for some folks, but less so for others.

Both pro brewer and homebrewer were happy with the outcome.

"It's just what I remember it being, reminds me of the original recipe ... the smell, the taste is very similar," Michael said after the tapping.

Aztec Ale, Chris says, stands as one of the more exotic brews to be entered in the Iron Brewer contest.

"This would be one of them. It definitely had a lot of ingredients that I don't often use in the brewery," he says. "There was also a beet beer last time that came pretty close to winning. That was really interesting."

Aztec Ale also marks the third fusion of chocolate, cinnamon and hot peppers by a Jersey brewpub this year. Basil T's in Red Bank and the Tun Tavern in Atlantic City both brewed with those ingredients back in January as a collaboration called Chocolate Fire, done under the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild's Jersey's Finest banner.

Like the other 10 or so contestants who vied for the Iron Brewer title this year, Michael made his beer with wort collected from the second runnings of IH's The Situation, a robust ABV beer (almost 10%) that weaves in and out of a few styles (think barleywine meets double IPA).

The contest, in fact, started as a way to make use of the healthy amount of malt sugar that would otherwise go down the drain after the needed volume of wort for The Situation is collected in the kettle.

Chris says The Situation likely will be scheduled for brewing again in February. "So that's probably when we'll do the next Iron Brewer wort pickup," he says.

Right now Michael is basking in the limelight of Aztec Ale, and planning to clone Dogfish Head's Indian Brown Ale, not to mention looking forward to defending his Iron Brewer title after the next wort give away.

"I'm not going to say what I'm going to brew, and it may change before then, but I've got some ideas," he says.

Is it there yet? Just a little further

2011-11-25T14:46:00.007-05:00

Some R&D and interacting with the public ...

When Flounder Brewing finally opens its doors, followers of New Jersey's growing ranks of craft beer makers can expect the Somerset County nanobrewery to do some batch testing of recipes on its new equipment, and letting the public sample some of those beers at brewery open houses.

After that initial phase, you can expect a more formal launch/opening of the Hillsborough brewery, with an invitation extended to town officials to take part. (Think sometime in the spring for this one.)

"I still have new equipment that I have yet to use because I don't have the utilities. I have new water to contend with because I haven't brewed in that space yet," says Jeremy "Flounder" Lees, one of the brewery's founders. "It's going to be a couple of months of batch-testing and letting people come into the tasting room and try those batches and things like that, letting people start to interact with the brewery and try the beer before we're really actively going out to liquor stores."

Earlier this month, Flounder Brewing checked in with federal regulators at the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau about the company's brewers notice, the paperwork the planned 1-barrel brewery needs signed off on to become a commercial brewery. The mid-month discussion with the TTB went well, Jeremy says, with just some minor details that federal regulators wanted addressed.

Right now, utility work (gas and water) is being done at the Hillsborough brewery, and Jeremy remains optimistic state regulators can wrap up Flounder's brewery application, then inspect the facility and grant a license by year's end.

"It seems like if all goes through with the federal stuff, according to what I just talked to them about on the phone, we should definitely have that federal license in this year," Jeremy says. "The state, we just have to submit a whole bunch of secondary information. Hopefully that's going to be what they need, and then they're going to have to do a site visit. I have no idea when that will be."

As much as federal and state regulators seem like a predominant focus for getting into business, there's still a third master that also must be satisfied: Turning the warehouse space Flounder leased into a manufacturing enterprise means going through the local officials for a bevy of things, including construction permits and building-use classifications. Dealing with some of that has been like groping along in the dark.

"Everything I had to submit to the township all made sense in the end," Jeremy says. "The problem was, it was really hard trying, for the most part, to navigate your own way through all these hoops and everything, going in and trying to ask questions about what has to be on the construction permit folder when you've never done it before.

"Fortunately, Hillsborough has a very good business advocate that works in the township. He helped get a lot of things cleared up for me as we were moving, and my landlords, too, because they want to see the brewery finally open there."

Working with the town has had its advantages, namely helping to create a buzz about a new brewery coming.

"Everybody I've bumped into, from fire inspectors to construction people to just in general people in the township are all excited. They're all looking forward to trying the beer. We have a lot of people with us on Facebook that are right from Hillsborough," Jeremy says.

NJ Beer Co. eyes return to bottle market

2011-11-17T19:42:00.007-05:00

A planned to return to the bottled beer market for New Jersey Beer Company.

The Hudson County production brewery is in the process of acquiring a new six-head filler that will enable it to once again bottle its Hudson Pale, 1787 Abbey Single and Garden State Stout, the triad of brews that NJ Beer entered the market with about 18 months ago.

John McCarthy, CEO of the North Bergen-based brewery, says NJ Beer expects to order the Meheen bottler before the end of this month and have it up and running at the beginning of next year.

"It's been a long time coming. We're really looking forward to it," John said by phone Thursday, the eve of the brewery's re-opening of its refurbished tasting room.

Shortly after launching in 2010, NJ Beer expanded its packaging beyond kegs and had its flagship brews in six-packs on store shelves. The product diversification in the marketplace was short-lived: NJ Beer was forced back to draft-only business when the filler from Applied Bottling of British Columbia irreparably failed after little over a month's use.

"The thing was breaking from day one ... We had parts falling off, breaking off. We literally broke almost every damn piece just in the normal operation. The manufacturer put some wrong parts in, which ultimately ruined the fill head," brewery founder Matt Steinberg said in an interview last spring, just before NJ Beer marked its first anniversary. "It got to the point where we were getting maybe one out of every six or eight bottles that would actually have 12 ounces of beer and a cap on it ... we couldn't properly fill bottles with that thing."

Now, NJ Beer is enjoying a rebound, having tenaciously endured the dark moments like the crippled-bottler episode and flooding last August from Hurricane Irene, which spared brewing equipment but ruined malt inventory. (The storm amounted to about a $1,000 sting to the brewery.)

"We've had some serious ups and downs. The bottler going down was devastating blow, losing all of our bottle accounts. It was a huge hit, emotionally and financially," John says. "We had to make some hard decisions and some sacrifices, but we weathered it, got some new investment."

The brewery is again poised to release its cold weather seasonal, Weehawken Wee Heavy, an 8.3% ABV brew that found favor among hordes of Jersey craft beer enthusiasts last year. "We're excited to get it out again. It should be out on draft at the end of the month," John says.

Along with the big Scottish ale will come its lighter sibling, the renamed 60 Shilling Mild (3.5% ABV), now called Sasha's 60 Shilling Mild, a salute to the brewery's now-deceased mascot Rottweiler, Sasha. (Head brewer Brendan O'Neil is a former dog trainer, and Sasha was his top dog.)

Both brews will be available for sampling, poured beside the Hudson Pale Ale, 1787 Abbey Single and Garden State Stout, when NJ Beer reopens its refurbished tasting room Friday (11/18, 4-8 p.m.). The end-of-tour room has been open intermittently of late, John says, but Friday's event will be something akin to a grand re-opening.

Meanwhile, NJ Beer is scouting a new, larger location, since the Tonnelle Avenue site in North Bergen where the brand was launched is becoming a little claustrophobic. Nearby Jersey City may hold some prospects, John says, but as far as a new location goes, the only thing that is settled is that NJ Beer intends to remain in Hudson County.

"Everything right now is looking really, really positive for New Jersey Beer Company," he says. "We feel stronger."

Charity begins at foam

2011-11-17T01:37:00.005-05:00

A beer and food pairing to put on your calendar, but leave your appetite and bring your sense of good will.

Barley Legal Homebrewers, the 200-member strong South Jersey/Philadelphia-area homebrew club, will hold a Thanksgiving food drive this Saturday (11/19) at the Pour House bar in Westmont, trading 4-ounce samples of their brew creations for food donations.

The three-hour event runs (2-5 p.m.) was organized by club officers Evan Fritz and Devin Garlit, who say the soured economy is putting the squeeze on more and more people these days.

That has left area food pantries struggling to keep up with the greater demand for the help they provide.

Club members themselves have been buying turkeys and other foods for side dishes and collecting contributions of the same from the public, storing the food at Brew Your Own Bottle homebrew supply shop in Westmont.

"We're collecting full Thanksgiving dinners, from the turkey down to the stuffing, vegetables and rolls," Evan says. "There are a couple of families people in the club know are struggling, so we'll help them first. The rest will go to food pantries. Some of the food pantries say they're in bad shape this year."

A taste of serendipity for Carton Brewing

2011-11-15T02:17:00.004-05:00

Carton Brewing, the Garden State's newest craft brewery, plans to turn out another batch of the session-strength golden ale that the draft-only production brewery teamed with a double IPA when it entered New Jersey's craft beer market back in August.

Launch (4.6% ABV) was a brew Carton made to break the seal their 15-barrel brewhouse in Atlantic Highlands in mid-July, a 30-barrel batch produced over a two-day trial run to put the newly installed Newlands Systems brewing set-up through the paces and ensure everything functioned properly.

The ale was intended to be a one-off brew and a placeholder beer on taps until Carton's flagship brew Boat, a hoppy session beer, was ready. Serendipitously, Launch found favor among craft beer bars that are inclined to steer patrons more accustomed to drinking pedestrian macro light brews toward better beer.

"The first beer we ever made is winning over the Miller Lite crowd. We haven't been able to stop making that beer," founder/co-owner Augie Carton (pictured above) said Saturday during an open house/brewery tour. "It's definitely become its own thing, and we will make it again, even though we thought we'd only ever make it that one time.

"There are those bars in New Jersey that are craft and want to cure people of Miller Lite, and they find they are having enormous success with Launch, where I thought they would have an enormous amount of success with Boat."

Boat was the catalyst for Augie and his cousin, Chris Carton, to start the brewery with their homebrewer friend Jesse Ferguson, (who is now the brewer for Carton Brewing). They wanted a beer that was as full-flavored as a double IPA from start to finish, yet session strength to be enjoyed over a few pints without ending up incoherent and on the floor.

"Boat is playing more to the craft beer crowd as a quaffable IPA," Augie says. "We thought it would play better to the wings community. What we've found is, it's killing in places of IPA drinkers who were having the same troubles we were having ... places like Cloverleaf (in Caldwell), which is a robust beer drinkers bar. They've got a collection of IPA-drinking regulars. Those guys wanted a beer they could have multiples of."

Three months in the New Jersey beer scene, Carton's lineup also features the double IPA 077XX, which with Launch, kicked off the brand, and a table beer BDG, a riff on biere de garde (the beer is actually more of a brown ale), or you can think of it this way: brunch, dinner, grub.

"It's doing well, better than expected, and for people who don't like hops – the rest of our beers tend toward hops so much – that's working for the brown ale/malt crowd," Augie says. "And now we're working on our milk stout because we're Carton, and you can't not have a carton of milk."

The stout, dosed with a mid-kettle addition of Bullion hops, is now in a second generation of pilot brewing, with another test batch or two to be done before a final version will be brewed in time to hit the market in late December or the start of next year. The goal now is to dial back some of the customary sweetness found in milk stouts.

"We don't really like sweet beers. The problem is, milk stout is inherently a sweet beer. I think the guys like Keegan (Mother's Milk) really nail it. It's just not too sweet," Augie says. "We're big into the session beer idea, and I don't find any beer as sessionable as a good low-alcohol stout. So that's what we want our milk stout to be.

"It's going to come in around 4 (percent ABV), and what we're doing is taking a super-roasty, just a ridiculously acrid over-roasted, malt bill and mashing it up against the sweetness of milk, and try to find the complexity to get you through a fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th pint."

Meanwhile, Augie says the fledgling brewery is already discovering the byproduct of their beers being well-received in the marketplace: the matter of keeping pace with demand. Carton Brewing is already talking about adding more capacity, unless their production schedule can be tweaked without compromising quality of the beer.

"We're in 40 places in New Jersey. We hit that right around eight weeks; we've been open 10 or eleven," he says. "We kind of had to stop. If people come to us and ask for our beer, we'll sell it to them, but we're not really pushing to get into new places because the last thing we want to do is let down those (initial) places."

To keep pace, though, new tank space could come online by next year's boating season.

"I think we're going to order it at the beginning of 2012. I think we're going to need it come summer," Augie says. "We've got an account right down the street that's selling six sixtels a week of Boat. By our business plan, they were only supposed to be selling one sixtel a week of Boat. They're selling six sixtels a week of Boat in November; it's going to be a dozen in June, so by June, we have to be able to make more Boat.

"Part of that is figuring out the true capacity of this brewery," he says.

A look at Flying Fish's future home

2011-11-11T00:09:00.011-05:00

Records, brake pads, and in a few months' time, beer.

Flying Fish's recently acquired building in Somerdale has led a few different lives in New Jersey's manufacturing world, but its new lease on life – a state-of-the-art beer producer – promises to give New Jersey its first-ever automated craft brewery and the first automated brewery in South Jersey in decades.

"A lot of our investment is on the packaging, and having more automation," Flying Fish founder Gene Muller said Wednesday after a walk-through of the building. "Our bottling line can do three times the speed than we do now, because we're hand packing it. We're just growing into our equipment."

It was last April when word got out that Flying Fish, long in need of a bigger facility and thwarted on previous attempts to find that larger space, had finally landed a suitable site that would fit the brewery's current and future needs.

Last week, Flying Fish officially announced what everyone had long accepted as fact: 1940 Olney Avenue in Cherry Hill, the only physical location the brewery founded on the World Wide Web in 1995 has ever known, would fade into glory by mid-spring of 2012, a farewell to the place that grew to producing 14,000 barrels of beer a year and hosted countless tours and twice-a-year Internet open houses that were halted a few years ago when space became an issue.

Right now, the new Somerdale home, tucked behind a Walmart just off Route 30, looks like an old, sprawling industrial complex that hasn't seen a tenant quite in a while.

"It needs a lot of work, but it's a nice, big open space," Gene says. "We've got enough land – five acres. We can't build on any of that because most of it is wetlands. But it will give us a chance to do maybe some parkland, rain gardens, things like that ... If we can get some favorable legislation, then we can either do events or festivals. It would be a great spot for that."

Flying Fish has just begun to scratch the surface on turning the place into brewery.

They've cut drain trenches into the concrete floor of the portion where the brewhouse, fermenters and packaging will be set up, with more of that work to follow in the coming days.

Head brewer Casey Hughes (pictured above), no stranger to using AutoCAD, has been designing the brewery floor plan, with the help of sales director Andy Newell's wife.

(With just a little over a month and a half left in 2011, it looks like Flying Fish will produce only one brew this year in its Exit Series – Exit 9, the 9% ABV red ale that came out back in March. The next Exit beer is all worked out, as far as style and ingredients go, but the time crunch devoted to continuing to produce core brands and the Somerdale move may mean brewing the beer before year's end will have to be sacrificed. Fear not, Casey says the jump in brewing capacity thanks to the new home means some more past Exits can be brewed again.)

In a couple weeks' time, Casey is due to jet to northern Italy for training on the new kegging system, and then head to north Bavaria for training on the new German-manufactured automated 50-barrel brewhouse that will feed new 150-barrel fermenters, tripling Flying Fish's production capacity and making New Jersey's largest craft brewer look something like Troegs Brewing's new place in Hershey, Pa., only about half the size.

Somerdale, NJ, 08083
At just under 1.5 square miles, Somerdale is a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of town, one of those small towns in the flow of cars along Route 30 through Camden County. (Not quite 10 miles south of Cherry Hill, Somerdale is accessible off the New Jersey Turnpike from Exit 3.)

Somerdale officials have welcomed Flying Fish, happy the brewery is breathing new life into a 40something-year-old industrial site that has sat empty for the past couple of years, not to mention endured long stretches of sitting idle between uses. When it was occupied, the building housed a handful of manufacturing companies, such as a brake pads, and most recently millwork.

But the site is probably best remembered as the Superior Record Pressing plant, a use that would resonate with folks who remember when 12-inch vinyl LPs and 7-inch 45s were fixtures in the music industry.

Superior was part of Motown Records' vertical integration. The Somerdale site, bought by Motown founder/producer Berry Gordy in the early 1970s, was the forerunner to a sister record plant Motown had in Phoenix, Ariz. (Do an Internet search and you'll find the plant name pops up in recording industry news stories from the mid- to late-1970s in Billboard magazine.)

"It was originally just a warehouse for Motown Records in this region," Gene says. "Motown got so big that they actually started pressing the records here. Then he (Gordy) put a second floor onto the building, kind of a private office area, a kitchen and all of that. They were here for about a decade."

Once the new location is up and running, Flying Fish Version 2.0 will mark the return of automated brewing to South Jersey, something missing since Eastern Brewing, in Hammonton in Atlantic County, closed in the 1980s.

"That was a huge building. If you take the Atlantic City train, you can still see some of the old brewery buildings – they've been converted into offices and stuff. But that would be the last big one," Gene says. "Camden Brewing shut down in the mid-'50s, and I guess Trenton, Champale (Malt Liquor), that was down in the '70s, maybe early '80s."

Editor's note: The record image is a Photoshop creation, a mash-up of a Flying Fish keg collar and Web-grab of a 45 rpm record.

Turtle Stone scores some key financing

2011-11-09T07:55:00.003-05:00

A fresh round of financing for Turtle Stone Brewing.

Turtle Stone on Monday got the green light from city officials in Vineland, the planned brewery's host town, for a $50,000 low-interest economic development loan.

Founder Ben Battiata says the cash will help pay for the production brewery's kegging equipment. "That's the last bit of equipment we have to get together," he says.

The kind of financing just approved for Turtle Stone is essentially collected state sales taxes being put back to work in the local economies that generated them.

Loans originated under the city's Urban Enterprise Zone program (part of a likewise-named New Jersey program to boost hard-pressed local economies) are partly funded by the sales taxes, and when those loans are repaid, the pool of available cash for future loans grows.

Turtle Stone applied for the funds around the beginning of last summer and was approved for a round of financing bankrolled by loans that were or are being repaid.

The ever-enduring metaphor for bad beer

2011-11-03T22:19:00.003-04:00

Hey, we don't condone toilet humor, but when you discover the wellspring of piss-water beer, er uh bad beer, it's a public service to point it out.

Flying Fish talks move to Exit 3

2011-11-03T21:09:00.007-04:00

Once upon a time, like in 1995-96, Flying Fish described its emergence on the craft (back then micro) brewing scene as going from minnow to fish.

Now, the soon-to-be-departing-Cherry Hill brewery, and its 14,000-barrel output, is growing from a tuna into marlin, so to speak. A bigger Fish, indeed.

