A Ramstein one-off, plus Oktoberfest

Another foray into one-off beers by weizen beer specialist High Point Brewing, which also for the first time bottled a non-wheat beer under its Ramstein brand.

Additionally of note for High Point: The brewery has gotten the earliest jump ever on producing its signature Oktoberfest seasonal.

Released last Friday, High Point offered up a new one-off brew, a bourbon-barrel aged version of its 6.5% ABV maibock, taking the beer beyond its German traditions and big malty profile by giving it a pleasing tang with the addition of some lactobacillus and oak characteristics from the whiskey barrel.

The brew made for a well-received follow-up to a Belgian-style chocolate cherry sour ale that High Point brewed at the end of last year.

For quite a while now, craft brewers up and down the state have been whiskey-barreling some of their beers for maturation and flavor effect. But the Buffalo Trace distillery oak High Point got its hands on was an inaugural effort at bourbon-barrel aging a Ramstein beer. 

The maibock, like the chocolate cherry sour, were tasting room treats, extras for tour patrons who show up at the Butler brewery for the Ramstein lager and wheat beers.

The jazzed-up maibock went fast, gone by early Saturday afternoon, reflecting the potential of craft brewers' tasting rooms to engage the public with small-batch beers that also give breweries and their tour patrons an additional beer theme to take up. It's all part of what lawmakers in Trenton enabled last year when they updated the rules for Garden State craft breweries.

"We had four kegs that we allocated for the brewery. We were open for four hours, and we sold out of them," says High Point owner Greg Zaccardi. "(It's) the excitement we have now with this new law. Let's be honest, we can make a few more dollars, but we also have to make it interesting. People are going to come here and buy the beer only if it's really worth coming."

The flavor profile of the barrel-aged maibock featured caramel-like signatures against a bright citrus quality, plus bourbon and vanilla from the wood.

"It had that tartness, that yogurty tang," he says. "But the nice thing about it is, you get that thirst-quenching sensation, then it stops to a clean finish of bourbon and vanilla."

Giving the maibock the barrel tweaking, taking it outside its traditional construct, put an emphasis on the sensory elements of beer.

"This was a way for us to get to people, get them to come in and think about what's going on – and they're educated," Greg says. "It draws attention to all the elements of beer. People start talking about aroma, they start talking about texture, they start talking about balance, complexity, depth of flavor."

The beer was a one-off, and though it's gone, there's more where that came from, so to speak.

"I'm not saying we're going to make a beer like it every week. But I would like to believe that every other month or so we're coming out with some sort of unique way of making beer taste different that what you're expecting," Greg says.

Meanwhile, High Point already has its top-rated Ramstein Oktoberfest in kegs. July has historically been the month High Point began brewing the märzen for its annual release on the second Saturday in September. (For years, the brewery has made a tour-day event of the märzen, ceremoniously tapping an Austrian oak keg to salute Oktoberfest.)

Over the past year few years, High Point has begun brewing the 6% ABV märzen earlier and earlier, reflecting increased demand for the seasonal, which, as a lager, requires the requisite longer conditioning time. This year, brewing began right after Memorial Day so High Point could both boost production by about 20 percent from last year and better work to distributors' needs.

"In May, we got a list of pre-orders for Oktoberfest from our distributors. They said, 'We'll pick it up in July if you have it,' " Greg says. "So why would we not brew it, if we had bona fide purchase orders for it? That's really what drove us to adjust our production schedule."

Meanwhile, the märzen's junior sibling, Ramstein Amber Lager (5.5% ABV, also called Northern Hills Amber Lager), was recently bottled for the first time ever, a moment that also marked the first instance of High Point bottling a beer other than its signature Blonde, Classic dunkel and doppelbock wheats. (Ramstein Oktoberfest, maibock, imperial pilsner, and golden lager are draft-only brews; the same goes for a 6% ABV pale ale that works its way in and out of High Point's lineup.)

"The beer is a hoppy, slightly lower-gravity sessionable version of our Oktoberfest. We have a lot of interest and (accolades) for our Oktoberfest, and we thought about making it year-round. People always ask us to make it year-round. It's just not designed for that," Greg says. "We wanted to make something that was in a similar vein but could be consumed year-round, and that's what this beer is."

Some of the amber lager, which is a favorite among Ramstein's Facebook followers, is destined for the festival Mondial de la Bière Europe in France Sept. 12-15. It's at least the second time Ramstein beers will be at the event.

