Barrels and honey

Some unfinished business from the weekend and back to the start of February:

Flounder Brewing produced its first batch of beer for sale on Saturday, and Kane Brewing is doing a tap takeover at Cloverleaf Tavern in Caldwell that features some of the Ocean Township brewery's beers taken to the hardwood.

The event itself is a bonanza of 17 brews – IPAs, browns, Belgians and stout.

Anyone who's been to Kane knows the brewery has a pretty cool rick of wood going, and the folks there cycle some interesting beers through those Jim Beam and Wild Turkey barrels. (Barrels are the brewery's Facebook avatar.)

Brewing started at Kane in July 2011, and the brewery has been giving its beers the barrel treatment from the get-go.

Last year's beer to made mark the company's first anniversary, 365, was a product of some barrel aging and blending. Kane's brew for the second anniversary will be all barrel-aged.

Here's owner Michael Kane from early February talking about what was sitting in the wood earlier this winter:  

"Head High and Overhead, we have Drift Line – we've done than before and it came out good, so we did six barrels of Drift Line. Then, there's some Belgian quad, some imperial stout, last year's anniversary beer, there's some of that."

And definitely more going forward.

----

While work was being done to finish up the brewery's cold box on Saturday, Flounder Brewing mashed in for its first official batch of a pale ale-amber beer crossover, Hill Street Honey Ale. 

Made with locally sourced orange blossom honey, Hill Street's a really quaffable beer, at 5% ABV, balanced with a gentle aroma of citrus grove, like you're standing at a produce cart of oranges.

The finish is an alternating embrace of honey and hops – really it's like those to ingredients are making out; there's a lot going on between them. 

Jeremy "Flounder" Lees, who launched the Hillsborough brewery with his brothers, brother-in-law and cousin, acknowledged the first brew with some relief and humor.

(The brew comes a year after being licensed and with some slight detours. It will be followed up with another brew day in mid-April. The brewery is still bringing some fermenters online.)

"As weird as it sounds, it's awesome to know that I'm actually going to pay taxes on this. Because it means it's official," he says. "It's only been several years … It's the most ingredients we've ever used, it's the biggest batch we've ever done, and so far so good.

Soft openings are planned for mid- to late May, with regular tasting room hours to start in June. 

"Because this is only one barrel at a time, we only have so many kegs and so many cases we can get out of this. I want to get another one or two full batches brewed and under my belt to have the inventory," Jeremy says. "It's still all about us getting our feet wet and figuring out our game plan and everything before we go too crazy. And that's fine with us."

Anyone who has started a brewery as a new career or side venture can tell you that behind the beer is someone whose understanding and patience is to be thanked. 

Standing at his Blichmann brew set-up, Jeremy gave his version of whom to thank:

"Everybody. Particularly family, and my wife, my very understanding wife, especially since we have 8-month-old twins at home. She's been very understanding in taking the kids when I've got to come down here work."

Flounder Brewing's upcoming first batch

Just two days past their first anniversary of becoming an official craft brewery in New Jersey, Flounder Brewing will fire up the kettle for the Somerset County brewery's first commercial batch of beer, a brew day that's been a long time coming, and one that has traveled a somewhat circuitous path.

Making the batch of Hill Street Honey Ale (5% ABV, 25 IBUs) is on the calendar for March 9 at the 1-barrel brewery in Hillsborough. The ale's a time-tested recipe from the Flounder guys' days as homebrewers in Lyndhurst, one they hope to follow up with Murky Brown Ale and a pumpkin ale in the fall. The Hill Street ale is made with orange blossom honey and fermented with East Coast Yeast's Old Newark Ale strain, a progeny of the strain used to make Ballantine ale. Flounder Brewing is a partnership of Jeremy Lees, his brothers, Mike and Dan; brother-in-law Greg Banacki Jr.; and cousin William Jordan V.

A pallet of 2,000 bottles is due to arrive late next week at the brewery located in a business park (yes, even at its small size, the brewery plans to bottle using a counter-pressure filler more likely to be found filling growlers in some brewpubs like Iron Hill); there's some big warehouse racking inside the brewery, stocked with T-shirts and pint glasses; growlers are on order, and a soft opening is planned for around mid-spring. 

The Fox & Hound Tavern in Lebanon (Hunterdon County) is a likely candidate for a first bar draft account. Morris Tap and Grill in Randolph (Morris County) is also on the draft-account target list. But it's tasting room sales that will play a substantial role in the brewery's business plans, especially now that a change in state law last fall eased restrictions on retailing both packaged beer and beer by the pint to people who stop by for tours. 