Via the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild newsletter today and its own website, FF offered some details of its planned move to Somerdale (that's Exit 3 in beer series lingo), where it will make beer on a state-of-the-art 50 barrel German-manufactured brewhouse and draw its juice (or some of it) via rooftop solar panels. (Still in Camden County, Somerdale is just a bottle cap's throw from Cherry Hill.)

A decade and a half after launching with an ESB (one that would in six months' time earn compliments from famed beer hunter Michael Jackson), an extra pale ale (a light beer without being nondescript light), a tasty porter still remembered by a few folks (alas it's gone, morphed into an imperial seasonal with the addition of coffee), and quickly weaving an abbey dubbel into the lineup, Flying Fish is tripling its capacity and promising some changes to its flight of beers. (In our recollection, FF has never brewed a lager. And since you can find head brewer Casey Hughes from time to time enjoying a Sly Fox Pikeland Pilsner at Good Dog in Philadelphia, maybe a pils is in the Fish's future.)

Interesting, too, is the fact that FF's expansion comes amid a surge in New Jersey craft brewing, with the addition of seven new licensees since mid-2009, and only a couple of casualties in that bunch (Newark's Port 44 Brew Pub, which closed last summer after only a year on the scene, and Great Blue Brewing, a nano that sort of started and stopped amid some technical troubles, but hasn't thrown in the towel).

It's a good time to be following brewed-in-Jersey.

Jersey beer trivia: Flying Fish is the only brewery in the state (maybe even the country) to have a cartoon drawn for it by a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist. Two-time Pulitzer winner Steve Breen, who worked at the Asbury Park Press in the 1990s, sketched a Cheshire-like cat perched between a pint of Fish and fish in a bowl, devilishly eyeing the brew Fish, not the finned fish.

Make it big

2011-11-03T13:29:00.007-04:00

Some Jersey-brewed big beers to talk about: a first-ever barleywine by Tun Tavern brewer Tim Kelly; the upcoming release of Cricket Hill's pro-am brew; a reprise of Climax Brewing's imperial stout; and a new dimension in take-home beer from Trap Rock.

Thirst for first
Brewers come and go, but sometimes the beers they make end up staying, brewed by the next hands to take over. And sometimes a few of the predecessor's beers stay in mind. Such is the case at the Tun, where memories of Ted Briggs' barleywine have survived for some folks more than four years after Ted left Atlantic City. (Ted's now the brewer at Lander Brewing in Wyoming.)

Amid that scenario, Tim Kelly, who took over for Ted in May 2007, decided to brew a barleywine. Coming in at 11% ABV, it's one of the biggest beers Tim has made professionally, edging out a Belgian tripel made last spring off a pro-am contest sponsored at the Tun, a wee heavy Tim did in 2010 and a Belgian brown he has done for the holidays in years past.

"Rumors keep perpetuating that I did this awesome barleywine and I hadn't done it in a while; they must be confusing me with the former brewer ... So to appease everyone, and also to challenge myself a little, I decided to develop a barleywine," Tim says. "It's dry-hopped with Cascade, aged on French oak; it's been conditioning for a couple months now. It will come out after the pumpkin lager, so this will probably be after Thanksgiving. I'll probably end up bottling about 100 bottles for retail sale, sit on them and let them age and sell them next year."

The pumpkin lager (a 7% brew) is almost gone, and when it does kick, that will open up a tap for a maple black walnut brown ale that Tim brewed a few weeks ago.

Stout royalty
Speaking of pro-ams, next month will see a teaser release of Cricket Hill's imperial stout, brewed from homebrewer Bill Kovach's recipe that bested 32 other brews in the contest Cricket Hill sponsored a year ago.

Brewery co-owner John Watts says the 10.5% ABV stout is set for official release in bombers in January, but fans of the Fairfield brewery will get an early shot at it in a prerelease event to coincide with a mid-December Friday open house.

Folks long familiar with Cricket Hill know the brewery staked out a place on the Garden State beer-scape with a flight of session beers and has been moving deeper into reserve-series big beers, notably among them an 8.5% barleywine done in 2010 that also got some bourbon barrel treatment.

Some of the barrel-aged stock got stashed away for special occasions, John says, so Cricket Hill fans should keep an eye out for them. "I can tell you, a year of aging on that, it's spectacular," he says.

Stout royalty, redux
In nearby Roselle Park, next month brewer Dave Hoffmann plans to turn out bomber bottles of his Hoffmann Doppelbock, a traditional toasty, caramel-like heritage brew (Dave's of German lineage), formerly only available from Climax Brewing as draft and in 64-ounce growlers.

"I've been making it for a long time, for like 10 years now. It's one of my favorite styles. I make it every year for the holidays," Dave says.

Climax Brewing began turning out six-packs last summer thanks to a newly acquired bottler. The bomber-bottled bock marks Climax Brewing working yet another label from its beer lineup into the brewery's new packaging model.

Early next year, look for another Climax brew to come out in 22-ouncers: an imperial stout that will make a reprise after a decade-plus hiatus. To be named Tuxedo Imperial Stout, the brew salutes the black cat, Tuxedo, that has mouse-policed Climax's brewery for 13 years.

"She did her job for all these years, so we take care of her now. She's getting older, so before she dies I want to make a beer for her," Dave says. "It'll probably be 8 or 9% alcohol, big and burly, a little hoppy in the finish ... it's the recipe I made 10 or 12 years ago. I made it twice already, but it was a long time ago, but this time it will be in bottles."

Rock in a bottle
Speaking of bottles, brewer Charlie Schroeder at Trap Rock has racked off about 30 1-liter bottles of the Berkeley Heights brewpub's Jet Fuel Double IPA, a step toward getting Trap Rock's bigger beers into more user-friendly take-home sizes (high-alcohol brews in growlers, especially ones like barleywines, aren't always the best idea, easy to finish in one drinking session).

Jet Fuel (yes, the brew's name speaks to the New York Jets and their followers in the Trap Rock locale) clocks in at 9.5% ABV, stuffed full of Nugget, Challenger, East Kent, Willamette and Bramling Cross hops.

Trap Rock added a third 7-barrel fermenter last month (it now has 3 of them, plus three 15-barrel tanks) to boost capacity, keep pace with growing demand and enable more runs of the bigger, specialty beers.

The long-range plan, Charlie says, also includes having have more of the big brews available in the take-home bottles and to set some of them aside as reserve brews for inclusion on the beer menu.

The new tank has necessitated some rearranging in the brewery space, plus some additional installation, before the bigger beers will be completely integrated into the brewpub's work flow.

NJ lieutenant gov pays a call on Flying Fish

2011-10-24T22:36:00.005-04:00

Another sign that Trenton is coming around to craft beer's industry potential.

New Jersey Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno toured Flying Fish's digs on Monday.

FF's tweet off the day says Guadagno, the No. 2 in the Chris Christie administration, talked about craft brewing growth in the Garden State, and founder Gene Muller, via email, called the meeting productive.

Christie's not exactly popular in union and public employee circles, thanks to some budget austerity since taking office last year.

But his administration has been craft-beer friendly. If you recall back in May, Christie signed a proclamation for American Craft Beer Week in New Jersey, coinciding with the national observance.

And now, the lieutenant governor drops in on Flying Fish. The visit puts FF and its growth (plus the planned move a few miles away to Somerdale) in the spotlight, but the state's craft brewing industry should be able to enjoy a bounce off this moment, too.

Craft brewing is a $7 billion-a-year industry nationally, and having the governor's office warm up to Garden State beer-makers could help improve the odds for overhauling the state's brewing industry regulations and put New Jersey on par with New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware, where the rules are more brewer-friendly.

That, obviously, would make New Jersey brewers more competitive.

And who knows, maybe Trenton will fall in love with craft brewing and show it like New York State did to Brooklyn Brewery in 2009.

Keeping tabs on the rising count

2011-10-11T22:25:00.011-04:00

Some numbers to peruse ...

The Brewers Association, the trade association representing the majority of U.S. brewing companies, maintains a searchable database of breweries across the country and in the U.S. territories of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

The lists for the states and territories also include breweries in development, a number that comes to 739 (up from 618 the Brewers Association reported back in March, by our count).

The 739 figure is a soft number – more proposed breweries can end up in the database or come off, plus there may be some planned breweries that the Brewers Association is unaware of, while some in the database may no longer be viable, as is the case for a project still listed for Landing, N.J.

Simply put, however, the database addition is certainly a reflection of the growing number of folks looking to get into the craft beer business, hoping to join the more than 1,750 breweries now churning out beer in the U.S.

Here are some breakdowns gleaned from the database:

California, a big state with a large, beer-friendly population, leads with the way with 98 in breweries development, followed by Texas (49) and Colorado (48).

The Garden State clocks in with 17 – nearly as many projects in development as there are craft brewers operating in New Jersey (19).

Odds are, most of the Jersey projects are production breweries of some sort, whether nano or larger.

Brewpubs prove to be a tough path, given municipal – not state – control over bar licensing, a condition that sharply drives up the start-up costs. (Despite that, there currently is a brewpub project in development, Laetare in Monmouth County.)

Nonetheless, 2011 has been one of the busiest for startups in the state since its early days of craft brewing in the mid-1990s. (Still, though, the Brewers Association ranks New Jersey 42nd in breweries per capita, with one brewery for every 439,595 people. The Garden State has about the same number of breweries as Vermont, which has the best per capita ratio. New Jersey's dense population, of course, busts the curve for us.)

The current growth phase over the past two years comes on the heels of a 10-year drought in adding new beer-makers. Changing demographics – the age 21-to-30 crowd is heavily into full-bodied beers of all styles – and bars' stampede to add craft taps are giving a lot of homebrewers and others who entertained the idea to start a brewery the confidence that they can make a go of it.

"New Jersey is not so much making up for a lost decade, as simply picking up where they left off," says industry watcher Lew Bryson, who co-authored New Jersey Breweries (2008) with Mark Haynie.

"Beer bars have been doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and now that some of the more conservative-minded beer sellers have been convinced that this 'microbrew thing' has legs, there's opportunity for a small brewer," Lew says. "Is it a startup bubble? Some of them aren't going to make it, sure, but that's going to happen in any surge like this, in any industry. Three steps forward, one step back. Demand keeps rising; you need more capacity to fill it, and you need more new beers to drive it."

Jersey snapshot
State regulators, so far in 2011, have licensed four production breweries – two nanos (Great Blue and Cape May Brewing) and two beer-makers with brewhouses at 15 barrels or greater (Carton and Kane Brewing).

Three more are sprinting to toward the finish line – Flounder, Tuckahoe and Turtle Stone – and expect to get the green light to begin making beer by the end of the year.

Much farther behind them are ones like Blackthorn Brewing, a planned father-daughter enterprise, and Black River Brewing, a planned Pennsylvania project with ties to New Jersey.

Chip Town and his daughter, Jacqui, of Jackson in Ocean County, are still siting a location for Blackthorn Brewing but envision their brewery of malty English and Irish ales ending up in their home county or southern Monmouth County.

Part of the banking world for 30 years, Chip, 55, has been making beer at home for the past 15 years; Jacqui, 25, a recent graduate of The College of New Jersey with degrees in marketing and chemistry, has been homebrewing seriously for three years.

(Jacqui came up with the brewery name, a nod to Ireland and the iconic walking sticks; Chip's mother's family is from County Roscommon, in the northwest of Ireland. The Towns also maintain a blog about their project.)

On the drawing boards for a couple of years now, Chip says plans call for Blackthorn to have a 20-barrel brewhouse to feed 40-barrel fermenters and hit the market in bottles and draft. The Towns are in the process of completing their business plan and will then pursue private investors.

"Once I have capital in my fist, I'll be out looking for warehouse space, hiring a brewer and start ordering stainless," Chip says. He doesn't expect problems with finding a location. "I've been working with a commercial real estate broker (who says) there's a lot of quality food-grade commercial space available out there because of the economy."

Blackthorn has been able to tap industry insiders for advice, something Chip is grateful for, noting Jersey brewers and their counterparts across the country have readily answered questions he's had.

"I've spoken to people in Texas, New York, Colorado ... Gene Muller (from Flying Fish) has been a huge help to me. He's let me pick his brain," Chip says. "Jesse Ferguson at Carton has been helpful; they've just gone through everything we're going through."

The Towns expect Blackthorn beer to find a niche in the local market. "Seeing what Mike Kane and Augie and Chris Carton are making – they're doing the West Coast styles – no one seems to be focusing on the maltier profile," Chip says.

Jersey vs. Pennsylvania, a business decision
Dave Grosch lives in Flemington in Hunterdon County, where he owns D&K Specialty Coffee, a wholesale coffee distribution company that supplies restaurants. He's also into brewing beer at home, quite active in the hobby over the past seven years. Dave, 45, even got to lend a hand at River Horse Brewing on a day the Lambertville brewery was making a batch of its flagship lager.

He's done well in homebrew competitions across the Delaware River, last year earning the title Homebrewer of the Year in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Friends suggested Dave go commercial. A fellow homebrewer in his club circles, Bryan Clayton, 30, of Lansdale, Pa., had designs on going pro, too. (Bryan is a project manager for a clinical research company.)

The two teamed up for Black River Brewing, a production brewery project they want to equip with a 20-barrel brewhouse and locate in Bucks County, Pa. They're eyeing the greater Philadelphia market, hoping to enter it with a Vienna lager, saison, IPA, and porter in bottles and draft.

Dave says they're working on a business plan and are about to begin raising cash for the project; then they'll pin down a location.

They chose Bryan's home state because the business climate is friendlier to craft brewing than New Jersey is. Among their concerns is New Jersey's restrictions on retail sales from the brewery, long a complaint among some Garden State craft brewers.

In Pennsylvania, Black River would be able to sell from the brewery tasting room everything from pints to kegs, so long as it adheres to seating requirements and sells some quantity of food. That's not possible in New Jersey, where production brewers' retail allowance is currently restricted to two six-packs or two growlers for consumption off premises.

"The main advantage is, you can be like a bar, but you're not trying to be the corner bar," Dave says.

Such sales, he says, would be vital revenue stream in addition to distribution to bars on either side of the Delaware, and in Pennsylvania state stores and packaged goods stores in New Jersey.

The brewery's name, incidentally, is a nod to the Lamington River in New Jersey and the Black River in Ireland, where Bryan has family roots.

Still a nano, just a bigger nano

2011-10-07T18:23:00.005-04:00

A capacity boost at Cape May Brewing Company.

The nanobrewer located in Lower Township in Cape May County has stepped up its brewing batch size to 1.5 barrels and has added five 2-barrel fermenters that will allow the brewery to phase out the nine 35-gallon fermenters it began operations with back in late spring.

The quick jump to a tripled brewing capacity is part of Cape May's business plan, says co-founder Ryan Krill.

The original brewing setup – designed Chris Henke, the company's brewer, and fashioned from repurposed half-barrel kegs – was directed more at getting the nanobrewery licensed and up and running in the craft beer market than it was to brew and maintain a flow of beer inventory.

"The new setup is stainless steel tanks Chris got from a stainless distributor and got welded with fittings. It's more efficient," says co-founder Ryan Krill, who took some time on Friday to talk about the brewery's jump from brewing 12- to 13-gallon batches to 46 gallons.

Other changes include the addition of a second cold box and regularly scheduled brewery tours. The tours began in July as announced-date events but are now set for each Saturday (noon to 4 p.m.). The tours have proved popular, Ryan says, drawing crowd sizes of 100 people during the allotted hours.

Also, the brewery has also joined the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild, one of three newly licensed craft breweries in the state to do so. (Kane Brewing and Carton Brewing, both in Monmouth County, are the other two.)

Cape May is still supplying a single bar account (the oceanfront Cabanas in Cape May), but Ryan says the tiny beer company that he started with his dad, Robert, and college friend Chris has seen a gradual increase in production.

The brewery produced 16 barrels from July to September, in the form of their flagship Cape May IPA, a one-off dark IPA (a beer that was done on a lark, so it's highly improbable to ever see it return), a porter, stout and wheat beer.

Heading into the Thanksgiving holiday you can expect a cranberry wheat beer, Ryan says.

Elsewhere
Speaking of Carton Brewing, the Atlantic Highlands production brewery that came online in August will begin conducting brewery tours this weekend, Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. (Judging from their website, this week they pilot-brewed a milk stout – Carton of Milk Stout – a brew that was always in the company game plan.)

Additionally, Carton is teaming with Kane Brewing, the Ocean Township production brewery that opened last July, for a benefit beer dinner on Oct. 14th.

Chocolate & Beer, Beer & Chocolate

2011-10-06T19:01:00.004-04:00

Chocolate stout, chocolate porter ...

When it comes to putting chocolate in beer, those two styles are ready candidates.

Which is why Iron Hill brewer Chris LaPierre, looking for something a little different, opted out of those styles and turned a brown ale into a chocolate brown ale loaded with 22 pounds of dark Belgian chocolate for an October beer release at the Maple Shade brewpub.

The beer and a truffle, made with wort from Iron Hill's mash tun by chocolatier Mike Collins of Reily's Candy in Medford, were the centerpiece of an event this past Wednesday night that also saw a selection of Reily chocolates* paired with IH beers.

The video gives you the backstory to how this fusion came about. But the quick version goes something like this: Chris grew up in Medford and knew of Reily's, a 40-year fixture in the Burlington County town. Mike, who's been with Reily's for almost half of the shop's existence, is a Iron Hill mug club member and discovered IH beers at the company's West Chester, Pa., location.

Combining their crafts seemed like a natural idea, and the result is Reily's Chocolate Ale and the Iron Hill truffle.

*The pairings at the October 5th event:

70% Cacao with Gogi berries & Abbey Dubbel
Tierra Missou Truffle & Bourbon Wee Heavy
Jalapeno Chocolate & Ironbound Ale
Vanilla Caramel & Oktoberfest
Bourbon-Soaked Cherry Cordial & Cherry Vanilla Porter
Iron Hill Chocolate with Caramelized Wort & Reilly’s Chocolate Ale

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

2011-10-06T10:03:00.007-04:00

Apple founder Steve Jobs died yesterday, and if you own an iPad, iPhone or an iPod, you can't escape how profound the guy's vision shaped your life.

Jobs knew what you wanted before you did. And that's how Apple made really cool stuff, game-changing stuff.

In a trickle-down fashion, Jobs shaped craft beer enthusiasts' lives, too. Just look at all the beer apps for the smart phones that are out there now, then remember that the iPhone revolutionized mobile phones and turned us all into a gadget-wielding bunch.

