Flying Fish announces Exit strategy

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.

Exit 13: chocolate indulgence

Chocolate stout met glass at Flying Fish today, where the packaging crew at the Cherry Hill brewery began bottling Exit 13, the sixth installment in FF's limited-batch specialty brew series.

The labels that tell you it's a chocolate stout get added next week in the second step of the packaging process. (The lone labeled bottle of 13 at top right was pulling photo-op duty. The beer hits store shelves sometime in December.)

But the beer's chocolate cred is truly in its flavor. And waiting beneath a super-dense head of deep-tan foam is a big, fat chocolate taste that would make hedge fund manager/cocoa market mogul Anthony "Choc Finger" Ward take notice.

Exit 13 was made with 580 pounds of Belgian chocolate, 200 pounds of cocoa nibs and 1,200 Tahitian vanilla beans.

"You can definitely pull that chocolate right out," head brewer Casey Hughes says, after offering a taste of Exit 13 from the brewery's holding tank. "When a lot people think about chocolate, they don't think about the vanilla that's actually in it ... That's why we have vanilla beans in there, to bring out that chocolate flavor."

The folks at Flying Fish planned a total of 150 barrels of the chocolate stout. Today's bottling made a dent in a run of 1,250 cases of the 750 milliliter bottles that have been a signature of the Exit Series.

Chocolate lovers may want to consider the box of 12.

Exit 13 release set

The next stop in Flying Fish's Exit Series gets bottled on Friday, with a release event set for 7 p.m. Dec. 7 at the Pub on Passyunk East in Philadelphia.

Folks at the Cherry Hill brewery say the release event for the chocolate import/export stout that is Exit 13 (Port Newark-Elizabeth) may be your only chance for a while to sample the beer on draft.

The chocolate stout – the sixth in series of limited-batch brews that kicked off in April 2009, was made with 580 pounds of Belcolade dark chocolate (the port at exit 13 of the New Jersey Turnpike is the ingredient's entry point into the US), then aged with 200 pounds of cocoa nibs and 12 pounds of of vanilla beans.

The exit brews have been a Garden State study for FF head brewer Casey Hughes, who has dug into the back pages of Jersey to research ingredients for the brews.

With Exit 1, a stout released a year ago that used Delaware bay oysters, the brewery messages on the bottle labels took on a somewhat historical tone regarding the regions the brews represented, and in turn offered craft beer enthusiasts an engaging glimpse into New Jersey culture.

But Casey thinks he's the one with the leg up on Jersey lore.

"I'm learning the most from this, because I probably know more about Jersey exits than anybody now. I can go up the highway and say, 'This happened at this exit, this happened at this exit ...' from just researching all the stuff."

The route to Exit 13 ...

Was paved with 4,999 batches of beer at Flying Fish.

Exit 13 (Elizabeth), an import/export chocolate stout, is batch No. 5,000, with production beginning this week using Belgian chocolate. Due out in December, it's the sixth beer in the Exit Series and the second stout to be brewed in the Exit lineup.

A year ago this time, Flying Fish turned out an export stout made with New Jersey oysters (the first actual Garden State ingredient) that's still grabbing some attention, even though it's getting hard to find on store shelves. Exit 1 Bayshore Oyster Stout was featured in the Atlantic last month.

Elizabeth, by the way, was home to nearly a dozen breweries between 1878 and 1939, with City Brewery Company becoming City Products Company during the 13 years of Prohibition. (After the enactment of the 18th Amendment, breweries did what they could to survive, some making soda, others making near beer, while others made malt extract for brewing at home.)

Given that Flying Fish just rolled the brewing hit counter to 5,000, we have something special planned in a couple of days to mark that milestone.

Meanwhile, there's a new face at Flying Fish. Mike Donohue, formerly of 21st Amendment Brewery in San Francisco, returned to the East Coast (his dad taught school in Camden) as FF's second-shift brewer, an overlap shift that's been in play at FF for two-thirds of the Cherry Hill brewery's 15-year existence.

Mike replaces Lawrence George, who took a brewing job in his home state of New York. The Flip video below is from an Oct. 2 Saturday afternoon tour. It was Mike's first occasion to meet and greet Fish fans.

No. 5 is a 6

The next installment of Flying Fish's Exit Series is a Belgian style with British, Slovenian and Japanese hops.

Oh, and it's Exit 6, the Mansfield area of Burlington County, where Dutch settlers from what is now a part of Belgium farmed rye.

Beernews.org is again out front with word about the fifth Exit Series brew, due out in early June. (It's also on FF's Twitter page as the official announcement.) Think Philly Beer Week observances, because this brew will be a part of it.

So much for our guess of roggenbock at Exit 8. Close. Kinda. Sorta. But this ain't horseshoes.

Exit 16

The next Exit Series beer from Flying Fish will be a double IPA made with wild rice. But the most important thing to know about the beer right now is, you can't get your hands on it until March.

So don't ask.