"We're going to be careful that we're not a taproom," says Jeremy, the Flounder in the brewery's name (yes, that's Jeremy's nickname, à la Animal House). "We will be serving pints to people who want to buy a pint. There are going to be limits, because we're small.

Jeremy 'Flounder' Lees in tasting room

"If you get 20 people to come in for a 2 o'clock tour, in my brewery that tour is done at 2:10. If all of those people want to drink a couple pints, and you have another 20 people coming at 3 o'clock, next thing you know you've got 40 people in your tasting room – I can only have 15 to 20 people ..."

Unofficially, the March 9 brew will be the third by Flounder Brewing. The brewery did two pilot batches at half volume last fall and early winter to work out mechanical bugs in the brewing system – it turns out the kettle had a leak – and to gauge how the honey ale recipe fared on a new brewing setup. 

After a year as a licensed entity, to say that Flounder is finally making beer commercially may be accurate. But it's also a little too predicated on the idea that time is money. 

State regulators indeed licensed Flounder Brewing on March 7, 2012. But the Flounder guys never considered their licensing to be a starter-pistol shot. Back then, there were still some odds and ends to deal with to finish out the brewery before striking an mash. There was no race to have beer for sale before the ink was dry and the license was framed and hung on a wall. 

As a business, Flounder Brewing was founded with a mindset that homebrewer enthusiasm could spill over into a commercial enterprise in an individualized fashion, writing your own script, holding onto the day jobs that pay the bills and not disrupting family lives. 

"The brewery was never set out to be, at the get-go, drop everything and it's your job now" says Jeremy. "It was always turning our hobby into the brewery. Without a doubt, one day I would love to be running a brewery and brewing beer, and that's my day job. But our business plan wasn't, 'All right, in the first two years we can all quit our jobs because we're pulling in this income.' 

"We have flexibility, because really our only overhead is the rent we pay and our yearly licensing."

Nonetheless, Flounder Brewing experienced a delay, and it had some very specific reasons, for which the go-slow approach proved beneficial: Jeremy and his wife Melissa's twins, Lyla and Ethan, decided to show up a little early, as in premature. As such, the twins' extended hospital stay and subsequent getting settled at home meant the brewery business would have to slip to a lower priority.

"It was a life-changing event. There was a lot of shifting around, but that was also the intention of starting the way we were starting, at the size we were starting, to give us the flexibility without having our houses on the line, or whatnot, for when things do come up or get twisted or turned around," Jeremy says. "We'd planned to have children, but didn't expect it to be two, and the complications that were there, too, kind of just pushed it. 

"That's when we found ourselves all of a sudden we're heading into another winter ... here we are again, it's another season, and here we are coming up to the license (anniversary)."

And now the upcoming brew day. 

Of course, getting to that point – getting back on track – involved finishing out the brewhouse area. The pace was again slow, tethered to a pay-as-you-go imperative for piping the brewery. Brewing fittings aren't cheap. When your personal wallet's involved, there's no rushing. 

"When I was doing the hardware on the system, I did it all on the stainless tri clover piping everywhere. It's a pretty penny for that kind of stuff," Jeremy says. "I had to do it in two phases, because I had to do it with money from paychecks. It had to be done over phases. We did it. Even though it's just 1 barrel, it's a homebrewer's dream of a system now."

And now a group dream unfolding to a reality: selling the public beer that has its roots in a homebrew kettle in Lyndhurst eight years ago, with the Flounder folks celebrating their home-made beer as an experience around the barbecue pit and camaraderie.

"We got into this game to just have a good time and enjoy what we're doing. That's what we've been doing," Jeremy says.

They hope New Jersey's craft beer enthusiasts will soon get to experience the beer, too.

A touch of high tech in brewing

Flying Fish, New Jersey's largest craft brewer and one of its oldest, is on pace to say goodbye to its foundig location in CherryHill in a month's time.

Elsewhere, by that July 1 date's arrival, the folks at the state's smallest and one of its newest craft breweries, Flounder Brewing, expect to have some test brews under their belt.

One of the interesting things about these evens its the fact that at both breweries, computerized touchscreen displays will be used to control the process of making beer.