Iron Hill: Something to look forward to

We’re told the work on a New Jersey location for Iron Hill brewery/restaurant continues.

In a beer conversation last month, we heard the building on Kings Highway in Maple Shade has been gutted, giving IH’s designers/planners/work crew a clean canvas on which to create a stylish brewpub.

A new face in Jersey, as we’ve said before, is a big deal for a state where regulators hamstring brewers with rules not found in neighboring states, like restricting brewers to be production operations and sell to distributors, or hold a brewpub license and make beer for on-site consumption. But never those twain shall meet in the you-can-only-be-one-or-the-other Garden State.

Boxing in brewers like that is part of the reason Jersey poses such rocky terrain for new enterprises. But we digress.

So yes, Iron Hill opening in May 2009 (the target date they’ve specified) is highly anticipated.

With that in mind, as an indicator of what you can expect from topflight Iron Hill, here’s a glimpse of some special bourbon barrel draft beers they’ll serve at their seven locations spread between Delaware and Pennsylvania throughout February. (All month, each location will spotlight two house-brewed beers that celebrate this style.)

Featured bourbon barrel aged beers will include:

• Bourbon Porter, Iron Hill’s award-winning Pig Iron Porter features roasty malt and pronounced bourbon flavors with a vanilla aroma, served on nitrogen tap.
• Bourbon Russian Imperial Stout, a Great American Beer Festival medalist, distinguished by complex malt character, balance, and distinct bourbon and vanilla flavors.
• Bourbon Barley wine, intense caramel-malt sweetness and aroma balanced with distinct bourbon and vanilla flavors.
• Bourbon Tripel, a traditional Belgian-style strong ale with complex aroma and flavor of plums, spice and bananas, with a balanced bitterness.
• Also: Bourbon Wee Heavy, Bourbon Baltic Porter and Bourbon Dubbel.

Makes you wish they were pouring in Maple Shade right now.

Sunny side up

Denny’s and IHOP may think they have a lock on breakfast, but here’s an angle the two chain (blecccchh) eateries didn’t think of: a breakfast beer for the shorts and tank top months.

But Cricket Hill did: Jersey Summer Breakfast Ale. (And yes we know it's getting into late summer, late for talking about hot-weather seasonals, what with Oktoberfest just around the bend. But we had to track this brew down, and it took a little bit of time.)

To be sure, part of the charm is the name, but as a bottle-conditioned Belgian summer beer that’s aimed as a full-bodied first step for some folks not quite into the full-bore saisons yet, this is a quite-drinkable brew. And as far as sales go, it’s also pulling some oars this summer for the Cricket (Fairfield in Essex County), outdoing its inaugural year (2007) when it was a draft-only beer.

Like a lot folks at the Garden State Craft Brewers Festival back in June, we ordered breakfast – JSBA was the first keg at the festival to kick – a few times over. Then we set out to find it the bottle, in the 12-packs that CH uses to market its seasonals (maibock and porter are two others).

It took a while, since CH doesn’t have much distribution in South Jersey. But we finally got our hands on it by heading up to Spirits Unlimited in Red Bank (Newman Springs Road & Route 35). We’ve been enjoying it with some revved up summer foods, tangy ones and practically anything you can put jalapeños on.

Try it with our very own burger recipe: douse a lean ground beef patty with some Caribbean jerk seasoning, grill a pineapple slice on both sides (sear it so the sugars caramelize), top the burger with the grilled pineapple, then top both with a slice of melted pepper jack cheese.

Like a good Jersey diner, Cricket Hill’s got breakfast whenever you want it.

On the horizon

Owner Rick Reed says CH is gearing up for version 2.0 of their bourbon-barrel brew. This year's is a small batch of naturally carbonated ESB, with some twists, that’ll stay parked in Jack Daniels oak (last year’s was aged in George Dickel barrels) until it’s time to be racked into four or five firkins (we did say small batch, didn’t we?) and maybe into some growlers for faithful followers.

Meanwhile, CH also has a Festivus for the best of us. OK, rest of us. We just didn’t want to be so linear with the Seinfeld reference. But yes, CH’s Fall Festivus amber ale is also on deck. Rick says it “tastes like the colors of fall.”

And yes, the name is borrowed from Frank Costanza’s contra-Christmas holiday. You’ll probably have to supply your own pole though.