Beercrafters closing

This is some sad news:

As of Sept. 19, Beercrafters homebrew supply shop will fold its tent. In the meantime, there's an everything-must-go sale.

Online discussion board chatter didn't reveal why the shop's closing after a 16-year run, and the folks at the store today we're pressed for time and couldn't talk.

The nucleus of the Gloucester County Homebrewers club, Beercrafters got a lot of people into homebrewing and helped a lot of neophyte brewers step up to making better beer, from extract brews turned out on stovetops to all-grain masterpieces crafted over gas flames in kegs turned into kettles.

Back in the mid- to late-1990s, Beercrafters was our go-to supply store, saving us a trip to far-off Philly's Home Sweet Homebrew and the related expense of parking in the city. Their selection of grain and hops was always respectable, their advice reliable, and the people always friendly.

And come the first Saturday in May, you'd find hordes of homebrewers in Beercrafters back lot, tending mash tuns in celebration of the American Homebrewers Association's annual Big Brew day. In fact, the winner of the AHA's first YouTube Big Brew video contest was shot at Beercrafters in May 2008. (The second video is from Big Brew 2007, shot in the first year of this blog.)

Big Brew, Part 2 (We won!!!)

First and foremost: A shout out to fellow Jerseyans, WHALES, the Woodbridge Homebrewers Ale & Lager Enthusiast Society, for their second-place showing in the American Homebrewers Association’s YouTube video contest.

WHALES’ efforts on Big Brew 2008 (May 3rd) were chronicled by BobbyFromNJ (that's his YouTube handle), and claimed second place in the most-viewed category (more than 1,750 hits as of this writing).

It’s worth mentioning here that some WHALES members are first-round winners in the AHA’s national homebrew competition. Good luck, and we're behind you all the way.

And now for the big moment, for us anyway ...

We won first place in the YouTube contest in the category of "Best Represents AHA Big Brew."

Winning is fun, but we're not going to crow about this too much or let it go to our heads.

But we will say (and underscore) that we’re flattered, immensely so, and honored in an equal measure. And we can’t overlook the other 17 folks whose entries qualified for judging and made it a competition. It was a fun contest, capturing one of the things central to beer: It brings people together. And nothing does that like homebrewing.

Big Brew 2007 was among the first videos we shot and posted online. A year later, we were back at BeerCrafters, doing it again. So it goes without saying that we owe the the folks there in Turnersville a huge round of thanks for availing themselves for an interview, or for just letting us taste their brews.

But it’s not just BeerCrafters and the Gloucester County Home Brewers Club.

It’s everyone – most of the craft brewers in New Jersey, easily – who has put up with our camera over the past year (or longer in some cases, like Flying Fish).

We like to think that we’ve learned something each time out that we've shot in the news-gathering style we rely on, which has hopefully (and we hope, artfully) kept us out of the picture and put the emphasis on the beer and the people making it, celebrating or otherwise just enjoying it.

Because that’s what it’s all about, the beer.

Big Brew ... The poetry of worts' worth

Here’s our entry to the Big Brew 2008 YouTube video contest sponsored by the American Homebrewers Association.

Where were they last year when we did this? Just kidding ...

But seriously, we did shoot Homebrew Day last year in our run-and-gun electronic news gathering style, with an eye toward posting on YouTube and Current TV, the website and digital cable television channel that airs user-created videos. (We even trumpeted our efforts in email to the AHA last year and got a nice reply.)

The AHA told us the contest idea came from the granddaddy of homebrewing himself, Charlie Papazian. So a nod to Charlie for seizing the day of user-created videos and inspiring the Cecil Beer DeMille (yeah, we know: bad pun, dated reference) in all of us.

About Big Brew
If you’re not a homebrewer, you may not know Big Brew is the annual AHA-promoted event in which homebrewers worldwide strike mashes and brew their tried and true recipes, all the while celebrating the conviviality of and finer things about beer, notably good food and the exploration of exotic or amped-up beer styles.

Last year, the AHA says, more than 9,000 gallons – 72,000 pints! – of homebrew were brewed by more than 4,000 participants at 242 sites on four continents. That breaks down to sites in 42 US states, and kettles fired up at celebrating locations in Israel, Australia, Argentina, and Russia. AHA stats show the volume has been rising annually for the past four years.

The folks at BeerCrafters in Turnersville (one of two places we relied on to stock up on malt and hops when we actively homebrew our Cross-Eyed Mary Pale Ale and Black Satin Dancer Stout) says they’ve been doing Big Brew for 15 years. BeerCrafters was the location for our video shoot on May 3rd, and you’ll notice in the video their commemorative mugs with a big blue 15 on the side.

But BeerCrafters and their affiliated club, Gloucester County Home Brewers, aren’t alone in their celebration of Big Brew. PALE ALES, a Princeton-area homebrew club, and WHALES, the Woodbridge-area homebrewers group, also get into the game. By the by, some members of WHALES – Woodbridge Homebrewers Ale & Lager Enthusiast Society – were first-round Northeast regional winners in the national homebrew competition that the AHA conducts each year. (The annual AHA national conference is June 19-21 in Cincinnati; we went in ’95 in Baltimore and again in ’97 in Cleveland.)

About the video
The AHA’s rules for the YT contest pretty much limited the length of videos to three minutes. So if you paused for an interview with us and didn’t make the cut, it’s because of the time limit. You still have our enduring gratitude, and we still have the footage, which could wind up in a end-of-year piece in December. (For the record, the video doesn’t have our signature logo/image at the end, either – again to meet the time limit.)

A last word about the video: Winning that AHA contest doesn’t matter an iota; it’s all about the beer, not us.

Onward
Monday kicks of American Craft Beer Week. The name is self-explanatory. A quick check of their website didn’t show any Garden State brewers with registered events. However, Cherry Hill’s Flying Fish Brewing is participating in the food-and-beer event, SAVOR, which is the coda to craft beer week.

We’re going to take this moment to note what’s been our glass this past week or so: Cricket Hill’s Col. Blides Bitter, FF’s Hopfish IPA, River Horse’s Double Belgian Wit, Triumph’s German Pilsner and Basil T’s (Toms River) Double Bock. Don't see your beer on that list? Don't worry, it will be.

Cheers.