For several weeks now, the custom German-made BrauKon 50-barrel brewhouse and complement of 150-barrel fermenters (not to mention other tanks) have been in place at Flying Fish's new home in Somerdale.

It's an almost-there, just a little further moment.

Yet there are plenty more signs that Cherry Hill, where Flying Fish began making beer in 1996, is fading from the landscape and Somerdale is looming larger in the picture: installation of packaging equipment is getting a lot of attention these days at the new location; the solar panels that will help power the new Flying Fish brewery are also being installed; and several weeks ago, Flying Fish closed the door to brewery tours at the Cherry Hill site.

Also, the month of May saw Flying Fish put the new brewhouse through the paces with some test batches of Extra Pale Ale, Hopfish IPA and Farmhouse Summer Ale. (Folks at Flying Fish report the better efficiency between the new brewing set-up vs. the old is rather dramatic; that will translate into less grain used per batch, which of course will save money in raw materials.)

Setting that brewing process in motion – from grain into (and out of) the mash tun to regulating fermenter temperatures, for instance – is an illuminated touchscreen control panel tucked beneath brewhouse framework.

Featuring computer icons of all the components the brewing process – the grain silos, mash tun, lauter tun, kettle, fermenter tanks, etc. – the display panel is driven by software into which the recipes, parameters and procedures for Flying Fish's lineup of ales (and down the road, head brewer Casey Hughes says there will be lagers) have been programmed, shifting the task of creating beer from the sometimes physically laborious to the feather touch of tapping glass.

But wait it gets better.

The system can be operated remotely, too. Imagine sitting at your favorite bar with a pint of Exit 8 in front of you, logging in via an iPhone to check the temperature of beer in the fermenters or the status of other tanks.

And in case you get the impression that high tech takes the hands out of hand-crafted, then guess again. The human touch starts with formulating the recipes and continues with some taste bud and olfactory follow-up on the beers produced, to ensure what was brewed turned out the way it was intended.

The automated set-up that Flying Fish-Somerdale has graduated to puts the South Jersey brewery in league with the likes of Pennsylvania brewers Troegs, Sly Fox and Victory. It's also move toward ensuring the kind of consistency the beer-drinking public would expect.

But such automation isn't always the province of becoming a bigger brewery. In a world where technology can change faster than a bar's tap handle lineup during seasonal beer releases, touchscreen control panels are available to breweries of all sizes.

Just go 60 miles north of Somerdale to Hillsborough, where the budding Flounder Brewing has a touchscreen to operate its 1-barrel Blichmann set-up. (The brewery last week got the official blessing from town officials to occupy the building; state regulators gave the green light to Flounder's license back in early March. There are still some odds and ends to take care of, but the folks at Flounder expect to begin brewing some test batches in June.)

It was engineering mistake that led Flounder to include in its game plan a $9,000 touchscreen controller made by Brewmation, a Hopewell Junction, N.Y., company. The size of the brewery's natural gas line was found to be a quarter-inch too small, a BTU drop that meant either upgrading – and incurring a potentially lengthy delay – or switch to electric, which the brewery did.

Jeremy Lees, who owns the start-up with his two brothers, a brother-in-law and a cousin, says the mistake proved to be fortuitous. All of the Flounder principals will be leading the lives of brewery owners with the full-time jobs they had before getting into commercial brewing. Anything that will ensure consistency from batch to batch is a plus, Jeremy says, not to mention that down the road, they could add remote log-in capability to their set-up to control some of the beer-making process from those day jobs – or wherever – via a smart phone.

Closeup of Flounder touchscreen

Not unlike Flying Fish.

Brewmation has been making the touchscreen controller since 2010; the company has been making control panels for craft breweries for almost 10 years, with units installed at the New York enterprises of Rockaway Brewing and Good Nature Brewing, says Kevin Weaver, a longtime homebrewer and one of the electrical engineer minds behind Brewmation. (Kevin also has his own 7-barrel brewery in the works.)

On the hot side, you need an electric set-up to be wired into the Brewmation controller (it doesn't support natural gas rigs), but it's universal on the fermentation side. (The units cost $9,000 to $12,000.)

Even for small-size breweries, the steps in brewing "screamed out to be automated," Kevin says. "That's how the whole thing started."

Turtle Stone becomes 2nd NJ licensee for 2012

Three beers for Turtle Stone Brewing.

That comes after three cheers for the Cumberland County brewery, licensed by New Jersey regulators eight days ago.