On a much more local level, the stuff that sprang from Jobs' mind has had a hand in New Jersey craft beer, from its leading edge to its current growth phase.

Flying Fish set up shop in Cherry Hill 15 years ago with Macs as its business computer platform (and on the Web a year ahead of that).

Before Carton Brewing began sending beer out the door this summer in Atlantic Highlands, you would find Augie Carton enthusiastically using an iPad to show off versions of the brewery's marketing materials and tap handle prototypes.

And finally, not to be self-serving, this blog site has always spun from Apple gear: Every word, image and video has made it to the Web thanks to a Mac or Apple software.

So if you're enjoying a beer today, take a moment to toast a visionary.

Hold up your end of the bargain

2011-10-05T12:49:00.007-04:00

River Horse Brewing holds its annual Oktoberfest from 1-6 p.m. on Saturday at the brewery on Lambert Lane in Lambertville.

The brew lineup for this pay-as-you-go event is Lager, Special Ale, Tripel Horse, Hop A Lot Amus, Hop Hazard, Hipp O Lantern and their new Brewer's Reserve, a dunkelweizen; the featured musical entertainment is Ludlow Station, the jam band head brewer Chris Rakow plays guitar in. (Check 'em out here, playing at last April's ShadFest.)

Unlike past years, the 2011 edition is a one-day-only affair (rain date is Sunday; past editions of the fest were spread over the weekend), and the brewery is calling on its legions of fans to lend a hand to a couple of local food pantries that are struggling to keep up with demand for their help in the flat economy.

So if you're going, pack along some of these items, and consider it holding up your end of the bargain in return for the great gig that River Horse puts on ...

Canned soups, tuna, salmon, chicken, vegetables
Canned or dried beans
Rice and whole grains
Pasta
Tomato sauce
100% fruit juices
Condiments - ketchup, mustard, salad dressings, etc.
Baking mixes
Cereal- hot and cold
Baby food
Sugar-free items (juice mixes, Jello, pudding, etc.)
Dog and cat food

Cheers.

Turtle Stone projects December licensing

2011-10-03T19:53:00.006-04:00

Craft beer's return to New Jersey's southwestern reaches looks to be entering a homestretch, as the planned Vineland-based brewery Turtle Stone Brewing expects to get its brewhouse set up this fall and potentially licensed to start making beer toward the end of the year.

If successful with that pace, Turtle Stone will become the third production brewer licensed in the Garden State this year (the others are Kane Brewing and Carton Brewing, both in Monmouth County); 2011, as a growth year, is on track to see the most craft brewers – seven – get the green light from regulators since 1996, when craft brewing was still getting established in New Jersey.

Turtle Stone founder Ben Battiata (that's Ben above on the right, talking to Mark Haynie of Mid-Atlantic Brewing News) took some time last week to talk about the progress with his brewery, the first in Cumberland County since Blue Collar Brewing ceased operations in Vineland seven years ago.

BSL: You had your 15-barrel brewhouse and fermenters in storage for a while. Where are they now?
BB: Right now they're in our brewery facility. The next step is getting our floor done and we'll be able to get the equipment set up ... I've got to do some electrical and plumbing work, set up my cold room, set up my tanks. Then we'll be set to go.

BSL: The regulators with the state, they're telling you early December?
BB: They've reassured us – as long as our equipment is set up to their satisfaction when they come out and do their inspections – we'll be approved by December.

BSL: You're so close you can taste it?
BB: I'm getting very anxious. It's really close.

BSL: You also redid the company logo ...
BB: We did. We ran a contest online through a graphic arts website. I think there was 120 different designs to choose from and we did select a design. It actually turned out nice. I like it a lot and we got a lot of good feedback on it.

BSL: Has anything changed with the beers that you want to enter the market with?
BB: Not really. We still want to go with the jasmine green tea blond (ale), and we still want to do the American stout. They're probably going to be the two first beers we put out there. I'd like to work in a winter seasonal beer; that's in the works right now. One of the first seasonals, or specialty beers, we're going to do is – Vineland is considered the dandelion capital of the world – so we're going to make a saison using dandelions and lemongrass. It's going to be like a nice spring seasonal beer.

BSL: You're a big supporter of locally produced commodities. What are your thoughts on that, and who out there in the wider world that is your neighborhood of South Jersey can assist you with that?
BB: Being located in South Jersey, we have quite a bit of farmers just in the town we're in alone. I know a lot of beekeepers. Our honey jasmine green tea beer is going to use local honey. If I could get any other locally grown products to put into that I will. It's difficult to get as much barley that we need locally, so I don't know if that's going to be the case. With the dandelion beer, I have some growers right now who are going to grow the dandelions for me for that particular beer.

BSL: Besides the honey and dandelions, what are some other possible commodities?
BB: What I plan on doing for our fall beer, rather than a pumpkin ale, as an alternative, we plan to use local sweet potatoes, maple syrup and some additional spices. It's actually based on a sweet potato casserole recipe that I make every year. So I'm making a liquid version of that.

BSL: You're raising money, via a website, for packaging equipment. The $30,000 goal isn't a deal breaker, is it?
BB: No, no. The Kickerstarter thing is a campaign we decided to do. It's based on more creative-minded ideas. We actually had to apply and get approved – our idea actually had to get approved by this particular company. It's money to assist towards probably our bottling system. Initially we're going to start with kegging. But the money itself is going help to purchase our packaging equipment, which we've yet to purchase.

BSL: Have you looked into getting financial assistance through that program backed by Boston Beer?
BB: We did actually look into it. Our county is too far south. They do actually approve certain areas of New Jersey (where) they will process these loans. For us, we're too far south.

BSL: These days, no one gets into the craft brewing game without doing some serious back-channel work – outreach to places like bars, the places that can push the product. How have you networked?
BB: Our area is a little deprived of craft beer (bars). We're going to push the local idea. That's actually good enough for a lot of these bars that don't really carry craft beers. They want to carry something that people have some connection to, whether it's the town that they live in that the beer's coming from, or the neighboring town. That's something that I think is going to help us a lot. Everybody is welcoming to the idea. We've gotten such good reception.

As long as we've been planning this – which has been over five years at least – a lot of people have been anticipating, have been waiting, so there's also that aspect. I think once we're out in the market, they're going to be jumping for it.

Oct. 18 release for new Beach Haus brew

2011-10-03T13:42:00.006-04:00

East Coast Beer Company is poised to release its second label, a fall-winter seasonal follow-up to its Beach Haus Classic American Pilsner, which debuted in the Garden State craft beer market a little over a year ago.

Beach Haus Winter Rental, a German schwarzbier-inspired black lager (5% ABV), was brewed a couple weeks ago in Rochester, N.Y., at High Falls Brewing, East Coast's contract brewer.

East Coast president John Merklin says the beer will be bottled and kegged Oct. 17 and brought into New Jersey Oct. 18.

John describes the dark-ruby colored brew as a medium-bodied beer with a maltiness and roastiness, a hint of chocolate and some subdued hops.

"We think it's really in line with what we're trying to do as a beer company – accessible but rich styles. We gravitated toward that as a style because it's the right fit for us," he says.

Don't look for a big release party, but John says the East Coast crew will be hitting the trail soon, radiating out from the company's Point Pleasant home base to promote the new addition to the Beach Haus brand. (A pale ale that has been on East Coast's drawing boards for a while is being targeted for April.)

"We're going to be here, there and everywhere, talking about Winter Rental with folks," John says.

Since East Coast's launch into the New Jersey craft beer market around Labor Day of 2010, the company has extended its reach outside the Garden State.

Beach Haus entered the Pennsylvania market back in June (it's in 14 counties now), and East Coast has met with New York distributors, although it has not signed on with anyone yet.

Back at home, Beach Haus cracked into the suburban chain restaurant scene (the pilsner is in 25 Applebee's locations up and down the state), where craft beer in general has been making deeper inroads against the likes of Bud Light and Coors Light, the long-established brews found at the eateries flanking the malls and shopping centers.

Craft beer's growing presence in such establishments (think Harpoon's IPA at TGI Friday's) is a reflection of its surging popularity. Finding Beach Haus, or any other Garden State brand for that matter, mirrors that trend.

Pinelands Brewing siting new location

2011-10-02T23:08:00.005-04:00

Pinelands Brewing, a South Jersey nanobrewery in development, is looking for a new building and possibly a new host town.

Founder Jason Chapman said the building in Egg Harbor City (in Atlantic County) that he and partner Luke McCooley chose back in the wintertime for their planned 1-barrel brewery now looks to be unsuitable. (That's Jason in the hat, talking to Ben Battiata, of Turtle Stone Brewing, a South Jersey brewery that's in the process of coming online.)

The building had housed a soda company in a former life (that's what made it attractive for a brewery, Jason says) and most recently was the home to an indoor flea market-like business.

Complications with the town have arisen over the location and are forcing Jason and Luke to scrap the building and look elsewhere, possibly in Burlington County.

"We had been leasing the building with the optimism of getting through the city, but have actually hit some hard times with them. It was a tougher battle than we previously could foresee. Right now, we've actually backed out of the lease, and we're scoping out a warehouse in Burlington County," Jason says.

One of the sticking points relates to a pre-existing condition that stipulated the building was to be knocked down to make way for parking for an as-yet unfulfilled city redevelopment project.

City officials wouldn't consider the brewery project as long as the redevelopment condition was still in force, and trying to get it lifted would tie up a lot of time and financial resources.

"For someone trying to start a small business, it's very difficult," Jason says.

The setback is disappointing, Jason concedes, but he says he's looking more forward than backward.

"It's a learning experience. No one said it was going to be easy. When you start this kind of project, the cards are stacked against you," Jason says. "But I remain confident. I will persevere. I'm hungry for this. I want to hold a position in bringing craft beer to South Jersey."

Senses working overtime

2011-09-30T12:22:00.004-04:00

Funny tasting beer is no laughing matter, and when presented with it, we turn up our noses, spit it out and/or shove it away.

Sometimes off flavors are obvious; other times they can be a "what's wrong with this picture?" moment and take a little bit of deduction to zero in on what just killed the pleasure of a pint.

Occasionally, the need to know exactly why is less important than the sensory conclusion that the beer had noticeable flaws, for whatever reason. Other times – like aspiring to become a bona fide beer judge or just to have a well-sharpened palate – you want to be able to draw the more formal conclusions, rather than just settle on the broad summation that the brew went bad.

That's where flavor orienteers come in. (The phrase is our coinage.)

New Yorker Mary Izett is one of those folks who helps you straighten out your taste buds' compass and parse those things that went awry in a brew (she's presenting a workshop on the subject at Amanti Vino in Montclair on Saturday). It's an endeavor she got into five years ago, when she started the NYC Beer & Food Pairing group, and the New York City Degustation Advisory Team a year later with Chris Cuzme, leading people, as she says, "through beer and food pairings and consulting with bars and restaurants."

The New York City/Long Island columnist for for Ale Street News also teaches beer judge certification classes, among other topics on brews, and you'll find her leading educational seminars at Get Real NY fests.

Her tips for putting the finer points of good tasting into your memory banks and not leaving them on the tip of your tongue are a combination of practice and study.

"The best approach is to slow down and focus. When I studied for the BJCP exam back in early 2006, I carried the guidelines and a notebook with me everywhere I went," Mary says via email. "I took notes on every beer I drank, comparing these to the guidelines and really focusing on what I was seeing, smelling and tasting. I learned so much by doing that! And now the BJCP guidelines are available as a smart phone app, and there are some really nice apps for taking beer notes.

"I also highly recommend reading Randy Mosher's Tasting Beer – so much excellent information is contained within this tome. It's a must for anyone looking to improve their beer palate."

Let's not forget, there's plenty of great beer everywhere these days, from great brewers of all stripes. But let's not kid ourselves either. There's some beer out there that's not up to code. And the sources of and reasons for brews tripping the funk alarm in a bad way are many.

"There are plenty of commercial beers that I come across that have off flavors," Mary says. "I just tasted a commercially brewed blond (from a craft brewery) a few days ago that was a (diacetyl) butter bomb. And it was at a very reputable bar that keeps their lines immaculate. I've had flawed brewpub beers, too, and as a BJCP judge, plenty of flawed beers in competitions.

"Dirty lines can also be a problem at some bars. And of course, kegs can be mishandled before they get to a bar, and casks can be poured for too long. There are plenty of opportunities for flaws ... I think you'll come across the most in whatever realm you drink the most, be it homebrew, brewpub or commercial beers."

O-fests on tap

2011-09-30T00:22:00.005-04:00

Oktoberfests on the radar:

Artisan's brewpub in Toms River serves up its annual Oktoberfest on Friday night (7 p.m.), a multicourse affair where the märzen is the headliner (with a main course of short ribs with beer sauce) and a pumpkin ale (with apple strudel) is the encore.

Oct. 8: River Horse's annual salute to the autumn fest in Lambertille. It's set for a 1 p.m. start at the brewery's back lot and will run just one day this year. (Rain date is Sunday, the 9th.)
Oct. 9: Long Valley Oktoberfest, noon, brewpub parking lot.

Upcoming: Ken Burns docu on Prohibition

2011-09-28T22:25:00.012-04:00

Something to keep on your radar for this weekend: filmmaker Ken Burns’ new documentary work, Prohibition, a spotlight on America’s 13-year, wrongheaded experiment with temperance.

The three-part, five-hour series begins at 8 p.m., Sunday (Oct. 2) on PBS. Burns’ documentary, made with Lynn Novick, traces the headwinds of the temperance movement, how it played out and why Prohibition was such a colossal failure.

What makes Burns’ Prohibition worth your time is simple. A lot of what we know or heard about America's going dry is shaped mostly by Hollywood gangster dramas. Burns’ docu serves up a refreshing round of facts, and once again the filmmaker calls upon author Daniel Okrent (a source in the 1994 Burns-Novick docu Baseball). Plus, you may notice a lot of the political fits, obfuscations and maneuverings playing out today look similar to those of the early 20th century.

Okrent’s 2010 book, Last Call, is the definitive account of the Prohibition Era, pulling together all the social and political forces that set the Terrible 13 in motion, and detailing how America stayed wet when the mandate was dry.

The 18th Amendment, and accompanying Volstead Act, marked the first time the nation’s charter took away a right and the first time the country took an eraser (the 21st Amendment) to something it had added to the Constitution.

Prohibition did not ban the partaking of alcoholic beverages. It only outlawed the commercial manufacture, importing, transporting and sale of intoxicating beverages (consequently, lots of religious and medicinal production of spirits and wine resulted, both genuine and disingenuous; homebrewing also got a nice boost).

The result of going dry – the unintended consequences – gave rise to a regiment of gangsters and widespread corruption (in New Jersey, at least two names come up – Newark’s Abner “Longy” Zwillman and Atlantic City’s Nucky Johnson) and a sprawling illegal booze trade (by both land and sea) to slake the thirst of folks who had no intention of ending the party. (Jersey trivia moment: The 18th Amendment was ratified in January 1919, taking effect a year later. The Garden State was the last of the nation’s then 48 states to ratify Prohibition, in 1922, two years after dry had become the law of the land. Connecticut and Rhode Island were the only states to say, “Screw it, we’re not going there,” and did not ratify the go-dry amendment.)

Despite its demise 78 years ago, Prohibition has had a lasting effect: the federal income tax (to replace lost tax revenue on booze); women’s right to vote (suffrage boosted the odds of Prohibition’s passage, since women were at the forefront of temperance); mixed drinks (something was need to cover the shitty taste of bathtub gin); and his and hers restrooms in bars (a byproduct of speakeasies, since before the dry era women usually did not frequent bars, but rather quietly imbibed at home).

There was also a colorful lexicon of slang, of which a few phrases still remain, while others make for great bar names, i.e. blind tiger, rumrunner.

For beer enthusiasts, the end of Prohibition gets celebrated each April 7th, the day beer became legal again in 1933. (Jersey trivia moment: Eight months prior, in August 1932, candidate FDR gave a campaign speech in Sea Girt in Monmouth County, during which the future president talked of giving Prohibition the heave-ho.)

On Sunday, pour yourself a beer and toast the cooler heads who prevailed and consigned Prohibition to the ash heap of history.

NJ @ GABF

2011-09-28T13:44:00.005-04:00

New Jersey beer enthusiasts who descend upon the Great American Beer Festival tomorrow through Saturday will find some of the trappings of home in Denver.

Jersey craft brewers attending the 2011 incarnation of the nation's biggest beer fest are Cricket Hill, Flying Fish, Harvest Moon, Iron Hill and Long Valley.

There's also a group presence of the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild: Flying Fish, Iron Hill, Cricket Hill, Kane Brewing (one of the state's newest breweries), Basil T's and Harvest Moon.

Cheers.

Old World tradition, New World innovation

2011-09-26T23:59:00.007-04:00

Belgian beer made in New Jersey by a Belgian, as an American for Americans.

That's the vision Wim Vanraes has for his planned Saint William Brewery, a project that the Somerset County resident has been nurturing for a year, building momentum via blogging and paying calls on other beer-makers on the Garden State craft brewing landscape that he seeks to join with a triple, a honey ale and an amber ale.

Wim, 31, is a Belgian native who lives in Warren Township and became a U.S. citizen last year.

So far for his planned production brewery, Wim has met with financial and branding consultants – advisers who will become his core management team. The first round of financing is expected to be in place by year's end, Wim says, and a third-generation Belgian brewer who trained him has agreed to work as a consultant and help set up the brewery.

Right now, he's siting a location (the New Brunswick area is a possibility), searching for a viable building that can be adapted to a brewery. Constructing a building is also an option, should a suitable existing building prove elusive. Other details being worked out include what size brew house and fermenters to start with. Of concern is keeping within a financial safe zone, but also ensuring appropriate growth potential has been accounted for.

"There is a lot that comes with opening a brewery nowadays; it isn't sufficient anymore to have a great beer you can make. There is the whole production side to it, but that is not enough in itself," Wim says. "In order to be able to keep making great beer, the brewery has to be successful as a business as well, balancing the passion and art of the brewer with the calculations and projections of the economist. Especially in rough times as we see now, everything needs to be planned and anticipated and prepared for, beyond the beer and production aspects. The reward will be there in the end: great beer, made in a healthy brewery."

Wim was born in Sint-Niklaas, a town in the province of East Flanders. He was raised there and lived there until after graduation from Ghent University eight years ago with a master's in archaeology. (His wife, Melissa Lariviere, teaches second grade. Melissa is originally from Detroit, but moved to New Jersey when she was little.)