FF hasn't officially made the announcement on the beer (it's not on their Twitter page or Exit Series Web site) and word got out a little prematurely. That's been a bit of a pain for the Cherry Hill brewery.

Beernews.org, which dug up the scoop, says it was in the brewery's newsletter, but we're told Beernews plumbed federal regulators' Web pages and got ahold of the Exit 16 label.

Nonetheless, everyone knew another Exit was coming at some point. And we got it half right – it's North Jersey, this time the Meadowlands, famous for a man-spoils-nature saga and a sports complex that has been named for an NFL franchise from New York; a governor who brought you the state income tax and an NHL team; corporate naming rights (Continental Airlines Arena/Izod Center); and lately an ill-conceived giant retail complex called Xanadu that was probably conjured up in an opium dream like Coleridge's Kubla Khan.

The upcoming brew will be the fourth Exit, and if you were expecting another stop in Belgium, well, blame this blog. Word from the top guy on the kettle was that the next one could be another Belgian-ish brew. Not happening. There was obviously a different direction taken.

Milestone
FF is closing in on the first anniversary of the Exit Series' that started during the spring of 2009 with the just re-released Exit 4, this time in sixpacks.

Like the fish, time flies.

Aw-shucks

Lew Bryson had a note about it on Monday, and the brewery tweeted on it, too. But we were emailing owner Gene Muller about it today: The next Exit Series bomber-bottled beer from Flying Fish is an oyster stout, due out in November.

The folks at the brewery are still shuttling between Cherry Hill and the Delaware bayshore of Cumberland County to get oysters from Bivalve Packing, a small seafood wholesaler in Port Norris.

By the numbers, this beer will be Exit 1 (Carneys Point, land settlers bought from the Lenni Lenape tribe for 80 gallons of rum and some cutlery). By the map, we're talking deep, deep in South Jersey, where you'll find not just oysters but Bivalve also, a locality within Commercial Township (the township in which Port Norris is also located) and Shell Pile, which is what you get after shucking a Meerwald load of oysters.

New Jersey's oyster industry in Cumberland County crashed in the late 1950s, virtually wiped out by disease. But it has since been revived. Like Springsteen sang: ... Maybe everything that dies someday comes back.

Or gets saluted with beer.

Sham, and for shame

A little off topic but here goes:

This is a big reason the New Jersey Turnpike Authority should embrace a beer series that salutes its world-famous toll highway instead of denouncing it and acting like someone threw a stinky diaper in its lap.

If the authority is going to be an event ticket broker – and the mere fact you can buy concert tickets through a toll road bureaucracy is so patently absurd – then the PNC Bank Arts Center should be selling at its concession stands beers that were made locally. (The Turnpike Authority owns the arts center; naming rights were sold to PNC years ago. Yet, the state is still broke, drowning in red ink.) The authority's bitching earlier this summer about Flying Fish and its Exit Series beers was bootless, knee-jerk whining more suited for a dumbed-down world we should have taken the exit off of long ago.

Of course, ensuring Jersey brewers enjoy a home-state advantage at those concessions would be circumventing the public bidding process for contracts. But hey, looks like the Turnpike ensures a concernt ticket advantage for insiders and its employees (because they work hard. Note to the TA: Let's just assume people paying taxes and tolls to support the Turnpike and Garden State Parkway and pay off the highway bond debt work hard, too).

But the bigger picture here is: How do you place any credence in the Turnpike's gripes about it being prima facie wrong to mention beer and a highway in the same breath, when the Turnpike's administration is running a ticket racket, selling premium concert seats to people smart enough know the Turnpike has killer seats for Dave Matthews or Incubus?

That in-the-know crowd pretty much excludes most of us, since last time we checked the E-ZPass lanes don't have signs saying "Need seats? Call (732) 750-5300." Nor do Turnpike toll tickets.

What's the next act taking the stage? Sham.

Time for a beer.

Time to exit this

MADD strikes a more moderate tone in the Courier-Post of Cherry Hill regarding Flying Fish's Exit Series beers.

Two months of running in place on the same topic ... Now's a good time to shift things out of neutral, move forward and exit this debate, or at least adapt it to the times (see here, and here, page 3 of the table).

Exit to ale ... and so it goes

There's an AP story on the wires and Internet in which MADD gets annoyed at Flying Fish's Exit Series.

Nothing truly new in this, unless you're looking for a release date for the hoppy American wheat ale that will be Exit 11 (it's July 15th, and alas a media event to kick things off is being held in Philadelphia that day, not New Jersey. Sort of flies in the face of the talked-up homage to Jerseyana. But then, Philadelphia is, was and probably always will be a top market for Flying Fish, so there's that to consider). And when we say "nothing new," we mean the very same argument/gripe trotted out in June is being recycled a mere month later. Who cares if it's coming from a different mouth this time?