Owner Ben Battiata jumped straight to brewing after the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control made its customary inspection of the Vineland brewery and gave the thumbs-up on March 13th.

Using a 1-barrel pilot system, Ben turned out a half-batch of a milk stout, and full batches of an American stout and a red rye ale, the latter of which is destined to be the house beer at the Old Oar House Irish Pub in nearby Millville, a bar that's been one Ben's haunts for a while and in recent times has been working craft beers onto its 30-plus taps.

"It's the bar I've been going to since I've been allow to go to bars," Ben says.

Turtle Stone's 15-barrel brewhouse is still being set up. Thus, Ben cobbled together the small pilot system to get some beer produced to ensure the brewery had a presence at the Atlantic City beer festival March 30-31. "We didn't want to lose out on that exposure," he says.

As a vision, Turtle Stone goes back about six years. As brewery startup, things started coming together more seriously three to four years ago, with the acquisition of brewing equipment and scouting a location. Ben and his partner, his girlfriend Becky Pedersen, saw the pace quicken last year with federal regulators signing off on the project and brewery construction taking place through the fall and winter. Last week's visit by ABC inspectors was the breaking of the finish-line tape to what had become a bit of a marathon. Despite that, there are still a few more details to get in hand, such as bringing the 15-barrel brewhouse online and adding a tasting room. (Ben hopes to have that taken care of by summer.)

"I've been waiting for things to settle down so I could get some rest. It hasn't worked out that way," says Ben, who still works full-time for Viking Yachts in Bass River. He brewed the three inaugural ales over four sessions (two batches of red rye ale), sometimes working until 4 or 5 a.m.

With the red ale, Ben says to look for a stronger rye presence. The 6% ABV brew was made with caramel malts and an ample amount of rye, and hopped and dry-hopped with Cascades, although future versions are likely to include Amarillo hops. (Right now, Amarillo is hard to get, but Ben hopes to lock in a supply at some point.)

"I really like rye beer, so I pushed that up a little more," he says.

The milk stout (5.2% ABV), Ben says, was Turtle Stone's first batch as a licensed brewery and comes from his recipe file built up from over a decade of homebrewing. It was done in a smaller batch because he was still getting a feel for the pilot system. He plans to take a couple of sixtels of the milk stout to the AC beer fest, but more of the two other brews.

The American stout (6% ABV), a beer that has always been part of the launch plans for Turtle Stone, also features Cascade hops, plus the Zythos blended hop. The grain bill includes some oats to give the beer a silky body.

Coming six days after the approval for Flounder Brewing in Hillsborough (Somerset County), Turtle Stone is the second production brewery licensed by the state this year, nudging up the tally of New Jersey craft breweries to 24.

The two additions come on the heels of five licensees in 2011, and the exit from New Jersey's craft beer scene of just two startup breweries since 2010 (Port 44 Brew Pub in Newark and Great Blue Brewing in Franklin Township, Somerset County).

NJ green-lights Flounder Brewing

A Flounder founder: Jeremy Lees

One of the first things you notice when you settle into Flounder Brewing is the glassware on a trio of shelves behind the tasting room bar and the pictures on another shelf along the side wall.

The photos are special moments frozen in time; the pint glasses and mugs come from up and down the Northeast, across the country and even around the world: the 2009 Craft Brewers Conference in Boston; the SAVOR beer and food event in Washington, D.C.; a visit to Prague, Czech Republic; even a Pabst glass from a business trip to China, just to name a few.

From the looks of it, this could be almost any craft beer enthusiast's den, with a kegerator centerpiece to keep up the cheer among friends. After all, beer is a shared experience and speaks to good company.

Jeremy Lees, and his family partners in Flounder Brewing, wouldn't have it any other way. Their mantra is "Experience Your Beer. "Everything tells a story," says Jeremy, whose posterized image is the face of the company's logo. "That's what everything in here is trying to show, just remembering those events. I know a lot of what I was drinking when I was doing something cool."

Now the folks at Flounder Brewing will get a chance to extend Garden State beer drinkers an invitation to experience Flounder beer and create their own cool moments.

State regulators on Wednesday gave the official blessing to the tiny, 1-barrel brewery, following a 20-minute inspection of Flounder Brewing's facility located in a Hillsborough (Somerset County) business park. The Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control's approval raised the tally of licensed craft breweries in New Jersey to just shy of two dozen. (Flounder is the first licensee of 2012; more brewery projects are pending before ABC.)