Right now Wim works as a freelance translator/proofreader (English to Dutch, Dutch to english). Before the economy soured, he worked with a company that cleans air conditioning units and commercial kitchen exhaust systems. Starting a brewery is a path to career change.

But Wim notes there's much more to it than that. Beer is central to Flemish culture, part of its folk traditions, and something he's been involved with since his youth. It's a catalyst for socializing, a force that unites people.

And that makes it a natural fit.

A chat with Bitting brewer Chris Sheehan

2011-09-21T21:07:00.007-04:00

Newark's only craft beer-maker, Port 44 Brew Pub, folded shop just three months past its first anniversary in Brick City. On July 22, the hottest day of 2011 in Newark – a record 108 degrees Fahrenheit – the financially struggling restaurant-brewery's air-conditioning conked out. The doors closed. (The For Sale sign had already gone up, sometime around the start of July; asking price, $2.1 million.)

Tossed out of work by the closing, brewer Chris Sheehan, who came to Newark fresh from Chelsea Brewing in Manhattan (he also put in time at at Triple Rock Brewery & Alehouse in Berkeley, California, and San Francisco's 20 Tank Brewery), needed a gig, a beer-maker in search of a mash to strike.

Opportunity knocked in late August, after J.J. Bitting brewer James Moss decided to relocate to New England.

Two brews (a brown ale and a hop harvest ale) into his tenure as keeper of the brewhouse in Woodbridge, Chris took some time last week from washing kegs and other duties to talk about brewing and the beers he wants to make at Bitting. He also fielded some questions about Port 44.

BSL: How long have you been with Bitting?
CS: I've been here for just over three weeks now. After Port 44 laid me off, I was unemployed for about two weeks and then picked up one week of work over at Greenpoint in Brooklyn, just one week of work there. While I was working there, I had already been in communication with Mike (owner Mike Cerami). Mike was looking for someone to step in here, so I ended up coming over here. In these economic times, been unemployed for only two weeks is not all that bad.

BSL: Bitting has its lineup of beers that are always expected to be on a share of its six taps, but you're going to bring some things to that mix, right?
CS: Mike told me the only three beers he wants to keep on at all times are the golden (Victoria's Golden Ale), the raspberry (wheat) and the amber (Avenel Amber). After that, I have room to work within my styles. I'll still bounce things off of him ... I do want to make sure the customers here are happy. I personally can't stand pumpkin beers, but I'm going to be doing a pumpkin beer. From what I gather it's been pretty popular here; I don't want to disappoint the customers.

BSL: One of your preferred styles of beer is stout, right?
CS: Well, I have a reputation for stouts. Six of my eight Great American Beer Festival medals were for stouts. By the same token, I consider myself more of California-style brewer, or a West Coast brewer.

BSL: You worked in San Francisco for a while.
CS: Yeah, my career began in California. My whole philosophy and approach is, if I'm doing a wheat beer, I'll do an American-style wheat beer. When I think of East Coast brewers, I think of brewing much more in traditional European beer styles. When I think of West Coast, I think American styles.

BSL: Lots of resiny hops ...
CS: Lots of hops, yes, in the appropriate styles. There are other styles that are not so hoppy, but are American styles, like wheat beer for example, like an American-style wheat beer versus a German hefeweizen. This place in the past has been pretty much a classic East Coast-style brewery. That's where I'm going to be bringing a little more of a different approach, as far as my philosophy being more West Coast. Not necessarily hops all over the place, but yes hops come up a little bit more in some of the beers. But at the same time, as far as the styles I brew, I'm gonna steer away from German-style hefeweizen. I'm probably gonna do an American-style wheat beer instead, come next summer. Maybe I'll do a wheat wine in the wintertime. I don't have a specific plan at this point, I'm just kinda feeling my way at this point. I have respect for the regular customers, and I don't want to come in here and just start throwing all sorts of stuff at them they're not into. It's important the customers want to drink the beer you're brewing.

BSL: But perhaps they will be able to, at some point, have a signature Chris Sheehan stout?
CS: Right. Definitely. The brown ale, we have it on cask right now, it's waiting to come on when we run out of dunkelweizen. That is basically what Mike wanted to be our dark beer for now. He didn't want to go totally into stouts at this point. But when that brown ale runs out, we'll follow it with a stout.

BSL: Bitting has traditionally done a barleywine ...
CS: Yeah, and that's where I touched on wheat wine instead of barleywine. I doubt that it's ever been done here. I'm all for a barleywine, too. I have no problem with a barleywine.

BSL: Have you done them a lot?
CS: Yeah, I've done barleywines in the past. I had a whimsically named beer over at Chelsea – it was a barleywine – just for a joke, we called it Imperial Mild. That was when everyone was doing imperial versions of everything, imperial brown ale, imperial pilsner. So OK, here's an imperial mild.

BSL: Three months from now, what would somebody coming here expect to find on tap?
CS: They always do winter warmer. I will do a winter warmer, but it will not be spiced.

BSL: Should people get the impression you want beer to taste like beer?
CS: I am a purist ... My mentality is beer should only be made with the four necessary ingredients: malt, hops, yeast and water. Maybe I can broaden that with: a grain, hops, yeast and water.

BSL: Let's talk about Port 44 for a minute. Newark is home to a Budweiser brewery, so Port 44 was the only craft brewery in New Jersey's largest city. It's a shame it closed back in July.
CS: I still believe it could be a successful business, with the right management and the right money. It has tremendous potential to be a very successful business ... You look at the (nearby) Prudential Center; it's the third-largest grossing arena in the country. Any start-up business, they say you should have financing to cover your two first years of operation, all of your expenses for your two first years of operation ...

BSL: So while you were serving up Port 44's brews, who were the regulars who came in?
CS: We had railroad guys – NJ Transit engineers. A whole group of them were mug club members. Other local business, small businesses. We had all sorts of regulars from Public Service (PSEG) and from Prudential.

BSL: So the business model it had laid out for itself was actually functioning, playing out?
CS: Yeah. The concept was good and the location was good. When I signed on, I really felt in my heart this would be a success. Whoever does buy or invest in that brewery, as long as they have restaurant or bar experience ... it could be a total success.

BSL: What were some of the brighter moments in Newark?
CS: I loved the brewery. Greg (Gilhooly, one of the founders) stumbled upon that brewhouse; we got that thing on eBay. I loved the system; I felt I was making some of the best beer of my career. It was an ITT system. From what I understand, there's only two of its kind in the whole country. I don't know where the other one is. I believe this one used to be in Michigan. It's a really unique system. I was very proud at the way I got the whole system set up.

BSL: Port 44 opened in April 2010 with guest tap beers, and its closing was well beyond that date, but just shy of the first anniversary of the Chris Sheehan-brewed beers going on tap. That has to be a great sense of frustration.
CS: It was really, really disappointing for me personally. Heartbreaking. That whole (brewing) system was my baby. I'd never done a start-up, and that's part of the reason I went there and did it, because I always wanted to be involved in a start-up. And to see it just go down the tubes like that so quickly was just very discouraging. But it was still a learning experience. I learned a tremendous amount going through the ordeal. I hope somebody will come along and be interested in buying the place.

EVENT NOTE: J.J. Bitting hosts the fifth annual Central Jersey Charity Beer Fest, 1-5 p.m. Saturday at Parker Press Park, Woodbridge, a five minute walk from the brewpub. Tickets are 25 bucks. Weather: High temp 75, 40 percent chance of rain. Rate date is Saturday, Oct. 1.

ADDENDUM: A note from a Port 44 denizen, Dave ...

I am one of the guys that was a regular at Port 44, and all my buddies were just as disappointed as I was when it suddenly closed. We happened to walk up there that day, and the doors were locked - but Chris was there and let us in. The place was hot thanks to the AC problems, and we shared our -last- beers there with Chris as he was cleaning the lines for the last time.

Sad!

Then, a few weeks back, I happened to be finishing up work in the Woodbridge area and stopped by Bittings for a late lunch and sure enough, there was Chris! I was happy he landed somewhere ...

New dimension at High Point – more space

2011-09-20T20:49:00.004-04:00

Regulars who make it to High Point Brewing's open houses probably noticed over the past couple of months the knocked down wall at the far end of the brewery.

It is what you think: underway expansion by the makers of the Ramstein craft beer lineup. In July, High Point took over the next-door space in the Butler industrial complex that the 15-year-old brewery has long called home. The space previously had been used to warehouse DVDs produced by an indy filmmaker and distributor, EI Independent Cinema (makers of the B-movie Spiderbabe).

Like a lot of the longtime Garden State production craft brewers, High Point is running at capacity, making the business of brewing the year-round core brands and squeezing in the seasonal brews a tougher balancing act. (High Point also does contract brewing.) Hence, the need to expand.

High Point owner Greg Zaccardi (that's Greg above pouring samples from the September open house) says the back wall came down in late July, and the extra 2,000 square feet of space was immediately used for storing empty kegs. It will also be used for grain storage, and sometime next month the brewery's cold box will be moved into there.

Relocating the cold box will open up 400 square feet for the installation of more 30-barrel fermenters, an undertaking that had been on the brewery's 2011 to-do list. That project is now slated for just after the start of 2012.

Greg says the brewery needs to get past the Oktoberfest season, an über-busy time of year for High Point, which specializes in German-style beers. On the heels of that is another big-selling seasonal, Ramstein Winter Wheat Doppelbock.

(Look for more of the weizenbock to make it into 12-ounces bottles this season than last year. Most of it was draft only last time, and a larger-than-normal portion of the production run was set aside for turning into Icestorm eisbock.)

Speaking of Oktoberfest, High Point brewed 10 15-barrel batches of its popular märzen this year. Demand for the seasonal was up 25 percent, and the brewery had to make a decision about whether to temporarily cut back on brewing Blonde wheat beer, a year-round Ramstein brew, when it began its production run of Oktoberfest back in July.

EVENT NOTE: High Point will tap an Austrian oak barrel of the märzen as part of an Oktoberfest event at the Pilsener Haus & Biergarten in Hoboken on Friday.

Where the sun chills the beer

2011-09-20T11:17:00.004-04:00

A spotlight on going green ...

If you've had the chance, say on a brewery tour in Cherry Hill or a beer event somewhere, to talk to the folks at Flying Fish Brewing about their plans to take up new digs in Sommerdale, then perhaps you know they want to put solar panels on the building to supplement their electric power demands.

Word is that FF's hopes to partner with the sun have run into an environmental glitch concerning the building, leaving their plans for the solar panels up in the air. That's just a minor status update, not the final word, so stand by.

However, there is a place just outside Atlantic City where the sun does play a role in beer.

For more 2 1/2 months now, the Joe Canal's packaged goods store in Egg Harbor Township has been chilling the beer in the cold box, running the lights and everything else that needs juice, using a 255 kW solar panel system – 1,245 of the obsidian-looking panels distributed over a parking lot carport, the building's roof and an area behind the building.

Owner Stuart Stromfeld says the panels went into service at the beginning of July and can provide nearly 85 percent of the store's electrical power needs. (Stuart graciously took for a phone interview a couple days after Labor Day, as he was heading to Philadelphia airport to catch a flight to Tuscany, Italy.)

The cost advantages for the long run are obvious. It's not cheap – 65-grand a year – to power cold box space that measures 60 feet by 20 feet by 20 feet and sits in the center of the store. It always needs to always be on, of course, to keep shelves of beer and wine refrigerated.

Stromfeld says the solar panels will pare the electric bill sharply. But they're also an environmentally conscious move, and that was a factor in the decision to have them installed. Plans down the road include fitting Stromfeld's second Joe Canal's location across town with the solar panels.

Brite Idea Energy of Egg Harbor Township installed the panels. The longer days of summer provide more power production, but "actually in winter time we do very good with production because the panels stay cooler," says Christopher Brown, sales manager for Brite Idea.

Brown says Stromfeld's store was a two-year project, from design and engineering work, getting regulatory agency approvals, and then installation.

"It's been a showpiece project for us," he says.

Fresh-hopped ales & a hop farm to watch

2011-09-18T19:08:00.013-04:00

Jersey-grown hops in two Garden State pub-brewed beers, and a small Burlington County hop farm to watch ...

For as long as he's been in charge of the kettle at the Tun Tavern, brewer Tim Kelly has used hops grown by his friends, Ray Gourley and Kathy Haney of Haddon Heights, to do a fall dry-hopping of the Tun's All-American IPA, a popular beer at the Atlantic City brewpub.

This year is the fourth for the IP-Ray version of the brew that's part of the Tun's regular tap lineup.

Tim (pictured at left with a load of hops on the bine) added to the serving tank just over 3 pounds of the Camden County hops – Cascade, Nugget, Chinook and Zeus cones picked Sept. 3.

(The beer was brewed with pellets of Chinook and Centennial for bittering and flavor. It finishes out at just over 6 percent ABV.)

One hundred miles north, in Woodbridge, Chris Sheehan, brewer at J.J. Bitting brewpub, has his annual hop harvest ale bubbling away in a fermenter.

Mostly Cascades, but with some Mount Hood, Cluster and Fuggle, Chris says he used the 6 pounds of hops grown (pictured below) at his mom's property in Delhi, N.Y., in the Catskills, and the 3 pounds from friends' hop gardens, adding them throughout the boil, supplementing them with some commercially grown whole leaf hops.

Chris has made the beer six years running, last year at Port 44 brewpub in Newark, and prior to that at Chelsea Brewing in Manhattan. (He has typically called it Catskill Hop Harvest Ale, but thinks the name will get shortened this year.)

The harvest ale is the second brew Chris has made for Bitting since taking over the brewhouse there this month, fresh off his year-plus stint at the now-closed Port 44.

Meanwhile, down in Burlington County, Sarah Puleo and Mike Visgil are looking to double the size of the hop yard they started at the 166-acre farm Sarah grew up on in Buddtown in Southampton Township.

The farm is an area where the open space and country roads seem to take you out of New Jersey. But it's also a ground zero for New Jersey farmstand staples like blueberries, asparagus and raspberries. You'll also find Chinese growers on neighboring farms, raising cabbage and snowpeas for restaurants in Philadelphia and New York.

Against that backdrop, hops are a non-traditional commodity. But then again, with the bines' inclination for a towering reach, and the high ceiling of blue skies, a hop yard seems like an easy fit at Isaac Budd Farm. (Sarah and Mike share the place with her parents and brother, and some chickens, peacocks, dogs and a lake.)

After trial plots over the past three years, the two went bigger, planting an eighth of an acre last spring, setting out rhizomes of Cascades, Centennial, Nugget and Fuggles, among other varieties.

"Cascades and Centennials showed well, yielding a few pounds of wet weight. Nugget and Fuggles flowered, but there was not a whole heck of a lot in terms of harvest," Mike said last week via email.

The two have networked with the Northeast Hop Alliance and Rutgers agriculture extension folks (Rutgers raised trial plots of several hop varieties back in the late 1990s, and also provided technical advice to Weyerbacher Brewing in 2008, the first year of a now-annual crop grown by the brewery that ends up in a Weyerbacher harvest ale.) Sarah and Mike also tracked this summer's progress on their Isaac Budd Farm Facebook page.

"Our main goal here is to establish community," Mike says. "For our first few years, we anticipate it being more of a homebrewer/homebrew shop presence. If we get a couple nanobreweries, a couple microbreweries in the area, that's great."

Some of this year's crop, dehydrated and vacuum-packed after picking, was passed along to the Barley Legal Homebrewers, the South Jersey-Philadelphia homebrew club Mike and Sarah are members of.

(Last spring, the two scored a second-place finish in the annual pro-am contest Iron Hill brewpub sponsors for homebrewers who brew with wort drawn from the second runnings of The Situation, a super-high gravity beer that IH brews during the winter. Mike also did an internship in 2010 with Cricket Hill in Fairfield, a gig that helped him with enrolling in the American Brewers Guild.)

"Sarah and I also will be toying with the therapeutics of hops by making some homemade sleep pillows, as well as some hop teas," Mike says.

Make no mistake, a hop yard, even a small plot, can be a lot of work. But the two dived into the task with a dedication that speaks a lot to their belief in and commitment to producing a local farm commodity.

"It's our evening job, our second shift," Sarah said during an interview back in May, on a picture-perfect Saturday that found her and Mike cutting and laying planters paper around the hop mounds to control weeds. "As soon as we get home from work, we're out there – if it's not raining – pruning, digging, planting, putting up (irrigation) hose."

The two started the hop yard on a shoestring budget. The hose purchased for drip irrigation is probably their biggest expense. For other project needs they improvised. Their trellising was fashioned from bamboo cut from the 1- to 2-acre cluster of the stuff that grows wild and skyward on the farm.

"We figured that if we can do it with what we have right now, put all the work in," Sarah says, pausing, "the second year if it goes well, then maybe we'll put more money into it."

Brewery launches Nos. 5 and 6 for 2011?

2011-09-13T23:33:00.008-04:00

Catching up with New Jersey nanobreweries-in-development Tuckahoe Brewing and Flounder Brewing, both of which project they'll enter the Garden State craft beer market before the end of the year.

Tuckahoe (in northern Cape May County) and Flounder (in Somerset County) have submitted their paperwork to federal and state regulators. How swiftly the processing of their licensing applications and brewer's notices by the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau and state Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control goes will be a significant factor regarding when their doors open.

But both breweries are optimistic their matters before the regulators are on track, and right now they're busying themselves with the build-out of their facilities.

Tuckahoe Brewing
Last week, Matt McDevitt, Tim Hanna and Jim McAfee, three of the four guys behind the brewery – the fourth is Chris Konicki – extended an invitation to check out their brewery-in-progress, located in a small industrial park in Ocean View (that's in Dennis Township, just west of the shore town of Sea Isle city). A 3-barrel brewing system from PyschoBrew is expected to arrive sometime this month, as are two 8-barrel fermenters. A keg washer arrived last week.

Step inside their space and you'll notice one of Tim's old surfboards, the front seat of a 1980s-vintage Dodge van (perfect for sitting down and enjoying a beer while camping) and a freshly built flight of stairs that leads to a loft office area, retro-furnished with a turntable and hip collection of vinyl, the kind that disappeared from most people's minds and stereo consoles decades ago. Next-door neighbors are an organic coffee roaster (Harry & Beans) and a seafood market (Casey & Ben's); both could figure into Tuckahoe's brew lineup (think oyster and coffee stouts).

