Between a laugh and a beer

A funny thing happened along the way to this Saturday's Brew Ha Ha beer festival and comedy show at Six Flags Great Adventure: What it takes for a brewfest to grab your attention changed.

Or at least, is continuing to change. Evolving.

Stay tuned to see if it's a trend with legs. But in a year that has seen the calendar undeniably crowded with more festivals (some well attended, others not so), it does seem like some of the winds steering consumer traits are actually shifting.

Simply having a lineup of brews and breweries for a given Saturday (backed up with some basic musical entertainment and stadium food), then doing some carnival-barking online, in print and on radio to call the masses, in the long run, isn't going to cut it. Competition is tight and growing tighter for the 45 or 50 bucks that festival-goers pony up for three-plus hours of unlimited sampling.

You gotta offer folks who are the craft-beer drinking public more for their money (especially in a sluggish economy), whether it's a distinct theme (Iron Hill's annual Belgium Comes to West Chester springs to mind) or some attractions to complement the beer.

Which is what's going on with the Brew Ha Ha event at Great Adventure: roller coasters, a food buffet, a comedy show, and of course, beers (50) from top names (30, including Stone ) in craft brewing. It's a mix of recreational fun and summertime foods that embrace beer.

And speaking of the beer, the lineup includes Garden State breweries whose labels are synonymous with the first wave of Jersey craft beer (as in the mid-1990s, i.e. Flying Fish), and the newest members of the brewed-in-Jersey family (Carton, Kane and Tuckahoe).

Festival-goers will get to vote on their favorite Jersey-made beer. Also, the comedy show bill features Floyd Vivino, aka Uncle Floyd, a guy who's no stranger to Jersey craft beer – Uncle Floyd once paid a visit to High Point Brewing in Butler.

Organized by TotalBru's/beerheads.com's, Brew Ha Ha is the company's biggest festival yet to be held in New Jersey and the third, large-scale event it has staged in the region this year.

Chris DePeppe, the guy behind TotalBru, is a seasoned hand when it comes to putting on festivals. He co-promotes the annual Philly Craft Beer Fest with Starfish Junction, and two years ago Chris launched Beer on the Pier in Belmar.

Last March, he helped stage the Beers on the Boards food-and-brew event at Martell's Tiki Bar in Point Pleasant Beach, a festival distinguished by featuring foods prepared with some of the beers served. Aside from the beer, of course, you can take that as one of the dividing lines between an average festival and one worth your time.

"As we move forward, events have to have something else," Chris says. "Having a cool venue is huge, (plus) good music and a buffet."

Chris' latter comment refers to the Brew Ha Ha event. But, as more promoters pack festivals aimed at the masses onto the calendar, it's a point that applies across the board.

Beer festivals have been around for decades. The Great American Beer Festival in Denver was started 30 years ago. (The Great British Beer Festival is even older.) The Garden State Craft Brewers Guild has been holding its annual festival for 16 years now; the Atlantic City beer fest, perhaps the state's largest, has been around for seven. Furthermore, upscale food and beer pairings have been around a while, too (think SAVOR in Washington, D.C., for one.)

In the mid-Atlantic region, back in the 1990s, festivals helped craft brewers, whose industry was new to the region, reach beer drinkers and helped build brands. Fests were much more novel then vs. now, and the formula of a lot of beers (U.S. craft and import), plus live music and food (usually concession fare of some sort) appealed to a wide cross-section of palates.

With the GABF being the big exception, that's not so much the case anymore.

Craft beer is popular on its own these days, and craft brewing, as an industry, has outgrown the need to use festivals for branding. Brewers years ago became choosier about which festivals to attend and send staff (who are on the clock, by the way).

And broadly speaking, these days, festivals (again, the GABF being an exception) are more attractive to newcomers than seasoned beer drinkers. Again, that's a generality, not a hard rule. But Chris says the fresh faces interested in craft beer are indeed the market. But there is, he notes, a need for some balance, to also appeal to seasoned veterans.

"New consumers is what industry needs, but what drives things is beer ambassadors," Chris says, referring to to those veterans, people who know and talk about good and interesting beers and steer others to it.

And that makes having some themes or attractions (beyond just music, multiple bands, by the way) to complement the beer lineup more important these days.