The approval, long in coming  – over 18 months, and aided by a micro-loan through a program backed by Boston Beer Company – seemed a bit anti-climactic, but it was celebratory nonetheless.

After the inspection, Jeremy says he phoned his wife, Melissa, and a brothers, Mike and Dan (the brewery partnership also includes brother-in-law Greg Banacki Jr. and cousin William Jordan V). He planned to toast the end to the long and winding regulatory road with a beer later in the evening. (And as great as that news is, he says, there was more on tap: on Thursday, he and Melissa will learn the sex of the twins she's carrying.)

Despite the fresh licensing, don't look for beer from Flounder too soon. Give them a couple of months. There's some electrical work that remains to be done before they can heat up the brew kettle to turn out a planned honey amber ale and other brews they'll target for local markets.

Full Circle

For the Flounder crew, craft beer reaches beyond beverage. It's something metaphorically circular: It's living; it's conviviality and good times that create memories, and those memories create new reasons to get together and share beers in good company.

When he was living in Morristown, Jeremy would gather with his brothers to homebrew on Friday nights and play Brew-Opoly.

"As well as boiling (wort), we're sitting there playing Brew-Opoly – it's all microbreweries instead of the real estate," Jeremy says. "And then we moved to Lyndhurst, where my brother lives, which was also my grandma's house, so it was her garage, and we'd brew and barbecue, and after we finished brewing, we'd drink around the fire pit at night. It was just about us getting together."

Conviviality. Good times. Memories.

Beer is even an aha moment, about seeing the light.

Jeremy, with now-replaced brew setup

"Fat Tire is actually one of the first craft beers I ever had," Jeremy says, recalling his own epiphany. "I was about 19 years old, and I was (managing) this band in college. We were out in Boulder and we played at this little restaurant where the manager told us if he saw us drinking any beer he'd break our hands, but we could have a gig here. But meanwhile, we were drinking Fat Tire in the back room, and I'm like 'This stuff is great.' I'd just gone a year into college, where all you were drinking was Natty Light, and suddenly for the first time, I had Fat Tire."

(Speaking of "this is great," the memorable line by Stephen Furst, gleefully uttered during the chaotic parade scene in Animal House, the brewery borrows its name form Furst's hapless Delta House pledge character, Kent "Flounder" Dorfman.)

Beer also exists in defining moments.

Jeremy says he proposed to Melissa in the brewhouse of Dogfish Head's brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, after coming up with a romantic scheme (via the Dogfish Head 360º Experience) that reached all the way up to owner Sam Calagione, who gifted the couple beers from his private stash (Worldwide Stout from 2002 and 2006, 120 Minute IPA from '06, Burton Baton from '05, and a 750 milliliter bottle-conditioned 90 Minute IPA)

"Shelter Pale Ale will always be one of my favorite beers, because I was drinking that waiting to propose to my wife," Jeremy says. "I want to make good beer, but I also want people to enjoy that beer and what they're doing. That's what you're trying to portray. You don't want people to just slam it back and get hammered. It's about enjoying your beer."

And experiences that create memories.

Tuckahoe planning for ABC inspection

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.

Is it there yet? Just a little further

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.

Brewery launches Nos. 5 and 6 for 2011?

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.

The Jersey Nano-Brewery Roundup

For something that by definition means very small, they've become big in craft beer.

And the Garden State.

Nano-breweries, sized 2 barrels and smaller, if you need a general definition, have been popping up across the country like dandelions in spring. The unofficial coast-to-coast count is nearly 60 now making beer and 40-plus in development.

In New Jersey, they're a big part of those itching to enter the brewing industry. Half of the 10 craft brewing projects to emerge over the past 12 months have been nanos. Of those, one has started brewing; another is on the cusp of striking a mash.

Great Blue Brewing at Suydam Farms in Somerset County, licensed on Feb. 28, christened its 2-barrel setup with a red ale. Deep in South Jersey, down the shore, is where Cape May Brewing installed a one-third barrel rig that federal regulators signed off on April 1. Cape May Brewing's state approval is expected soon.

But wait, there's more.

Flounder Brewing is settling into leased space in an industrial park building in Hillsborough to become a 1.5-barrel brewery; in Ocean County, homebrewers calling themselves the Jersey Shore Brewing Experience are shopping to bar owners the idea of installing a 2-barrel brewery. The intended result: a brewpub via the nano track.