Tuckahoe's business plan calls for hitting the market – the foursome anticipates a November launch – with a year-round American-style pale ale, called DC Pale Ale; the fall-winter seasonal Steelman Porter; and Marshallville Wit for the warmer weather months. (The names are all drawn from northern Cape May County lore; DC is short for Dennis Creek, a Delaware Bay tributary.) The brewery also wants to source local ingredients for its brews whenever possible and is talking with a nearby farmer about growing barley for brewing. (They will have to find a maltser, however.)

Matt, who handles the brewing, and Tim served up prototypes of the porter and amber pale ale turned out on a homebrew rig that's now a pilot brew setup. Dosed with Centennial, Amarillo and Willamette hops, the pale clocks in around 6 percent ABV and offers a quite worthwhile drinking experience.

Matt and Tim backed up the pale with the Centennial-hopped porter, a 6 to 7 percent ABV brew that was roasty and well balanced, quite quaffable beneath a dense, tan head of foam. With this brew around, Cape May County winters are going to be much anticipated.

Matt says he's still fine-tuning the Belgian wit recipe. So far, he's turned out versions of the 4.5 percent ABV brew using Fuggle hops, coriander, bitter and sweet orange peel, chamomile, clover honey and grains of paradise.

Flounder Brewing
Hurricane Irene was quite cruel to inland New Jersey north of Route 195, the east-west interstate that New Jersey wears like a belt. Hillsborough in Somerset County caught its share of the late August tempest's thrashing, and the subsequent flooding set Flounder Brewing's timetable back some, says Jeremy "Flounder" Lees, one of the nanobrewery's founders.

The brewery is on high ground, so it fared the storm well enough, with a shade tree on the property coming down. However, the town itself saw a fair amount of standing water and has been left trying to catch up on official business in the aftermath.

That matters when your brewery needs a construction permit from town hall and has to submit some new drawings of the site for review. On top of that, the plumber the brewery uses has likewise been swamped by storm-related emergency work.

The upshot is the delay Jeremy noted, but he still envisions a soft opening around the holidays with a gingerbread brown ale and honey-infused amber ale, called Hill Street Honey.

Despite the storm clouds, there is a rather bright silver lining for Flounder Brewing.

The brewery picked up $6,000 in financing through the Brewing the American Dream program, the Boston Beer-ACCION USA partnership that makes micro-loans available for fledgling breweries.

The brewery was able to get the financing after the program was broadened to serve start-ups, which otherwise would have had to show a half-year's worth of revenue to qualify for cash. That's obviously something difficult to do when you're not already in business, but rather trying to launch a business.

In any event, the cash has enabled Flounder Brewing to start larger than it had initially planned by purchasing a pair of 55-gallon kettles – one for wort boil, the other as a hot liquor tank – and a 35-gallon kettle for mashing.

If things go smoothly from here on out for Flounder and Tuckahoe, and they are able to launch this year, 2011 will go down as a very vibrant year for start-ups, a year that also saw the licensing of nanos Great Blue Brewing and Cape May Brewing, as well as production brewers Kane Brewing and Carton Brewing.

Only 8?

2011-09-11T22:38:00.003-04:00

Wading into the tide of beer popularity, 24/7 Wall St. profiles eight brands that have been running out of gas over the past few years.

It seems like there should be more than eight.

But maybe that thought is just a reflection of the fact that most of these macros taste the same. (Or a bias toward stupid commercials for Coors Light and its gimmick of the can telling you when the beer is cold. Ditto for triple-hopped Miller Lite, the light beer you're told to man-up to, when that should be a contradiction of terms.)

The King of Beers' crown has lost its luster. That's not a dig at Dudweiser, er, Budweiser, just a fact of accounting: Bud's sales have tanked 30 percent over the past five years. Michelob's have skidded more than twice that.

Blame changing demographics for the turning of the tide, that and the fact that a dumbed-down lager just doesn't say much in a world where tasting what goes into making beer actually counts. And is expected by a growing contingent of craft beer enthusiasts.

Peer into things a little more and you'll notice people just turning 21 now have so many more choices of beer and swiftly gravitate to the array of flavors, ever exploring for not just what's new but what's interesting and tasty. Add them to the ranks of those who have been part of the craft beer scene over the past 20 to 30 years and you have a huge, widening crack in the wall of the big macrobrews.

There's the old beer culture joke (often seen on T-shirts) Life's too short to drink shitty beer ... Eight tanking big brands is just another way of saying that.

Jersey brewers in Irene's tempest

2011-08-27T00:11:00.005-04:00

One of New Jersey's newest craft brewers sits on the frontline of Hurricane Irene's wrath, but the folks who run nanobrewery Cape May Brewing are optimistic the massive storm won't rob them of the 7 barrels of beer now conditioning in their cold room.

Irene is expected to be the first hurricane to pound the Garden State since the Great Hurricane of 1994. The storm's south-to-north trek along the heavily developed Atlantic Coast, bringing buckets of rain, savage winds and power outages, is a reminder of how vulnerable businesses can be at the hands of Mother Nature.

But such a storm could prove a product-spoiler nightmare for a business like a brewery, where glycol chillers keep the beer temperature-controlled for fermenting and conditioning. And, given the size and slowly diminishing strength of Irene, breweries inland (especially River Horse in Lambertville, along the Delaware Canal) could face a share of problems, too.

In Lower Township, in Cape May County, Ryan Krill, of Cape May Brewing, says the brewery's tiny size is a blessing in the face of Irene.

The brewery's 5 barrels of Cape May IPA and 2 barrels of Cape May Wheat, a new brew for the nano, are conditioning in the brewery's insulated cold room, kept at 56 degrees by a window air-conditioner unit adapted as a chiller.

In the face of a prolonged power outage, Ryan says, the air conditioner could be powered sufficiently by a portable, gasoline-fired generator. Despite the storm, Ryan says Cape May Brewing, which began making beer earlier this summer, had plans to brew a porter using honey from a beekeeper in nearby Marmora.

Meanwhile in Atlantic Highlands, 100 miles north along the storm-threatened Jersey Shore, the folks at Carton Brewing say a prolonged power outage is a worry for New Jersey's newest craft beer-maker. Nonetheless, there's a silver lining.

"Big fear is power outage," Augie Carton said via text message Friday night. "We have nothing starting fermentation, so nothing is generating heat. As long as it's not out too long we hope everything stays in line."

Carton received its state license a couple of weeks ago, and entered New Jersey's craft beer market with a brace of brews, a session-strength golden ale called Launch (4.6% AV) and a double IPA called 077XX. The brew lineup reflects a slight change from earlier plans of leading off with a hoppy session beer called Boat.

Look for Boat, made with a kolsch yeast, to come out next month. Augie says releasing Boat in September will help reinforce its place in the market as a year-round signature brew.

A planned brewpub & blessings through beer

2011-08-02T11:07:00.007-04:00

Just two years ago, word that the Garden State was getting a new brewery was enough to make it seem like the Earth had moved.

After all, Iron Hill brewpub was the first craft brewer to open in the state after a 10-year drought, and that opening came just three years after the loss of well-regarded Heavyweight Brewing.

But that was then. This is now.

And 2009 is starting to seem more like a whisper compared to the shout that is this year's pace of new brewery openings and breweries in development: Kane Brewing, Carton Brewing, Cape May Brewing, Great Blue Brewing – those are just the ones to be licensed since January; there six more craft beer-makers in development, from a production brewery to nanobrewers to a brewpub.

Count among those in development Laetare Brewing Company, the brainchild of Brian Donohoe, the Rev. Brian Woodrow and Casey Cavanagh, whose project on the drawing board is a brewpub that would pour Belgian and Irish ales, among other styles, and serve a menu of burgers, woodfired pizzas and steaks.

But they also envision Laetare – Latin for "rejoice" – as something else: a place where beer can bring some spirituality to people's lives through conversation, counting blessings and enjoying the things in life. “Crafting exceptional beer with the intention of bringing people together in an atmosphere of celebration!" is their tagline.

"We're hoping to show that it can be enjoyed in a spiritual sense, in a family and friends atmosphere," says Donohoe. "We want beer to bring people together, not have the end goal of just becoming drunk."

"Laetare Brewing Company is close to striking out into the drinking world in effort to re-educate folks about a lost art, rejoicing," says the Rev. Woodrow, a homebrewer-priest and parochial vicar at St. Theresa Roman Catholic Church in Little Egg Harbor. "In my ministry, I come across so many folks who are down on their luck and unfortunately turn to the drink as a sort of self-medication.

"The drink is a gift from God and like many of his gifts, we tend to overdo it a bit. Enjoying a beer for the sake of enjoying a beer seems to be a lost art. It's our hope to change that, one fine drink at a time."

The Rev. Woodrow, who has known Donohoe since Donohoe's senior year at St. Rose High School in Belmar, has supplied ample guidance to the project. In all, there are six people involved in the project, but Cavanagh and Donohoe, both students at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, are the ones taking the lead.

Hailing from Manasquan, Donohoe, 22, is majoring in hotel and restaurant management and will graduate from James Madison in December. Cavanagh, 21, of Frederick, Maryland, is majoring in graphic design and will graduate next May. (Cavanagh created the company's chi-rho logo.)

Right now the project is in the very early stages, says Donohoe, who spoke from Washington, D.C., by phone on Monday. The goal is to have a location chosen by this Thanksgiving, with an eye toward a December 2012 opening. Their preference for a location is Monmouth County, with Asbury Park an early possibility. (They have also considered Belmar. The company's location for now is given as Spring Lake, owing to some investors in that area who have signed on.)

Laetare's lineup of brews would include St. Patrick's Irish Red (a tribute that resulted from spring break trip to Ireland), Chapter XL Belgian Ale (a nod to St. Benedict and the guidelines for imbibing), an American-style IPA, a black IPA (called Man in Black, à la priests' garb), and a nut brown ale or kölsch.

Nearly a year so far in development, the brewpub project is an extension of Donohoe's interest in homebrewing and his crossing paths with Cavanagh after a performance at James Madison by the four-piece rock/alt-country band that Cavanagh fronts (he plays guitar and seven-string banjo). Donohoe says he introduced himself, and the conversation touched on music homebrewing and craft beer.

A homebrewer for 2 1/2 years, Donohoe learned the craft from his father, a hobby brewer whose beers were made using malt extract. Donohoe's quest for more brewing information led him to all-grain brewing. Brewing beer, or simply enjoy some craft beer, and enjoying conversation with friends became an activity that followed Sunday Mass, Donohoe says.

At school in Virginia, Saturdays took on a similar themes: brewing beer or just enjoying beer and conversation, often to a soundtrack of Cavanagh and his band playing. Those Saturdays "got more people into craft beer and brewing," Donohoe says.

Ultimately, Donohoe says, it all became an inspiration – Laetare.

No more runner-up; this time he's champ

2011-08-01T21:51:00.007-04:00

July in New Jersey doesn't resolve to August without a new state homebrew champion being crowned.

This year Dave Pobutkiewicz lays claim to the title of Best of Show in the New Jersey Sate Fair homebrewer competition, taking home the honor with a helles bock that the Pompton Lakes resident will get to reproduce for the taps at Krogh's brewpub in Sparta as his top prize. (Dave's victory was announced over the weekend on the Facebook page of Sussex County United Brewers and Alchemists homebrew club.)

This bock is a stalwart brew that's taken Dave a few places, notably the Great American Beer Festival in Denver as a finalist in the Samuel Adams LongShot homebrew contest, back in 2007. (That's Dave pictured with Jim Koch from Boston Beer Company.)

Brewed at the start of 2011, Dave says the beer (6.75% ABV) came together perfectly. Not that it hasn't before. Dave's a brewing zealot, meticulously keeping notes on his many brews. (Just this past weekend, he brewed a cream ale and an IPA hopped solely with East Kent Goldings). Members of his beer club, Defiant Homebrewers, also thought Dave nailed it with his latest take on his helles, and they've sampled enough incarnations of the bock to know.

"Everybody was like, 'This is the one,' " Dave says.

Dave's no stranger to the State Fair contest – for years, he's routinely finished somewhere in the winner's circle, including runner-up to the top prize. But this is his first Best of Show, and with the 2011 title under his belt, there's plenty of satisfaction.

"I can mark this one off the list," he says.

Yet, it's the LongShot contest that is sort of a Holy Grail for him. Four of the six homebrews he entered in the State Fair contest also were submitted in this year's LongShot competition. (His helles, an ESB, Oktoberfest, and Belgian strong dark were entered in both contests, while a nearly 2-year-old 12% barleywine and a hefeweizen rounded out his fair contest submission.)

Alas, a chance at LongShot glory, to have his recipe reproduced by Boston Beer for a national release, eluded him this year.

"The LongShot I try really hard for," Dave says. "I've been there before. I gotta get back there; I gotta repeat on that."

Climax fires up new bottler

2011-08-01T09:17:00.007-04:00

An inside look at the bottler acquired by Climax Brewing.

For the first time in its 15-year history, the Roselle Park-based maker of ales and lagers began putting its beers in 12-ounce bottles and six-packs, a move that for the most part retires the 64-ounce growlers that were the brewery's longtime shelf presence at packaged goods stores.

After a month of set-up and testing of the bottler it bought from Fegley's Brew Works (Allentown and Bethlehem, Pa.), owner Dave Hoffmann launched the new packaging last week with a run of his India pale ale (a top-seller for Climax).

Dave already has label approvals for his nut brown ale and a golden ale, so those will hit 12-ounce bottles soon, as will seasonals like Dave's eponymous Hoffmann Oktoberfest. Dave's also expanding his reach, lining up a distributor for South Jersey.

Port 44 for sale

2011-07-26T17:17:00.005-04:00

Port 44 Brew Pub in Newark is being offered for sale.

Owner John Feeley said in a brief phone interview Tuesday that he listed his Commerce Street brewpub a month ago. According to a listing at loopnet.com, the asking price is $2.1 million.

Feeley, who is also a lawyer, says he was unable to devote the time it takes to operate the business and now wants to find a buyer who can run it and offer quality beer.

The brewpub opened in April 2010, featuring guest tap beers. It was one of two new craft breweries to open in the state last year. (New Jersey Beer Company in nearby North Bergen is the other one.)

Following a grand opening that August attended by Newark's mayor, Corey Booker, Port 44 began pouring a lineup of house beers made by brewer Chris Sheehan.

Test brews go smoothly at Carton

2011-07-25T22:24:00.006-04:00

An inside look at the test-run brew days at Carton Brewing.

Augie Carton, who founded the Atlantic Highlands brewery with his cousin Chris, says the two beers – a generously hopped session pale ale à la kölsch yeast and a double IPA brewed July 17th and 18th, respectively – are on track: "30 barrels of each beer bubbling away."

There are still some minor details to get squared away at the brewery, but an early August launch is the hope of the crew at Carton, which brewed those two initial beers under a temporary license from the state.

NOTE: Special thanks to Mike Kivowitz from New Jersey Craft Beer for an assist on the video.

Calendar note: Lions, tigers & beers, oh my

2011-07-22T00:23:00.006-04:00

A menagerie of Jersey animal-named craft breweries at this Saturday's Summer Ale Festival at the Philadelphia Zoo.

Flying Fish ... River Horse ... Cricket Hill, plus Triumph (think of its Pennsylvania brewpubs for this one) and Climax Brewing are on the card for the fundraiser festival, now in its third year. (Alas, bad news if you don't have a ticket: it's sold out.)

The event is a special one for Climax owner Dave Hoffmann. Dave's a huge fan and supporter of zoos (the big cats are a personal favorite of his) and enjoys putting zoo tours on his itinerary whenever he travels.

"I've been to so many zoos ... San Diego, I went to a couple of really big zoos in Europe, couple of big zoos in Canada. I've been all over the place, lots of zoos," he says.

These days, Dave does fewer festivals than he did when he launched his Roselle Park-based brewery 15 years ago. But he jumped at the invitation to be part of the brewery lineup for last year's edition of the zoo festival and again this year.

He gives the Philadelphia Zoo high marks.

"At the Philly zoo you can get real close to the animals, like the big cats, the gorillas. Whereas in most of the other zoos, they're kinda far away. It's a really good zoo, very well kept," he says.

Brew trifecta for Kane

2011-07-18T21:25:00.005-04:00

Three brews in the fermenters at New Jersey's newest craft beer-maker, Kane Brewing.

The Monmouth County brewery broke the seal* on its brewhouse earlier this month with a Belgian single (a blonde ale) dosed with a Trappist ale yeast from East Coast Yeast.

After a short production break to fine-tune some of the brewery's control systems (i.e. gylcol), brewer Clay Brackley and founder Michael Kane fired up the kettle at the end of last week, brewing an American pale ale and a West Coast IPA.

"The first brew day was little longer, since were getting used to everything. The second and third days went smooth. We hit our gravities and volumes," Michael says. "The flavor profiles are looking good."

For beer geeks and the curious, German pils malt, some Vienna malt and wheat make up the grain bill for the 5.2 percent ABV Belgian blonde that's likely to be just one batch this summer but is expected return next year as Kane's summer seasonal. It's hopped with Styrian and Saaz.

The brew also serves as a step-up for the Trappist ale yeast, since it will get used in an upcoming big Belgian brew intended for the fall season taps, although the actual style hasn't been decided yet.

Michael traced the specifics of the second brew, the American pale ale, describing its grain bill as 2-row with some Munich malt, a touch of rye, and crystal 77, and hopped with Columbus and Hallertau in the boil and finished with Cascade and Centennial. You can expect the "C" hops for the dry-hopping.

"We hope (the rye) will add a little spiciness, more than you get with the average pale ale," Michael says. The brew will be around 5.5 percent ABV.

The third beer features pils, 2-row, cara-pils and crystal 44 malts, angling for a lighter color and drier finishing IPA at 6.5 percent ABV. "We weren't going for a super malty IPA, but we wanted to make sure there was some body to it," Michael says.

The brew was hopped with Columbus and Chinook in the boil, with later additions of Citra, Ahtanum and Centennial. Michael says it will be dry-hopped with some combination of those varieties.

This year has been an especially active one for craft brewery start-ups in the Garden State, with three licensed so far. Right now Kane Brewing is the state's newest craft brewer, a title it's not likely to hold for long, as Carton Brewing in Atlantic Highlands moves closer to licensing and its official launch. That could come sometime next month.

Calling Ocean Township home, Kane occupies industrial park space not far from where Heavyweight Brewing made its celebrated artisanal beers before closing shop five years ago. The closing left Basil T's brewpub in Red Bank as Monmouth County's sole craft brewery.

Basil's opened its doors in 1996 – a big year for craft brewery start-ups in the state – and Red Bank in particular has been at the forefront of craft beer in New Jersey, with the long-defunct Red Bank Brewery and its craft lagers part of that history. (Departing Basil's brewer Gretchen Schmidhausler got her start with Red Bank Brewery.)