Brew haha

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Tun Farmhouse IPA in da house

Brewer Tim Kelly filters Tun's fest beer

American craft brewers love to ignore beer style guidelines and crash styles into each other. In the process, the unconventional has led to some conventions, like American IPAs – bold, strapping beers that have more hops than a hopyard and left their British IPA ancestors behind years ago.

Call 'em West Coast or American IPA, hophead tonic, or whatever. Just don't call 'em unconventional, because these days they're ubiquitous and true signatures of US craft brewing.

For the Atlantic City beer festival, Tun Tavern brewpub brewer Tim Kelly was looking to create a beer that bucked convention and spoke to fusion of styles. What he came up, a Farmhouse IPA, may sound like something Flying Dog Brewery (Frederick, Maryland) did with last year's In de Wildeman tribute beer.

Aside from the style, there's only a minor bit of overlap (a specialty grain – rye), so there's no copying here (but you have admit, Flying Dog is good company to be keeping). Tim made sure to cut his own path with the Tun's version, using oats and crystal rye in the grist, along with some sour mash, plus raw apple blossom and goldenrod honeys in the kettle.

Simcoe, Cascade dry-hopping

"I often sit around at night and think, 'What can I do different?' The idea of a farmhouse IPA struck me. After I thought of it, I went online and looked around to see if anyone else had done it. I  came across only one; it was actually Flying Dog," Tim said Wednesday as he filtered the 4-plus barrels of the 6% ABV IPA brewed for the festival that starts Friday night at the neighboring Convention Center. "I tried to do some layers of things, so it's not a one-dimensional hopped beer, so there's some character to it."

With the brewing, the hops started off with Nugget, moved into Saaz, finished with Styrian Goldings, with a dash of Chinook in the whirlpool. Tim dry-hopped with a touch of Cascade added to Simcoe. (The beer was fermented with a saison yeast.)

"Simcoe tends to be not as citrusy as the Cascade. It's a little more like apricot flavor," Tim says.

The result: a bit of a bizarro IPA at 65 IBUs, he says, "not the American citrus hop, but something different, sweeter, you know earthy, funky, spicy."

FOOTNOTES: The Farmhouse IPA marks the third time the Tun has produced a beer specifically for the Atlantic City festival, and it's probably the only beer pouring at the festival that was made specifically for the event. (That's something brewpub's have more flexibility with than production breweries.) The beer also goes on tap at the Tun on Friday. It was produced in about a half-batch size, so it may not last long (plus, there's a maibock waiting in the wings.)

This year's brew, like the two prior – a dunkelweizen in 2010 and Belgian tripel last year – were made as part of a promotion with The Press of Atlantic City newspaper and its weekend entertainment guide, At The Shore. Mark Haynie, New Jersey columnist for Mid-Atlantic Brewing News and a beer columnist for At The Shore, helped brew the beer.

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Notes from Harvest Moon's Sweet 16

Harvest Moon brewer Kyle McDonald

Another reminder of how craft brewing can integrate itself into a local economy ...

New Brunswick's Harvest Moon Brewery & Cafe celebrated its 16th anniversary with a beer dinner that included pork and beef produced by Rutgers University's agriculture program.

The ag program takes Harvest Moon's spent grain, sparing the brewpub disposal costs, and by feeding it to the cattle the program raises, the spent grain doesn't wind up in landfills.

Getting farmers to take the grain is a rather common practice among craft brewers, that is, when there are nearby farmers available (it's not always the case). So it may not seem like a big deal that Harvest Moon's spent grain ends up being dispatched in this fashion.

But in truth, the exchange, especially one in which a brewery finds a subsequent use for the spent grist, then in turn uses products the grain helped enable, well that makes a brewery something more than just a beer factory, and a brewpub something more than just a place to eat and drink.

Harvest Moon's relationship with Rutgers was a side point noted to patrons of Thursday night's dinner. After the dessert course of chocolate cake pops, head brewer Kyle McDonald was kind enough to take a few moments to explain the brewpub's interdependence with Rutgers' ag program, and how Harvest Moon's executive chef, Michael "Tank" DeAngelis, added Rutgers farm bacon and beef to the anniversary dinner menu.