Meanwhile, Pinelands Brewing, the handle taken by a homebrewing duo in Atlantic County, has set its sights on a building in Egg Harbor City, the former host town of Cedar Creek, a now-defunct brewpub that made beer in the mid-1990s. Its 2-barrel system is now used at Great Blue.

The buzz about über-small, commercial brewing isn't lost on the trade group that represents most of New Jersey's craft brewers. "We'll welcome anybody that makes craft beer in New Jersey into the guild. That's always been the case," says Trap Rock brewpub's Charlie Schroeder, vice president of the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild.

By all accounts, the nano wave is the result of ambitious brewers – many of them rather accomplished homebrewers – looking to put their beers in front of someone besides their friends. They want to go pro, and they see nanos as an affordable foot in the door of the burgeoning craft beer industry. It's an entry point that steers around taking on the steeper expense of 10-, 15- or 20-barrel brewhouses and accompanying tank space.

With nanos, you can hang onto a day job that you're not financially ready to leave; yet you can still brew commercially and try to carve out local markets for beers that range from session strength to imperial. Nanos may be baby steps, but for some of the folks behind them, the vision includes going big someday.

"It's an effective way to enter the business, enter a market and build a brand," says Flounder Brewing's Jeremy Lees, a senior sales manager for a North Jersey manufacturer. Flounder (yes, the name's an Animal House reference) is a family affair that includes Jeremy's brothers, Mike and Dan; his brother-in-law, Greg Banacki Jr.; and cousin William Jordan V. "A nano lets us do this while dealing with responsibilities we now have. I do hope one day my full-time job is to be brewing beer. But you can't have a full-time job brewing beer as a nano brewery."

Paul Gatza, director of the Colorado-based Brewers Association, the craft beer industry's trade group, says nanos started showing up on the association's radar around 2008. "I think the movement of homebrewers into more sophisticated brewing systems and the availability of those systems are definite factors in pushing nanos forward," he says.

Those more sophisticated systems are what companies like Sabco, Blichmann and Psycho Brew are all about. They're the bridge between homebrewers and craft brew start-ups that jumped into the game on the larger scale.

Chris Breimayer and his brother, Pat, are the people behind the year-old Psycho Brew in Belding, Mich. Breimayer, an architect/engineer and homebrewer, turned to making custom brewing rigs after the slowdown in the housing industry.

Psycho Brew has sold a dozen systems – nearly all of them to nanos in development – since the fall, when Breimayer placed an ad on ProBrewer. Psycho Brew's biggest system runs about $13,300 and can produce 3 or 4 barrels. Breimayer spends a couple of hours each morning working out price quotes for prospective buyers.

"A lot of poeple don't have the money for the bigger systems. They can buy ours and prove their prowess and then step up," he says. Nanos that eventually outgrow their Psycho Brew rig can still use them as pilot systems for recipe formulation. (Psycho Brew is putting together a pilot brewing system for Brewery Ommegang, by the way.)

Keeping tabs on nano-brewers across the country is a side interest of Mike Hess, whose eponymous 1.6-barrel nano-brewery in San Diego started making beer last July. One of San Diego's 37 licensed breweries, Hess Brewing was expected to hit a total production mark of 70 barrels by the end of last month. (Hess features among its brews an 11% ABV pale ale and a rye imperial stout that's just under 10% ABV.)

Mike's blog, the Hess Brewing Odyssey, chronicles the nano niche and has become the de facto guide on starting a nano-brewery. The Brewers Association even steers folks interested in nanos to the Odyssey. Under the heading The Great Nanobrewery List: From CA to MA, Mike keeps a running coast-to-coast count on nanos that are operating or are in planning stages.

"I get email twice a week with something to add to the list. It gets updated as often as we get new information. We've done our best to keep it as thorough as possible," says Mike, who also owns a financial services business and has homebrewed since 1995.

The current count: 57 brewing, 42 on the drawing boards.

Andy Crouch, author of Great American Craft Beer and keeper of BeerScribe.com, finds a contrast between nanos and some brewing enterprises tripped up by a past industry shakeout. The people behind nanos have more beer savvy and are driven by something more pure of heart than those past entrepreneurs who envisioned a payday in microbrewing.

"They didn't really know about beer, know about distribution. They were just in it because they thought it was a good fad or a trend, and they just wanted to make some money. A lot of them lost a lot of money," he says. "These days a lot of the growth we're seeing is, oddly enough, in the opposite direction, people who aren't necessarily in it for money; they're in it to make very small batches, these nanobreweries. Here in New England, where I live, there are probably at least 10 that have opened up in the last two or three years, making 1- to 2-barrel batches."