In addition, Triumph Brewing once eyed the artsy town for a second location. (Triumph opened in Princeton in 1995 and followed that up years later with brewpubs in New Hope, Pa., and Philadelphia).

Triumph is again considering a presence in Red Bank. If that comes to fruition, Monmouth County could end up with four craft breweries, more than any other county in the state, and outpacing its neighbors to the north, Middlesex County and Essex County, by one. (Middelesex County is home to brewpubs JJ Bitting, Harvest Moon and Uno Chicago Grill & Brewery. Essex County has craft brewers Cricket Hill, Gaslight brewpub and Port 44 Brew Pub. It's also home to the outsized mainstream brewer Budweiser in Newark.)

*Figuratively speaking, of course. Not an equipment malfunction.

Black Belgian IPA, would you believe?

2011-07-18T13:05:00.008-04:00

Another collaboration beer by South Jersey brewing neighbors Iron Hill and Flying Fish.

The previous one was a chocolate coffee stout, and this one isn't getting any lighter: Black Belgian IPA, a collision of styles that reflects a shared tongue-in-cheek nod from brewers Casey Hughes (Flying Fish) and Chris LaPierre (Iron Hill) to the trend of collaboration beers.

"I kinda like the idea of collaborations. It's always fun to brew with your friend, but I've always thought that they're more about marketing than anything else," Chris says. "I can't say that there are too many collaboration beers that I've had that I see they came up with something that either of the brewers wouldn't have come up with on their own.

"We both think they're kinda gimmicky, but we also think they're a lot of fun to do, which is why we're doing it. And because we think they're gimmicky, we decided to throw in every gimmick we could think of, and two of the big trends out there right now are black versions of beers that aren't usually black and Belgian versions of beers that aren't usually Belgian. So we thought we would do a Black Belgian IPA. And to make it even more trendy we're going to barrel age some of it."

But to be sure, the brew won't be all about parody.

Like last January's mashup of IH's Luca Brasi coffee stout and FF's Exit 13 chocolate stout, a collaboration borne more out of serendipity than actual planning (Chris was grabbing some yeast one day last fall at Flying Fish when Casey gave him a sample of Exit 13 that tasted like a natural fit with a coffee stout in Iron Hill's serving tanks) you can expect the results of the next crossover beer to put flavor ahead of gimmicks and trends.

There's just too much award-winning brewers' sense heading into it.

"We already know that Belgian yeast character works well with American hops. I do a few American-Belgos here; Casey won a gold medal with his American-Belgo (Exit 4). We also know that hops will work with black beers. We do a black IPA here that's very popular. Hops work with black beers and Belgian black beers work together, too. We're kinda combining all three of those, we know two of those things will work together and think three of them will together as well."

Unlike the chocolate-coffee stout collaboration, which was a firkin filled with a blend of beers that then got a little extra treatment (vanilla beans, cocoa nibs and Belgian yeast to prime it), the next brew will be designed from the ground up and will be full batch for Iron Hill's tanks (think 7 to 10 barrels).

The brew will be at least the second collaboration this year for IH: Chris did a saison with his girlfriend Suzanne Woods, of Sly Fox (although it wasn't a true Sly Fox collaboration) and third overall since opening in Maple Shade.

And it looks like this will be Flying Fish's third collaboration. Exit 6 Wallonian Rye, which came out a little over a year ago, was done with the folks at Stewart's Brewing in Delaware.

NOTE: The Black Belgian IPA gets brewed July 27th and will be released on Aug. 27th in conjunction with Iron Hill's IPA event. Chris has been been saving a quarter keg of every IPA he has made since about January and plans to tap eight of them that day, plus some FF Exit 16 Wild Rice Double IPA (a brew that debuted around March 2010).

Carton Brewing fires up kettle in test run

2011-07-17T18:03:00.010-04:00

Carton Brewing christened its 15-barrel brewhouse Sunday with back-to-back brews of a not-for-sale American pale ale called Boat Beer that, along with an amped-up IPA, will make up the brace of beers the Atlantic Highlands brewery is targeting for launch.

Another round of brewing was planned for Monday, with back-to-back runs of the double IPA called 077XX. (The name is a play on Monmouth County ZIP codes).

"Boat is our session pale ale: kolsch yeast, German malt bill and American hops. It's a 4.2 (percent ABV) session beer hopped within an inch of its life to keep it interesting for the whole session," says co-founder Augie Carton, explaining the brew that was first in the kettle.

The beer is bittered with Crystal and Nugget hops, with later additions of Galaxy, Citra, Cascade and Nugget again.

"We started (brewing) this morning. We just added our hops in the boil, so we're about an hour out from finishing it. And then we're going to do it again. Thirty barrel fermenters, 15-barrel brewhouse, so we're doing that twice to fill the fermenter," Augie says. "We did a water brew yesterday (Saturday) to make sure all the seals worked. But this is it. This is a first, true 15-barrel brew of this recipe that we've pilot-brewed probably 30 times."

The two days of beer-making were allowed under a temporary permit from state regulators, who granted the special permission so Carton could put the brewing equipment through the paces while a representative from manufacturer Newlands Systems was available to provide technical guidance for brewer Jesse Ferguson. (That's Jesse up top and at left; Augie is pictured at far right in photo below.)

The expected 60 barrels of beer from the brewing sessions won't be commercially available until the state officially issues Carton its limited brewery license. Augie expects that to happen sometime next month.

The brewery is awaiting installation of its kegging equipment and cold storage unit. The latter is expected to be installed by the end of the week. In addition, the brewery is also waiting for local officials to give a final blessing of the brewery building renovations.

Despite those unfinished details, Carton Brewing is on the cusp of becoming the Garden State's 24th craft brewery, following a run of six breweries coming online in New Jersey in just the past two years.

Two breweries opened last year – New Jersey Beer Company (North Bergen) and Port 44 Brew Pub (Newark), while 2011 has so far seen nanobrewers Great Blue (Somerset County) and Cape May Brewing getting licensed, and the larger production brewer Kane Brewing (Ocean Township) launching this month.

Three more nano breweries – Flounder Brewing in Hillsborough, Pinelands Brewing in Egg Harbor City and Tuckahoe Brewing – are in development, as is larger production brewer Turtle Stone Brewing down in Vineland.

The reality is, 2011 could wind up as New Jersey's biggest year ever for craft brewery start-ups – eight – should all of the projects in development come online behind those breweries that were licensed this year.

Right now, 1996 is the year with the most start-ups: six.

One for the chef

2011-07-12T09:34:00.005-04:00

Some quick calendar notes:

Toms River brewpub Artisan's holds its mug club dinner Friday, beginning at 7 p.m., with a lineup of six beers, including a weizenbock that marks the first time ever brewer Dave Hoffmann has made that style for public consumption (Dave also owns Climax Brewing in Roselle Park).

There's also a really exceptional pils on tap, and as much as we'd like to keep talking up the beers, it's fitting to give some credit to Artisan's chef Steve Farley.

Steve puts together a really kickin' spread for this gig, including a buttermilk fried chicken that will have you ignoring your doctor's warnings about fried foods. Not because it's guiltless, but because it's incredibly good. (Think Thomas Keller of Ad Hoc fame – that kind of chicken).

So go for the beer, stay for the food.

Meanwhile, Saturday in Maple Shade Iron Hill celebrates its second anniversary with a bourbon-barrel aged winter warmer (kept four months in the barrel), appropriately dubbed Christmas in July, and a second generation of the Sorachi Ace-hopped Rising Sun, this time a double IPA called Second Rising and dosed with enough Sorachi for an emperor.

(One of the cool things Iron Hill has done with this beer is use it to raise money for earthquake/tsunami relief in Japan. Sometimes, it's not about the beer's flavor, but what the beer can do to help people.)

Iron Hill gets a little fancier on July 27th with a beer dinner that also salutes the brewpub's two years in New Jersey. The brewpub was founded by three Jersey guys who launched in Delaware for business reasons but had always wanted to be in the Garden State.

Two years ago, they got their homecoming.

Extra capacity for Trap Rock

2011-07-11T22:29:00.006-04:00

A much-needed capacity boost for Trap Rock.

A 7-barrel fermenter is to scheduled to be installed next month to help the Berkeley Heights brewpub keep up with current demand and give brewer Charlie Schroeder some flexibility with Trap Rock's seasonal brews.

The new tank will also allow him to create a lineup of specialty brews for take-home sales.

Like a lot of beer-makers these days, Trap Rock is finding it tough to keep up with demand for its eight taps (including a hand pump) and has watched its production numbers climb as craft beer's popularity continues to surge.

Trap Rock cranked out 475 barrels of beer last year, an increase of 40 barrels from 2009. (The brewpub did 425 barrels in 2006.) That may not seem like a big figure, but Trap Rock has a 7-barrel brewing system with an annual capacity of 500 barrels. So the brewery is nearly maxed out.

Some more stats: The brewpub sold 3,594 half-gallon growlers in 2010 and is running about 100 jugs ahead of that figure so far this year. Trap Rock sold 3,050 growlers in 2009 and 2,640 the year before.

The extra fermenter, which will supplement the brewery's two 7-barrel tanks and three 15-barrel tanks, will allow Charlie to brew an extra two batches of beer per month.

"I'm brewing six to eight times a month. I need to be at eight to 10 times a month just to keep up with current demand," he says.

The additional tank will allow for monthly brews of Hathor Red lager, a beer that has been made with ale yeast on occasion to facilitate faster turnaround and not tie up tank space. Charlie says the new fermenter will prove critical for working the brewpub's Oktoberfest seasonal into next month's production schedule, not to mention allow for big beers like barleywines, strong ales, Belgian triples and imperial stouts.

Those big beers figure into Trap Rock's plans to produce a lineup of bottled specialty beers. Charlie says the brewpub plans to buy a single-head bottle filler for that task.

"I get requests to make these beers all the time and have to tell people I just don't have the room to do it," he says. "How many bottles am I going to sell? I don't know, but taking home a growler of barleywine is not ideal. You want to (drink) that when you want to, not that night or the next day."

Cape May Brewing opens doors to public

2011-07-10T12:47:00.009-04:00

A week after supplying its first draft account, nano-sized beer-maker Cape May Brewing welcomed the public with its first open house, a four-hour meet-and-greet on Saturday that featured beer sampling and a tour of the brewery's facility nestled in an industrial park-like building alongside Cape May County Airport.

More than a dozen craft beer enthusiasts paid a call on the state's smallest beer-maker and were treated to tastes of a one-off malty brown ale-like dark IPA, and the brewery's launch beer, a deep-golden IPA informally called Jump The Jetty.

Cape May Brewing kicked off July by picking up a tap handle at Cabanas, an oceanfront bar and grill, with Jump the Jetty, which is actually registered with beer industry regulators as Cape May IPA.

Located just a bottle cap's toss from the brewery, Cabanas (on Beach Avenue in Cape May) quickly blew through the IPA over the Fourth of July holiday weekend but is now pouring the beer again thanks to a second sixtel delivery.

Notching nine brew sessions since getting its state license in mid-May, Cape May Brewing is right now the Garden State's only producing nanobrewer. Somerset County nano Great Blue, licensed in March, has been idled with some technical problems with its brewing equipment.

Cape May Brewing cranks out 25 gallons for fermentation, a production rate that for now has the brewery at about one-third of its capacity. The batch volume is produced via combined brews on a horizontal brewsculpture fashioned from repurposed 15-gallon beer kegs, a setup not unlike what you would find in a homebrewer's garage. For its sixtels, the brewery relies on Cornelius kegs, saving money by forgoing the purchase of more traditional kegging equipment.

"It's a brewery, but it's a very small brewery," says Ryan Krill, who's a partner in Cape May Brewing with his dad, Robert, and college friend Chris Henke, an engineer by profession who built the company's brewing rig. "We're not trying to take over the world, and we're not trying to get nuts. It's an affordable business plan."

Ryan says the trio were pleased with Saturday's open house turnout, which had them filling growlers of both IPAs, selling pint glasses and logoed baseball caps, and discussing how the brewery is trying to establish itself.

"I didn't really know how many people would show up today. The only advertising we did was put it on Facebook," Ryan says. "Everything for us so far has been a slow release, a soft open at Cabanas, see how the beer's received ... A lot of people want to carry us, but the whole plan is to take our time, be slow, feel out the beer business, see what we can get ourselves into."

Ryan explained how Cape May Brewing will pace its output: "We're just doing Cabanas now. After about a month, we'll have a good feel for how much they need and how much we need at the tasting room. After that point we'll see how much extra we have, then we can work on new accounts. But we're not going to try and get a new account and then find out we can't supply a new account."

Chris adds: "As we've been saying, it's just figuring it out. We go slowly so we don't get ourselves in a situation where people are yelling at us for not keeping up the supply."

As far as the beers go, if you've had the opportunity to taste Jump The Jetty, you can expect some tweaks to dial up the hop character. The ale trends toward a milder take on IPA, less bitterness up front. "It's good, but it's not exactly where we want it to be ultimately," Ryan says. "The next batches have been hopped up more."

The dark IPA, likewise, sidesteps some of the more traditional hallmarks of the style, and answers some of those variations with a toasty character.

The beer is the result of attempting something off the beaten path with ingredients on hand. "We had an extra day to brew. We said let's brew something different – before that we had four batches of IPA – so we said let's try something different," Chris says. "So we collected all the hops we had in our freezer ... doubled up on our dark malt, which is crystal 50, and we got a very interesting beer.

"We really don't know what to call it. I've been calling it dark IPA because the base was kind of an IPA, but they were older hops so we didn't get the extraction that we thought we'd get out of the hops, bitterness-wise. But you do get the dark malt; that hits you at the end. You get that dark, toasty feel to it," Chris says.

NOTE: Check with the brewery's Website or Facebook page for future open houses.

Action in Trenton talk topic at Guild fest

2011-07-06T09:46:00.005-04:00

Most of us would rather drink beer than talk about what the state says you can do or can't do, as far as brewing and selling it go. But proposals to make New Jersey a friendlier place for its growing, 15-year-old craft beer industry do warrant some discussion.

Continued discussion, at that.

As in getting out the message about why brewers are pinning their hopes to the legislation that would modernize rules written back in the early 1990s, when microbrewing looked more like a passing fad than a budding industry that could generate tax revenues and create jobs. That's what the interview subjects in the video discuss.

For craft beer enthusiasts, the changes would mean more choices choices in the marketplace, since brewpubs would be able to sell beer at locations other than their restaurant-breweries. For the brewers who already bottle, the changes would, among other things, let them sell more beer directly to folks who stop by for brewery tours.

Meanwhile, the legislation, introduced in May in the state Senate and Assembly, has picked up an additional sponsor: Sen. Anthony R. Bucco, a Republican from Morris County.

Keep the discussion going.

One more sponsor for beer legislation

2011-06-15T09:38:00.005-04:00

The legislation to modernize New Jersey's regulations for its craft beer industry has picked up another sponsor.

Assemblywoman Joan Quigley, a Democrat from Hudson County, is the latest lawmaker to get behind A3969, which with companion bill S2870, would give the state's craft brewers some business freedoms already enjoyed by Garden State wine-makers and craft brewers from surrounding states.

Quigley, who serves the state's 32nd legislative district, counts among her constituents production brewer New Jersey Beer Company, which is located in North Bergen.

With the process of making laws, there's strength in numbers – the more sponsors, the greater the chance bills will be posted for floor votes in each legislative chamber, and the better their prospects for passage. Quigley is the fourth assembly member to sign on, joining Craig Coughlin, Jon Bramnick and Patrick Diegnan Jr. The Senate version right now has two sponsors: Tom Kean Jr. and Donald Norcross.

To recap, the legislation would:

Remove the arbitrary two-brewpub limit per owner. For instance, say you already own the Ship Inn; you can open one more brewpub and that's it. No matter how savvy of a business person you are or how many jobs you pledge to create, or how much you vow to buy from local suppliers, you max out at two. How many other businesses can you think of that the state limits you to a mere two locations?
Allow small breweries to sell beer directly to consumers from their brewery locations. (Right now, breweries can sell two six-packs or two growlers, that's it.)
Allow small brewers to sell their product at 10 locations across the state directly to consumers. This relates to BYOB restaurants. Wineries already have this privilege, and it hasn't hurt bars or packaged goods stores (the former can always put the beer on tap or stock the bottles; the latter can probably price competitively.)
Allow small breweries and brew pubs to offer samples to consumers both at their breweries or off-site, such as at charity events and festivals.
Allow brewpubs to sell their beer at other bars and restaurants that they own but do not have a brewery on-site, yet have a retail consumption license.
Allow brewpubs to sell their beer off premise, through distributors, in the same manner as production breweries. Imagine going to Canal's and finding your favorite Bittings, Gaslight or Tun Tavern brew on the shelf, or laying hands on an Iron Hill brew at a store in North Jersey. If you need a clear example for this, think of Pennsylvania's Sly Fox, which has brewery-restaurants and also does production brewing. Think Sly Fox again, because a diversified revenue stream (as opposed to relying on just foot traffic into the establishment for your revenue, like Garden State brewpubs have to) makes for a healthy company. Which is why Sly Fox just announced plans to triple their production capacity (yeah, it means shutting the Royersford restaurant-brewery, but they'll be opening a bigger production brewery.)
Increase the amount of craft beer that both production breweries and brewpubs could produce annually.

A chat with Kane Brewing's Clay Brackley

2011-06-13T16:55:00.005-04:00

It's beginning to look like a stretch run at Kane Brewing in Monmouth County.

Floor work is finished, and the brewhouse, fermenters, and bright tanks that arrived months ago have been set in place.

Founder Michael Kane expects electrical and plumbing work to be largely finished this week, setting the stage for necessary local inspections and final inspection by the state. The current forecast is for brewing by the end of June (barring any hitches with inspections).

Since late March, when he arrived in Ocean Township to take the job as head brewer at Kane, Clay Brackley has been conducting pilot brews (among other tasks), testing both malts (brands and varieties) and yeast strains, resolving some quality preferences that will be crucial to Kane's inaugural batches of beer (think American IPA) and beyond.

Clay, a Nevada native who homebrewed while he studied forestry in college, came to Kane via a somewhat circuitous path: Nevada (BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse chain), Alaska (head brewer at Sleeping Lady brewpub in Anchorage) and Pennsylvania (Victory Brewing).