Applause for Chef Tank DeAngelis

(The bacon was a topper to a first course of split pea soup, while braised short ribs were the main course. Beers on the night were an American-inflected mild that was amped up a little more than you might find in its English cousin; an abbey single/Belgian golden ale; a one-two shot of Irish stout and 10.5% ABV imperial stout. The finale was a barleywine that led with some hops but resolved to the warmth of its 11% ABV.)

From Kyle:

Rutgers obviously has a big ag department, and they raise a variety of different livestock. One of things they do raise is hogs.

(Taking the spent grain) is a big savings to the brewery and a sustainable thing for Rutgers in that they're giving back in the community.  

I don't think it affects their livestock feed budget at all, but they're kind enough to come and take it from us. They no longer feed hogs with it; they only feed the cattle.

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Because I work directly with the gentleman who supervises their entire livestock program – he's the one I contact to come pick up (spent) grain and I'm on their email list – so whenever they slaughter anything and they open that up to public sales, I obviously get the heads up.

We had the beer dinner coming up, so I alerted Tank. We wanted to try to incorporate as much different stuff as we could. For the pork, he thought it would be good and easy to incorporate bacon in one of the dishes. So he grabbed 10 pounds of bacon right away.

The short ribs we had for the entreé were from the cattle they raise; we got 15 or 20 pounds for the dinner. It kind of completes the full circle – livestock fed at least in part with our grain – returned back braised in our beer and served with the beer that fed either that cattle or other cattle.

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Jersey Shore attraction: craft beer & food

Click to enlarge beer list

At the intersection of the words "beer" and "festival" this weekend, you'll find quite a companion spread at the Jersey Shore: chicken and a summer ale, kielbasa and a golden lager, or brisket and a pale ale.

Beers on the Boards at Martell's Tiki Bar Saturday on the Point Pleasant Beach boardwalk features regionally and locally produced craft beers, with some of those brews used in the preparation of the dishes on the event's buffet menu. Six New Jersey brands figure prominently on the beer lineup, which also includes some of the usual big festival suspects, like Murphy's Irish Stout. (First session starts at 12:30 p.m.; evening session is set for 6 o'clock.)

Nonetheless, the event represents something bigger, as far as beer scenes go. Beers on the Boards reinforces the inroads that craft beer has made at the Jersey Shore, an area of the state where the big macro producers still command a lot of tap handles, even as craft beer's popularity continues to surge.

That doesn't mean the Shore is an utter craft beer dead zone. Far from it. But it's hard to deny that the region has trailed the west side of the state and North Jersey in craft beer appreciation and good beer bars coming online.

"The Jersey Shore has great potential, but it's a tough nut to crack. Some places kind of get it," says promoter Chris DePeppe, a Jersey Shore native-turned-Pennsylvanian whose TotalBru Marketing and Beerheads companies launched the Beer on the Pier festival in nearby Belmar two years ago. "Whether we'll sway some of the Miller Lite or Bud Light drinkers, I don't know. There are some craft beer drinkers out there though."

Beerheads teamed with Martell's and the Point Pleasant Beach Chamber of Commerce to stage Beers on the Boards. East Coast Beer, the Point Pleasant-based company behind Beach Haus pilsner, signed on as a sponsor. So did Cricket Hill Brewing, and you'll find the two brands among the Jersey brews on the event's lineup. (The others are: Flying Fish, Carton, Kane and Tuckahoe.)

"Sure it's special to us. It's our back yard," says East Coast's John Merklin. "There are actually two stories here: Craft beer has come to the Jersey Shore, and the Jersey Shore has come to craft beer."

And this time, it's borrowing some ideas from beer-and-food events like the Brewer's Plate in Philadelphia, or SAVOR, the Brewers Associations annual gathering in Washington, D.C.

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Folks who attend Beers on the Boards will find plenty of flavors to explore as they sample both the beers and the buffet, says Martell's executive chef, Tom Peet, who crafted the event menu. Tom paired the beers to the bring out the best flavors of the beef, fish and chicken dishes.

"I like the Philadelphia Pale Ale beef brisket, the Yards Brawler Fish 'n' Chips. That (beer) paired well with the fish. They're all good in their own way," Tom says, adding any dish is a good starting point.

"Start with your heart. If you like chicken go with chicken. If you like beef, go for beef. It's all about individuality; it's what you like," he says.