If you read The Associated Press story, you get the impression that Mothers Against Drunk Driving was contacted for comment (a completely logical thing to do as far as news reporting goes; and honestly, where was MADD a month ago when the chance to grouse about this was on the front burner?), as opposed to MADD getting out its long knives to fillet the Fish with a protest, à la a news conference at the start of a major travel holiday (such as last week's Fourth of July celebrations), something the organization is known to do. Not that we're advocating MADD tee off on a brewery; hardly, since we think MADD, nationally, has become a temperance league – as in all beer, liquor and wine are bad or lead to trouble – and especially since we thought the New Jersey Turnpike Authority needed to lighten up when it was getting fussy last month over this. But it is curious that the freshest news release on the Web site for the New Jersey chapter of MADD is dated 2006. The Exit Series gripe isn't even mentioned on MADD-NJ.

And, if you ask us, The Star-Ledger's headline on the story sort of oversells things. MADD gets second fiddle following some more of the Turnpike Authority frowning and resignation at Flying Fish's First Amendment rights (which the Exit Series wholly is). The balance of the story, aside from more rebuttal from FF, is about the beer series, not about how MADD intends to get madder over this. A mild slam, it would seem.

This item made WCBS radio in New York this afternoon, with audio comment from MADD folks (in which they did indeed slam FF, saying they were "appalled") coupled with some renewed deflection from Gene Muller at Flying Fish in Cherry Hill (he has proffered once before that drinking and driving are an unthinkable combination, something anyone could guess). But oddly enough, WCBS did this same story three weeks ago – after Channel 4 in New York did a take on the Turnpike folks having a conniption, after the TollroadsNews Web site broke the story (if you want to call it that). In CBS' report back then, the station spoke to Gene, but never went after the MADD angle. Hmmm.

And now a news day in the slow lane once again today.

And so it goes ...

PS: One thing about the Exit Series that does come to mind these seven months into FF's program for 2009 and as far as keeping beer denizens far and wide interested: 18 exits, 3 beers a year = 6 years of taking exits. The turnpike's a long road, indeed. Maybe the US Mint has some tips after 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, 52 quarters and 10 years.

Exit to ale, reprise

If you believe Toll Road News, there’s some frowning at the Woodbridge headquarters of the New Jersey Turnpike over Flying Fish and its Exit Series beers. If that’s the case, then the Turnpike Authority should lighten up.

From a chat with Gene Muller, Flying Fish’s president, it seems the fuss is a little overblown, but not without a PR dividend for the brewery. The static comes from fears over the potential for assumptions, albeit erroneous, that the Turnpike is behind the beer.

That’s funny, since Flying Fish doesn’t use the word turnpike on its labels or related Web site. And you can't get an Exit beer at the Molly Pitcher rest stop, nor an Exit 4 T-shirt anywhere but Flying Fish.

Also, the brewery isn't infringing on any trademarks. (You can’t trademark that highway-sign color of green; nor can you trademark the word exit; the shape of the Turnpike’s sign is trademarked, however.)

In the grand scheme of things, this is about the New Jersey Turnpike as iconography and pop culture. The Flying Fish series is an homage to something distinctly New Jersey. And last we checked, the Exit Series celebrates that slice of Jerseyana; it does not mock it, like so many comedians and a recent headline in Draft Magazine.

Still, in the face of all this gear grinding, the brewery’s Web site for the Exit Series now features a disclaimer now (pictured; click to enlarge).

Any authority concerns about drinking and driving were met with the reply that Flying Fish folks don’t condone drinking and driving (they never have; nor does any Jersey micro or pub brewery), and that they drive the same roads as everyone else.

(The dim view of roads and beer or wine or liquor mentioned in the same breath is a knee-jerk association to DUI, a propensity to see a dark side. The thinking person knows better, knows it's not fait accompli. It's unfortunate and makes you wonder when you consider this: Five years ago, Buena Vista Township in Atlantic County temporarily changed the name of its mint-growing section of Richland to Mojito. Why? Because Bacardi gave the town 5 grand for the promotion, and got a mojito sign along Route 40, the main highway through town. Last we checked, a mojito was made not with just mint, but rum, too. And this event went over with not a hubub, but feature stories written about it. Go figure.)

Gene did suggest the Turnpike shouldn’t be spending money on lawyers to swat at a small, taxpaying business. (A lawyer contacted the brewery to press the authority's concerns; there's no cease and desist notice that we know of.) Tolls pay the Turnpike’s bills; who needs a toll hike because the Turnpike Authority took a wrong turn down a legal dead-end?

In the long run, all of this attention proves beneficial for Flying Fish. Exit 11, the second installament of the series, is due out soon. News media from the surrounding region have been working the story. (Update: Channel 4 in New York did a somewhat dour turn on the dispute on the 6 o'clock news. Their written version has a lame headline pun.)

A day in the slow lane for the news outlets perhaps, but a grand avenue of exposure for the beer.

One final word: We’ve dealt with Joe Orlando from the Turnpike Authority, going back to our AP days. And while the Turnpike Authority's concerns are understandable, the tone and disparaging remarks in the Toll Road News story seem out of character. Even on the worst of days, i.e. bad news coming out of the Turnpike, Joe was always helpful and candid, never coarse. Hence, some doubts about Toll Road News.