Michael describes Clay's fit, aside from his obvious brewing experience, as something of a shared vision, an understanding of what Kane Brewing should be in New Jersey's craft beer market.

"We were trying to find someone who would fit in well with what we wanted to do ... someone who had the same interest in the style of beer we're going to be making and seemed to really enjoy brewing beer and was really into the craft beer scene and had the energy we're looking for," Michael says.

For his part, Clay says his time in Nevada taught him the nuts and bolts of large-scale beer-making, instilling in him what makes for best practices in a brewery. Alaska, rich in beer culture and ironically a place where you could get craft and import brands unavailable in Reno, was where he began hitting his stride as a brewer. (It also landed him in the winner's circle of the Great Alaska Beer & Barley Wine Festival.) Pennsylvania was a brief layover in his return to the lower 48, and Victory Brewing in Downingtown, Pa., imparted some important lessons from an automated brewery. But at the same time, Clay notes, it separated him from that certain intimacy with the product that a craft brewer experiences.

Clay, who just turned 30 last week, recently took some time to chat and talk about his brewing experiences and his path to New Jersey.

BSL: What got you into brewing?
CB: I started to make beer in college to save money. I liked craft beer from the beginning. When I was younger, I remember tasting my dad's Coors Light or Budweiser and I thought it was terrible. I thought all beer was bad until I got a taste of some Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, some hoppier beers and some English beers.

I liked them, but it's really hard to afford $8.99 or $6.99, $7.99 a six-pack when you're in college and just scraping by. I found out you could spend like 22 bucks on ingredients and make five gallons of beer. Sure, it takes time and effort. I thought it was fun at the time and started doing it and got the brewing bug. It's like people who love to cook. You learn how to do something, you love to do it and you keep doing it.

BSL: And then, perhaps, on grander scales.
CB: I never really thought I would ever be a professional brewer. When I was in college (University of Nevada, Reno) I went for forest and range management. I just thought this is a dream job, this is something that would never happen ... I never knew how I could get into it. I'd even talked to some of the brewpubs, and their brewers had been there for years, and they weren't going anywhere. So I was like, 'I can't work there, that guy's not quitting.'

BSL: But you did get in the door, at BJ's. Talk a little about that first paid gig at a commercial brewery. How did you land the job?
CB: They had a little hiring thing when they first opening the BJs, it was mostly for restaurant people. I went to the restaurant hiring lady, I said, 'Look, I already have a job, I don't need a job ... I really love making beer, I want to learn more about making beer. I want to volunteer to work for the brewery, who do I talk to?' She got me in contact with (brewmaster) Dan Pederson.

At the time I was making pretty decent money; I was actually in the restaurant industry as a sous chef. It was a good job because I didn't have to work a lot of hours. I made good money and it worked well with my class schedule. (Dan) was offering me a Monday through Friday, 40-hour job, which was actually a pay cut at the end of the month when I looked at it. I was like, 'This is going to be a struggle,' but I thought it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up.

About three years into it, I moved from just basically a grunt assistant not really knowing what was going on, to actually running the brewhouse, just like the brewmaster. They were so busy dealing with the paperwork and the corporate stuff – logistics of getting certain beers to certain markets and the taxes. I was just basically doing what they told me to do on the brewhouse.

BSL: What was their capacity?
CB: We did around 27,000 barrels a year. They kept growing and growing. The facility was a 50-barrel brewhouse, 100-barrel fermenters. It was all draft-only, so there was quick turnaround.

BSL: What were some of the beers?
CB: Piranha Pale Ale ... the Brewhouse Blonde was a kölsch. We did Jeremiah Red, which was a high-gravity Scottish/red ale. Tatonka Stout, which is an imperial stout, and then we did some seasonals; we did a hefeweizen ...

BSL: At what point did you get to Alaska?
CB: I was working there (at BJ's), and I had the experience, but the pay scale didn't go up unless you went and became a brewmaster, and there was no opportunity within that company to advance ... I really got tired of scraping by. You can only survive on $9.50 an hour for so long before you're like, 'Why did I go to school?' And student loans were coming due. I was like, 'If I'm going to do this brewing thing, I gotta do it, I can't just stay here. I would have to quit and get another job.' ... So I started looking on ProBrewer.com and saw an opportunity up in Alaska for a head brewer. They offered me a lot better money, also the ability to have creative control, to make a bunch of beer and see what I could do on my own. I just went up there and took over.

BSL: This was a brewpub, right?
CB: Sleeping Lady Brewing Company was the brewery, and the brewpub was called Snow Goose Restaurant (in Anchorage). It's kind of a remote area in Alaska. So they just took homebrewers that had experience. It's not like you can just tap into the local brewing community and find somebody from another state. They were kinda just picking with what they had; so basically they had homebrewers – smart dudes that made good beer – but they really weren't trained on how to operate the systems properly.

BSL: What challenges were you faced with working at a new place?
CB: When I started, I didn't have any training from the previous brewer. I basically started and three days later I was brewing. I saw a lot of things that were kind of jury-rigged, kind of just put together without someone who'd seen it done by professionals before.

For instance, dry-hopping. Normally, at a large production brewery you would dry-hop in your conical fermenter because the cone allows a lot of the hops to drop out, and then you can transfer off of that. They had dry-hopped in a serving tank without a standpipe. They basically took large bags of hops and threw them in the bright tank. This was actually hooked up on their draft lines to send up to the restaurant. I looked at the draft line one day and it was empty – and there's supposed to be 3 or 4 barrels of beer in this tank. One of the big balls of hops had rolled in front of the bottom of the tank and clogged it. There was beer in there that couldn't get out. So I had to open it up, and there was all this beer I had to dump and all these bags of hops I had to throw out. That was just one instance. There were all kinds of things. That's what I did up in Alaska – I just applied the stuff I had learned at BJ's to this brewpub.

BSL: So you tightened up their practices, put them on a better footing as far as brewery management went?
CB: Yeah, I got some decent paperwork going on, started doing (yeast) cell counts on all our beers, got a clean fermenting yeast, we were pitching with the right amount of oxygen, we were keeping everything clean. I don't even know how they sanitized their loop from the heat exchanger to the fermenters. When I got there, I had to rig up some stuff to make it happen until I bought hoses that allowed me to create this loop so you could recirculate hot liquor from the heat exchanger all the way back to the hot liquor tank, so the whole loop is 180 degrees and 100 percent sanitary.

BSL: The kinds of beers that you were making there, what were they?
CB: We had 15 draft lines and seven of those were the standard beers. We had the Gold Rush Golden Ale, which was not even like a kölsch. I considered it like an American golden ale, but very light and dry. Then we had Urban Wilderness Pale Ale, Fish On IPA, Portage Porter, John Henry Oatmeal Stout, Forty-Niner Amber Ale and Old Gander Barleywine.

The other handles I could put on anything that I wanted to. The owner was really, really cool. He just let me brew whatever I wanted to. He was a banker, he made a lot of money, he wanted to have a brewery and he loved beer. His only requirement was anything that I put on, he could randomly show up at any time and he had better like it. Otherwise he was gonna come straight to my office. I made sure I wasn't going nuts, that I wasn't doing anything super-crazy. But I did a lot of fun stuff that was unique and different.

BSL: Such as?
CB: I made a pumpkin beer with real pumpkins. I actually bought sugar pie pumpkins, had to get there at like 4 in the morning to roast ... We brewed an ale with real squash and pumpkin, not just canned pumpkin.

We started a barrel-aging program (with both bourbon and wine barrels) ... I started experimenting with sour beers, but we weren't a packaging brewery so I really wasn't going to put sour beers through my draft lines. So I made only a couple of experimental batches that we were eventually going to hand-bottle just to have, maybe put it in a firkin.

BSL: What was the beer festival scene like up in Alaska, in Anchorage. Can you share your experiences with that?
CB: They don't have a lot of brew festivals in Anchorage. The biggest one of the year is the Great Alaska Beer & Barley Wine Festival. It's held in January, so it's freezing cold outside. It's a perfect time for barleywine, and it's been a thing they've been doing up in Alaska for a long time. Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Barleywine won in '97. A lot of guys have won in that barleywine competition. It's a very well-run competition, as well as a beer festival.

BSL: This is the 2008 competition you entered, right? Going into it, what did you think of your chances?
CB: I knew I had a really good barleywine. I brewed two different barelywines; all of it I just threw down into the barrels.

As soon as I got started and I had time to brew, I brewed barleywine and started it on my Jack Daniel's barrels. I had the barrels, and I knew it was going to take a long time for this beer to be ready. So I had some stuff to play with. And we didn't just take everything out of every barrel and put it in the tank. I took a couple select barrels, we blended those together, and some of the rest of the beer we continued to let rest. And that was our blend. That was our Old Gander Barleywine. It was a little bit unique because of the fact that it had multiple recipes, also differences from the different barrels – the same recipe in two different barrels might be very different. Some more vanilla, some toastier, some a lot more bourbon. We picked them all so it wasn't like over-the-top whiskey taste; one of them was actually a little hoppier, whereas the other one was sweeter. Blending all those beers together I think made a real big difference, and we came out with the first medal that brewery ever won. We got second place overall and we got best of show, or Best in Alaska.

BSL: What were some of the beers you beat?
CB: There was Deschuttes Jubelale ... there was Bigfoot Barleywine, Dogfish Head's Olde School Barleywine, all the Alaska barleywines from Midnight Sun's Arctic Devil to Alaskan Brewing Company's barleywine ... It's a huge, huge, huge haul. Pretty much everyone that has a barleywine gets entered in the competition. There's maybe 50 barleywines that get entered.

BSL: Talk a little about your decision to return to the lower 48 after being in Alaska.
CB: It was fun, and I really liked it up there but the seasonal aspect was getting too much for me. I wanted to be in a place that I was going to want to live for the rest of my life ... I stuck it out, I liked Alaska, but I didn't think it was a place I wanted to spend the rest of my life. So I just kinda looked for a better opportunity, and tried out with Victory for a little bit ...

BSL: And you landed with a start-up beer-maker, Kane Brewing, where you're, once again, the hand that shapes the flavor.
CB: The creative control, I didn't think I would miss it, but I did miss it.

Krogh's event on Sunday

2011-06-09T21:05:00.004-04:00

More from the homebrew front ...

Come Sunday, Krogh's will play host to a first-anniversary soiree for the Final Gravity podcast, a homebrewing and craft beer discussion that the Sussex County brewpub sponsors.

The event runs from about noon to 5 p.m., with Final Gravity's host Jayn Cummings anchoring the live, 90-minute podcast from the Tudor-style establishment's taproom; a homebrewing demonstration will be conducted outside on Krogh's patio by members of NJHOPZ, the homebrew club affiliated with Final Gravity.

There will also be a brewer from Krogh's on hand, and an invitation has been extened to one of the crew from River Horse Brewing in Lambertville to come up to Sparta and talk about beer.

Drawing some influence from the Brewing Network out of California, Final Gravity got rolling after Jay decided to put back into service the idled recording studio in the basement of his Belvidere home in Warren County.

"We thought it was kind of a no-brainer. We love talking about beer, so why not share our passion with other homebrewers?" he says.

The show is sometimes irreverent, sometimes bawdy, but always about beer: tasty craft brews that come into the region and homebrews that are of the crews' creation.

Now in its 12th year as a brewpub, Krogh's, as a bar, dates back to the late 1930s. As part of the New Jersey craft beer scene, the brewpub annually turns over its brewhouse to the winner of the State Fair homebrew competition, scaling up the victor's recipe for brewing on the pub's 5-barrel DME system and putting the finished beer on tap.

Jay says Krogh's owner Bob Fuchs is a big supporter of homebrewing.

"Bob is a great guy to work with," Jason says. "He's totally enthused about homebrewing and the ideas we've come up with and presented to him ... he's very enthusiastic about craft beer in general."

Dump the permit, keep the law

2011-06-09T00:17:00.007-04:00

How many homebrewers are there in New Jersey?

Good question.

The state's Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control, the agency that now regulates both commercial and amateur brewers by way of licensing and permits, can only tell you that it granted permission to 386 homebrewers in 2010.

But the American Homebrewers Association, the Colorado-based organization that promotes homebrewing and watches those brewers' backs as far as trends and regulations go, says its paid membership from New Jersey likely tops the number of homebrewing permits issued last year by the state.

In fact, those 386 permits from last year are the most New Jersey has issued in the past six years, with the lion's share of them going to patrons of brew-on-premise establishments. You have to go back to 2007, when 359 homebrewer permits were granted, to find a similar peak within that time period.

Why are there more homebrewers than the state can account for? Probably because most people who jump into homebrewing in the Garden State don't know they're supposed to get a permit in the first place. Homebrew supply shops aren't obligated to play cop and enforce the permit rule, and many shop owners say that if they did, they'd lose more customers to Internet sales.

So it's a good thing that there's a bill in the Legislature, A4012, that proposes dumping the 20-year-old permit requirement, plus its restrictions against making or serving homebrewed beer anywhere except the address put down on the permit application, not to mention the provision that allows the ABC to carry out spot checks on permit-holders to ensure compliance.

There's also the matter of the permit's cost – 15 bucks. "The money that they charged to get that, administratively, I can't imagine that it was cost-effective," says JoEllen Ford, owner of The Brewer's Apprentice, a brew-on-premise and homebrew supply shop in Freehold. "What were they hoping to accomplish? I don't understand what the objective was to begin with, what were they trying to stop or prevent."

To many, the introduction last month of A4012 was indeed welcome news. However, the AHA notes a caveat about just tossing the permit regulation. The way the bill sponsored by Middlesex County Assemblyman Craig Coughlin is written, the AHA says, it appears to just rely on the federal legalization for homebrewing. That is to say, you can legally brew up to 200 gallons per adult per household per year.

The federal standard may seem safe, but the AHA says it doesn't leave on New Jersey's books some stipualtion that homebrewing is a legal practice and that the product of homebrewers' efforts will not be taxed. The AHA recommends that states expressly say homebrewing is legal and not subject to taxation. (Coughlin did not respond to several messages left with his office seeking comment on his bill. His district, by the way, is ground zero to the WHALES homebrew club of Woodbridge.)

Homebrewing, once the province of Prohibition-era drinkers thirsty for a beer, was legalized by the federal government in 1978. New Jersey followed suit 13 years later. Exactly why the state decided that Garden State homebrewers would also need a permit each year to strike a mash in their garage has sort of been lost to the mists of time.

But Joe Bair, owner of Princeton Homebrew (along Route 29 in Trenton), says the permit ended up being included in the state's codification of backyard beer-making because of some tradeoffs between homebrewing proponents, notably the late Ed Busch, a former member of the AHA governing committee, and the Legislature.

At the time, there was considerable opposition from restaurant and bar groups concerning craft brewing and homebrewing.

"He (Busch) had to sign off on all this ridiculous stuff," Joe says. "In order for him to get the thing passed, he had to eat that. At the time, he was a member of the AHA governors, and one by one, all the states were making homebrew legal. He didn't want to delay it anymore, he wanted results, so he compromised on that.

"He had to do whatever it took, and the result is he passed the law. That's not to say it's the law he wanted to get passed," Joe says.

Make the guild fest a rally point

2011-06-03T12:21:00.003-04:00

Philly Beer Week kicks off tonight with an opening-tap shindig at the Independence Visitors Center.

For folks in South Jersey, and even for beer fans north of I-195, PBW is a big attraction. Be that as it may, let's still think there's no place like home.

And with that, here's a reminder that the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild festival is only two weeks away.

Yes, it's at the Camden waterfront, aboard the USS New Jersey battleship museum again, and, yes, that has been a thorn for some North Jersey beer drinkers. (We've always supported the idea of having two festivals – spring/summer and fall, one in South Jersey, the other in North Jersey).

But there is something in the air this year that makes showing support for the home-state brewers all the more important: legislation in Trenton to level the playing field for New Jersey brewers and modernize the rules under which they make and sell beer.

Senate bill S2870, and its Assembly counterpart, A3969, would put the state's 15-year-old craft beer industry on par with that of Delaware, New York and Pennsylvania, not to mention pretty much the rest of the country.

Imagine being able to buy your favorite beer from your favorite brewpub at a Canal's, Liquor Outlet or Total Wine. Imagine a BYOB restaurant selling you a six-pack of your favorite locally made beer, instead of you having to bring it in tow.

That's some of what the legislation would allow. (The Assembly version, by the way, has picked up two new sponsors: Jon M. Bramnick, a Republican from Westfield, and Patrick J. Diegnan Jr., a Democrat from South Plainfield.)

So let this video of last year's Garden State Craft Brewers festival, together with this year's upcoming festival, be a rallying point and a reminder that change is in the air.

Changes at Basils in Red Bank & Uno

2011-05-31T20:24:00.005-04:00

From Pub Scout Kurt Epps:

After a decade turning out the ales at Basil T's in Red Bank, brewer Gretchen Schmidhausler is leaving.

Pizzeria Uno brewer Mike Sella will take over at Basil T's.

Big Brew video contest winners

2011-05-27T10:04:00.008-04:00

New Jersey homebrewers found the winners circle for a second-straight year in the American Homebrewers Association's video contest, but a crew from Oregon took the prize for capturing what National Homebrew Day is all about.

On Thursday, the AHA announced this year's winners of the annual contest staged in conjunction with Big Brew, held every first Saturday in May.

Portland, Oregon's FH Steinbart won the Spirit of Big Brew Award, while the Barley Legal Homebrewers club, teamed with Beer-Stained Letter, won for the video that drew the most views during the 10-day judging period.

This year, apparently, the AHA has done away with the second-place finish that it had awarded over the past three contest years.

Rounding out the field for 2011: Philadelphia's ALEiens picked up an honorable mention, as did California's Humboldt Homebrewers, who, for a while, gave the Barley Legal brewers a strong run for their money in the most-watched category.

Last year, the WHALES homebrew crew from Woodbridge won the most-watched award, while Barley Legal and BSL came in second place. (BSL won the Spirit of Big Brew Award in 2008, the first year of the contest.) The Society of Oshkosh Brewers won the 2010 Spirit of Big Brew Award.

Congrats to FH Steinbart, ALEiens, Humboldt Hombrewers, and of course, to the Barley Legal clan.

Rider students brew up beer docu

2011-05-26T13:34:00.005-04:00

Here's the finished product of those Rider University students' New Jersey brewing industry documentary. Nice work, guys.

By the way, no brewers were hurt making this documentary. But, alas, some beer was spilled.

Cheers.