These days the Garden State is witnessing the biggest surge in brewery or beer company development in more than a decade.

In 2009, the well-established Iron Hill brewpub chain opened its eighth location – but its first in New Jersey (Maple Shade). Last year, production brewer New Jersey Beer Company (North Bergen) launched, as did Port 44 Brew Pub (Newark) and East Coast Beer Company (Point Pleasant in Ocean County), a contract-brewed label. Turtle Stone Brewing (Vineland, Cumberland County), an enterprise in development from late 2009 and through last year, was still looking for a site while warehousing brewing equipment (a brewhouse from a shuttered Rock Bottom brewpub and some 15-barrel fermenters).

By the start of 2011, seven more projects were in development: production brewers Kane Brewing and Carton Brewing (both are located in Monmouth County and have licensing paperwork pending with the state) and nanos Great Blue; Cape May; Flounder; Pinelands and Jersey Shore Brewing.

Great Blue entered the state's craft beer scene with a concept to use hops grown at Suydam Farms in its beers targeted for bars and restaurants near the farm. The owners say they still have some bugs to work out on their brewing system, but they plan to put it in service a second time later this month.

Cape May Brewing hopes to be making beer in time to hit the summer season and build a following throughout the shore region. A tiny one-third-barrel system was installed in their building in Lower Township to secure approvals from federal and state regulators. Plans call for upgrading as quickly as the brewery's market will allow.

Flounder Brewing hopes to be making test batches of beer by summer and launch the brand with a bottled Hill Street Honey, an American amber ale made with honey from a New Jersey farm. "My grandfather was a beekeeper, he was the original artisan in the family," Jeremy says.

The guys at Flounder hope the market lets them grow to 2 barrels quickly. "To start we would be doing 20 gallons at a time, two cycles being 40 gallons a brew session, so about 1.5 barrels per brew day," Jeremy says.

Bottling will be handled on a counter-pressure filler like some brewpubs use to fill growlers (his model is an older version of the kind in use at Iron Hill). If their market takes off, he says, they may contract out some brewing and offer draft beer.

For now, Jeremy says, the brewery's tour/tasting room has been finished; an architect was hired recently to do utility work design for the brewery buildout.

Farther south, in Ocean County, Wayne Hendrickson and three homebrewing colleagues in Bayville have been pitching nano-brewing to bar owners, hoping one will take them up on the idea to invest in a restricted brewers license and let them install a 2-barrel system to turn the tavern into a brewpub.

Their sales kit consists of a white four-pack carton of sample beers: Screamin' Demon English Red, Gütesbier German Alt, Trouble Maker American Ale and XPA Extra Pale Ale.

Their company name comes partly from the sense of community that craft beer creates.

"We're all Jersey Shore guys," Wayne says. "We wanted it to say a little more. It's more than the beer; it's about the (beer) experience."

After months of making their pitch, Wayne says they may have a bite, someone who's interested in buying a bar and adding a small brewery.

Jason Chapman of Hammonton (Atlantic County) says he unsuccessfully made similar pitches to bar owners before coming up with Pinelands Brewing, a nano he and his homebrewing partner, Luke McCooley, want to get rolling with a German-style wheat brew spiced with coriander and dried lemon peel, a smoked English special bitter and an imperial stout.

The brewery's name is an ode to the Pine Barrens and those things associated with it. "I'm from this area. I grew up camping, fishing and canoeing, all the activities that are typical of the Pinelands area," Jason says. "Cranberries are in the plans for brewing. I've brewed some tasty cranberry beers, and being from Hammonton you have to brew with blueberries."

Last winter the two put money down on a building in Egg Harbor City.

"It was built for a soda company some years back. It has the high ceilings, a floor drain system already built in, which is a big sticking point for breweries," says Jason, whose day job is a heating and air conditioning technician.

"I have the equipment and the experience and recipes to brew 1- to 2-barrel batches. It's just a matter of getting the capital together to get the kegs, the advertising, the intricacies of starting an actual microbrewery."

FOLKS IN THE PHOTOS ... Top to bottom: Jeremy Lees (photo supplied to BSL); (from left) Robert Krill, Chris Henke and Ryan Krill; (from left) Luke McCooley and Jason Chapman.