Cape May licensed; another nano emerges

2011-05-20T00:31:00.005-04:00

Just as Cape May Brewing scores its state license to begin making beer, another Cape May County nanobrewery is emerging, hoping to fire up a kettle in the fall and launch with an American pale ale in New Jersey's southern shore draft beer market.

Tuckahoe Brewing Company is a foursome of homebrewers from Atlantic and Cape May counties who have been brewing together since 2006. They established their company back in January and earlier this month leased a 1,000-square-foot building at 369 Woodbine-Oceanview Road in Dennis Township, about a 20-mile ride up Route 9 from Cape May Brewing, which just became New Jersey's newest brewery and the state's second nanobrewery (behind Great Blue Brewing in Somerset County).

State regulators gave Cape May the green light to strike a mash following an inspection of their facility on Thursday. (Federal regulators signed off on the brewery in early April.) Ryan Krill, one of the three owners, says they expect to begin brewing sometime next week.

Matt McDevitt, one of the guys behind Tuckahoe Brewing, says he and his partners – Tim Hanna, Chris Konicki and Jim McAfee – have filed paperwork for a brewers notice with the federal government and for a limited brewery license with the state.

"Our goal is to get started around October/November, depending on how that gets processed," says McDevitt, whose day job is teaching at Mainlaind Regional High School in Linwood. Hanna and Konicki are also teachers at Mainland Regional; McAfee is an architect in Cape May County.

Ahead of them now is the task of getting a floor plan together and turning that into brewing space.

"We all get out of school in mid-June, and at that point we'll do some work on it, make it brewery-ready," McDevitt says. "We looked around for about two months for different places down in Cape May County and found a place that has pretty much everything we need, as far as a new-enough building that we don't have to do that much work to it."

The four plan to brew two to three times a week on a 3-barrel set-up to feed an inventory of sixtels and possibly half kegs. If all their recent outreach to Cape May County bars and restaurants to generate interest leads fortune to smile upon them, they'll look to boost their brewing capacity.

"Once things start to move in the right direction, the next step will be a 10-barrel system," McDevitt says.

The partners have been looking at brewing systems from a couple of fabricators who have become central to the burgeoning nano sector of craft brewing.

"Psycho (Brew) is one of the systems we're looking at. Obviously money is a factor, and that's one of the more affordable systems," McDevitt says. "The other is, we've looked at a system from Premier Stainless, which makes another 3-barrel model and will custom-fabricate a system."

Long-time followers of New Jersey's craft beer scene may remember the planned Tuckahoe Malt Brewing Company, which failed to get off the ground back in the mid-1990s. McDevitt says he and his partners approached the owners of that name about opening a brewpub under that banner, but opted for a nanobrewery instead and formed their business as Tuckahoe Brewing Company.

On their blog site, the four say they intend to launch with four styles: pale ale, wit, porter and another ale or pilsner made exclusively with agricultural products grown in New Jersey.

The pale ale, hopped with Cascade, possibly Centennial, and finished with Mount Hood, will likely be the company's flagship brew, McDevitt says.

"That will be what we start with. It's going to be high production with that," he says. "The plan is, right now, to make two seasonals, like a Belgian wit in the spring-summer and a smoked porter for the fall-winter.

Locally made, locally served is a guiding light for Tuckahoe Brewing's business model. McDevitt believes that's something the buying public is keen on these days.

"This area for the longest time hasn't had any local beers besides Flying Fish (from Cherry Hill), but even that is, a little bit, a ways away," he says. "So hopefully, we can do some good for the Cape May and Atlantic County areas, hopefully get some people excited about drinking some locally made beer."

Re-pint, er, repent! Judgment Day cometh!

2011-05-19T00:05:00.007-04:00

Oh what rapture it would be to spend this Saturday in Southern California.

Specifically San Marcos, where the folks at The Lost Abbey, makers of some big, tasty Belgian-style beers, plan to throw a swinging End of Days party, complete with space for saints, sinners, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse and avenging angels.

"It's the end of Craft Beer Week and the world as we know it at the same time," says Sage Osterfeld, one of those Lost Abbey folks. "Can you think of a better way to go, after you've just had a great beer?"

If you haven't heard – if you've been spending more time re-pinting than repenting – for quite some time a Christian radio evangelist has been preaching that May 21, 2011, is Judgment Day – the Rapture, Jesus' return and the run-up to the annihilation of the Earth that's supposed to happen five months later. (Better get your winter seasonals brewed now.)

"It's been Judgment Day here for five years," says Osterfeld.

Known for taking an ale-infused satirical turn on religion (Devotion, Inferno Ale), Lost Abbey, part of Port Brewing, just marked its fifth anniversary, and incidentally, is looking to expand into the New Jersey market, beyond Belgian brew-loving Philadelphia, this fall.

Unless, of course, the Earth is destroyed.

On Saturday, the brewery will make its Belgian quad, Judgment Day, the centerpiece of a daylong party in the brewery's tasting room, serving the 10.5% ABV ale and other beers that use it as a base. The brewery is reserving one side of its 50-foot bar for saints, the other for sinners. A costume competition invites you to attend dressed as your favorite character from Revelations.

"We've gotten a lot of calls about it," Osterfeld says, referring to the intersection of Judgment Day (the beer) and Judgment Day (the end-of-the-world proselytizing). "The local news in San Diego did a story about it."

Those calls started back in January. At first, the Lost Abbey folks were a little leery about making light of the End of Days pronouncement by Harold Camping, leader of the Family Radio Worldwide ministry. The apprehension was less about the appearance of sacrilege and more about the possibility of doomsday cults, a legitimate concern since the group that followed the Comet Hale-Bopp into the afterlife with a mass suicide in 1997 was located only 15 miles from San Marcos.

But in this case, things are quite different.

In hordes of interviews, Camping says he zeroed in on May 21, 2011, as the date for Judgment Day through close examination of the Bible. He calculated (seems more like extruded) the moment based on the date of Jesus' crucifixion (April 1, 33 A.D.), the 1,978 years hence, the number of days in a solar year (365.2422) and the 51 days from the start of April to May 21st. The product of all that mathematical contortion was then matched to some numerology representing atonement, completeness and heaven. The result: May 21, 2011.

Camping's revelation has drawn plenty of believers, including some who have trumpeted the end-is-coming message via billboards (like ones in Morris County in North Jersey and Cumberland County in South Jersey) that also, coincidentally, promote the ministry's radio show and website. (Wonder if Camping will do a big finale show like Oprah?)

But the bold pronouncement that Saturday is the Big One also has an ample share of doubters and critics. Ample, as in probably most of us.

So, who's to say some satirical, irreverent, or even gallows, humor isn't in order? After all, the doomsday prognosticator made a similar calculated forecast for 1994 (wonder if Camping forgot to carry the 1?) and yet, we're all still here.

For now, at least.

But in case you still need some reassurance about things, Osterfeld offers this comment: "I don't think anyone actually thinks the world is coming to an end."

NOTE:
The image above comes from Lost Abbey's website. And, yeah this site is nearly always about New Jersey beers, but this story was too good to leave behind.

Interior work at Carton progresses

2011-05-18T19:33:00.007-04:00

Carton Brewing is moving along with renovations to their building at the Monmouth County bayshore. The crew there expects delivery of the brewhouse, fermenters and bright and hot liquor tanks from Newlands Systems in Canada in a little over a week.

"Looks like there's some flooding in Manitoba. The train our tanks are on is stuck. We're not getting it this weekend, looks like it will be the following weekend," brewer Jesse Ferguson explained on Wednesday.

"But they're in there pouring conrete tomorrow. They busted out that front door already, where we're going to put in that roll-up (door). So, things are moving."

Last Saturday, with newly installed floor drains and other plumbing in the background, Jesse, with founders Augie and Chris Carton, discussed the interior work going on at the soon-to-be brewery in Atlantic Highlands.

They also offered some samples of pilot brews produced on a homebrew rig: a hoppy kölsch at 5% ABV and an almost 8% West Coast-slanted IPA.

The IPA, the first test take on that style, was hopped exclusively with Falconers Flight, the Hop Union mash-up of Citra, Simcoe and Sorachi Ace. The Citra-hopped kölsch, much farther along in development than the IPA, is being called Boat and was finished with Nugget and Cascade.

"It's a kölsch yeast in an American pale that we've hopped within an inch of its life," Augie says. "This one is a little higher (in alcohol) than we want; we want it to be closer to 4%."

There's a touch of wheat in it to give it some body, plus some flaked barley. "I'm doing everything I can to get the mouth feel up because it's low gravity, and it's finishing low," Jesse says. "We had a problem where it was coming off too dry and the hops were just off-the-map accentuated. The wheat and the flaked barley are there to try to counteract that."

Among the next steps is possibly another tweak to the grain bill and to produce six more test batches of Boat using various hop varities, since they're having some trouble with the availability of Citra, their preferred hop for the beer, and may need to select an alternative. Four of those Boat R&D batches have been brewed, Jesse said Wednesday.

With Boat, Augie says, the goal is to make a beer whose flavor doesn't collapse, while its alcohol content overwhelm.

"Image you're fishing, imagine you're playing softball, imagine you're commuting on the ferry (from Manhattan), you want to have three or four beers, but you don't want to be crippled. But you also want it to be tasty," he says. "We want it to be a friendly, sessionable beer for guys who like the beers we like – Nugget Nectar, Dogfish 60, Double Simcoe from Weyerbacher. We love all those crazy beers, (but) they're all just so boozy."

The Carton business model is to make brews below 5% ABV or at 7.5% and over. "It's either going to be sub-5 and sessionable and fun to drink, or it's going to be contemplative, thinking, big bottle 8%," Augie says.

A guy with a food blogger background and penchant for exploring flavors, Augie acknowledges the time-is-money critical nature of getting the brewery built. But he confesses to finding pleasures in the R&D side.

"Jesse and I bought ourselves a (MoreBeer) Tippy ... It's our pilot system; we got that just to have our mad scientist days with. It's coming in about another six weeks," he says.

The pilot brewing rig's arrival could be about the time their actual 15-barrel brewhouse is ready.
"We'd like it to be late June," Augie says, referring to the brewery buildout. "But I think it's going to be July."

ABOUT THE PHOTO:
It's a mug of one of the incarnations of Boat, provided by Jesse.

Guild puts out action alert for brewery bills

2011-05-17T23:35:00.006-04:00

The talking points are up and the action alert has been made.

The Garden State Craft Brewers Guild is asking New Jersey beer enthusiasts to reach out to their representatives in Trenton to support Senate bill 2870 and Assembly bill A3969.

The companion legislation would bring the rules under which the state's craft breweries operate more in line with marketplace conditions in the mid-Atlantic region and elsewhere nationally.

The guild posted the upshot of the legislation on its website on Tuesday, along with a blueprint for contacting state lawmakers to express support for the bills.

Meanwhile, the Senate version picked up a new sponsor, Sen. Donald Norcross, a Democrat from Camden County. Norcross joins Sen. Tom Kean Jr., the Union County Republican who introduced the measure at the beginning of the month. The Assembly version is sponsored by Craig Coughlin, a Democrat from Middlesex County.

Coughlin, by the way, also has homebrewers' interests in mind. He just introduced an unrelated bill, A4012, which would throw out the state's requirement that homebrewers get a permit to make their beer. (Text of that measure hasn't gone up on the Legislature's website yet.)

But back to the commercial brewing legislation.

Here's what the guild says is the aim of S2870 and A3969, which were referred to law and public safety committees in their respective chambers:

Remove the arbitrary cap (2 brew pubs) on the amount of brewpubs a company can open in the state. (Taking away this cap means brewpub businesses wishing to expand and create jobs in the state could without any unnecessary restrictions.)
Allow small breweries to sell beer directly to consumers from their brewery locations. (New Jersey wineries already have this privilege. Additionally, this element mirrors A3520, which was introduced back in November.)
Allow small brewers to sell their product at 10 locations across the state directly to consumers. (New Jersey wineries have this privilege already, bringing their product directly to consumers without any harmful impact on other wine or alcohol interests. Think BYOB restaurants with this one.)
Allow small breweries and brewpubs to offer samples to consumers both at their brewery or offsite at such things as charity events and festivals.
Allow brewpubs to sell their beer at other bars and restaurants that they own but do not brew beer onsite, yet have a retail consumption license.
Allow brewpubs to sell their beer off-premise in the same manner as small breweries through the wholesale distribution chain. (This would allow consumers to buy their favorite brewpub beer at other locations in the state.)
Increase the amount of craft beer both New Jersey’s small breweries and brewpubs could produce annually.

The current regulations were enacted in the early 1990s, a time when craft brewing in New Jersey seemed faddish, more likely to remain a niche interest and not grow into a part of the state's manufacturing base.

For the state's breweries, the rules now feel like size medium T-shirt on a XL body – they don't fit.

And for any New Jerseyan who's been to Sly Fox in Phoenixville, Pa., for instance, had lunch and a draft beer, then came home, stopped at a package goods store to pick up a six-pack of Royal Weisse, the existing rules can be confusing.

"This legislation removes some of the roadblocks that craft brewers in the state currently have to take their success to the next level," says Mark Edelson, one of the owners of Iron Hill brewpub in Maple Shade. "The current legislation has been in place for about 20 years and was negotiated at a time when states were just starting to craft legislation to launch our industry.

"This helped incubate our industry in New Jersey, but as our industry has grown, we are seeking two things: a more level playing field with some of the privileges currently enjoyed by New Jersey wineries (and) a more level playing field with small breweries in neighboring states."

But this is about more than beer. There's a spinoff benefit for the state by encouraging growth, and it's not all about excise taxes, either. It's jobs, Mark says, and not just brewery jobs, but also ones like pipe fitters, truck drivers and engineers.

"The economic impact is clear. This will allow us to promote and expand our sales, which leads to more revenue for the state and more jobs in the state," he says.

Just days away

2011-05-17T01:40:00.005-04:00

It's New Jersey Craft Beer Week, too

2011-05-16T16:07:00.004-04:00

Here's the proof, fresh from Gov. Chris Christie's desk.

You have to go back 11 years for a proclamation like this, when Gov. Whitman proclaimed July 2000 as American Beer Month in New Jersey.

So yeah, this is pretty cool.

Here's to all the people who make the great beer here, the New Jersey craft brewing industry.

Cheers.

Good time to be in our own backyard

2011-05-16T15:29:00.008-04:00

It's American Craft Beer Week, and that's a good moment to take stock of what's emerged on the Garden State beer landscape over the past year.

For starters, 2011 finds in business two new breweries, Great Blue Brewing (Franklin Township, Somerset County) and Port 44 Brew Pub (Newark) that weren't here a year ago this time. A new contract-made brand, East Coast Beer Company (Point Pleasant), also landed on the store shelves with a pilsner (Beach Haus) and is ramping up plans for another label.

Two production breweries are in development in Monmouth County – Kane Brewing (Ocean Township) and Carton Brewing (Atlantic Highlands), while nanobrewing has gained a foothold in the state. One such brewery is already licensed (Great Blue), while another (Cape May Brewing) is on pace to get the green light soon from state regulators, and further still, a handful of nanos are on the drawing boards (Flounder Brewing, Pinelands Brewing and Jersey Shore Brewing Experience, to name three.)

The hits keep coming.

The state's oldest production craft brewer, Climax in Roselle Park, bought a bottling line to put its ales and lagers in six-packs for the first time in its 15-year history. To the south, the state's largest craft brewer, Flying Fish, has designs on a new building in Somerdale (about five miles from its current home base of Cherry Hill) that will triple the brewery's size.

But Flying Fish isn't alone with the serious need to expand. In fact, right now, nearly all Garden State brewers can't make beer fast enough for demand, and for many, limited capacity is the reason.

Meanwhile, in Trenton, lawmakers are being asked to update the rules for microbrewing to catch New Jersey's industry up with neighboring states, if not the rest of the country.

"The current legislation has been in place for about 20 years and was negotiated at a time when states were just starting to craft legislation to launch our industry," says Mark Edelson, one of the owners of the Iron Hill brewpub in Maple Shade.

Looking east, the phrase down the shore now translates as being able to find good beer selections on tap on the sandy side of the state, something that, excluding oases like Firewaters in Atlantic City or brewpubs Tun Tavern, Basil T's and Artisans, has lagged behind North Jersey and the Delaware side of the state.

"I'm usually a little shocked about this area because of its proximity to New York City and people's exposure to cuisine, culture and travel," says Mark Danzeisen, owner of the well-stocked Twin Light Taphouse in Highlands, which just celebrated its first anniversary May 1 and will turn over its taps to Long Island's Bluepoint Brewing this Wednesday for a American Craft Beer Week soiree.

"Beer has always been something – I won't say shunned – but it's never been fully explored or delved into like the rest of the state. People are opening their eyes now."

Danzeisen, 30, comes from a place where the beer pedigree is solid. He opened Twin Light, on Monmouth County's bayshore, because the beers he was used to drinking were, for the most part, still back home. Although back home – Philly – wasn't a world away, it did seem so through the prism of a flavor-starved pint glass.

"I grew up down in Philadelphia and worked in beer bars down there. In college, my local bar was Monk's, Bridgid's, North Third, Standard Tap," he says.

All of New Jersey is picking up its game, he finds.

Thank a vibrant craft brewing industry, changing palates and a food movement that embraces beer. Roll into that the gravitational pull of beer-craving Pennsylvania and New York state. Or anywhere else that takes a wider view of food and drink.

"You go to Europe, you go to other places, and food and alcohol is first before other business is taken care of ... Or the home is based around the kitchen. We've lost that because of our time investment into work and other things," he says. "We're seeing this culture swing back toward food and appreciation of food, a return to grandmom's recipes and mom's old recipes. Beer is being pulled into that; there's that seeking out of flavors."

But, as much as it seems like our own backyard is suddenly a fun place to play, this week is also a reason to remember and support the home team – the Jersey brewers who have been plying these waters for 16 years, the folks who chose to go into business back in the 1990s because they wanted to bring to New Jersey what they were enjoying from their own beer travels or homebrewing experiences.

And it's a moment for the new entrepreneurs, who see a brighter beer future in the Garden State and a chance to bring to market the brews they envision.

Because, yes, it is a good time to hang out in our own backyard.

Homebrew Day, the video

2011-05-16T09:52:00.003-04:00

This year's video from National Homebrew Day/AHA Big Brew, shot May 7th in the back lot at Iron Hill brewpub in Maple Shade, where the year-old Barley Legal Homebrewers club pretty much calls headquarters.

Special thanks to Chris LaPierre at Iron Hill and Tim Kelly from the Tun Tavern.

Remember to support your local homebrew shop.

And brewery.

Cheers.