Flying Fish tasting room & Menendez visit

Senator Robert Menendez notes some
accomplishments of Flying Fish
after touring the brewery on Monday

Flying Fish toasted its year-old Somerdale facility with a visit from U.S. Senator Robert Menendez, whose tour of the brewery on Monday was also the highlight of a soft opening of Flying Fish's new tasting room and the bottle release of its hurricane fundraiser beer, FU Sandy.

Senator Menendez, a co-sponsor of legislation to cut federal excise taxes for craft brewers by as much as half, took a brief tour of Flying Fish's brewery space, checking out some firkins and wooden barrels at the foot of towering fermenter tanks. He then raised a pint of Flying Fish Farmhouse Ale with company president Gene Muller and sales director Andy Newell in the new 10-tap tasting room. 

From left: Andy Newell, Gene Muller,
and Senator Robert Menendez

The senator saluted 17-year-old Flying Fish as a groundbreaker in the state, noting the brewery's growth since its move last year from its founding location of Cherry Hill, and saying: “It’s the first microbrewery here in southern New Jersey, and the first new brewery in the region in more than half a century. The $6 million expansion in 2012 has enabled Flying Fish to triple production and create two dozen new jobs.” 

There's more growth ahead: Flying Fish has two more 150-barrel tanks coming later this month.

Last May, Senator Menendez highlighted the introduction of the federal legislation to cut the excise tax on craft breweries from $7 a barrel to $3.50 on the first 60,000 barrels of beer produced, a reduction that would actually make the federal tax slightly lower than New Jersey's tax on craft beer production. (Others from New Jersey's congressional delegation who are supporting the measure include Reps. Rush Holt and Leonard Lance.)

Meanwhile, Flying Fish's new tasting room opened quietly on either

side of the Fourth of July holiday for growler fills and sales of six-packs and of the limited-release bottled FU Sandy.

Joe Torres, who recently joined Flying Fish to run the brewery's tasting room, says a total of 109 growlers were sold last Wednesday and Friday, plus nine cases of Sandy, the wheat-pale ale first brewed last winter to raise money for Hurricane Sandy relief efforts. 

Initially draft-only, FU Sandy sold out effortlessly and was brought back with a draft release in June and 750-milliliter bottles that began hitting store shelves early last week. 

Flying Fish's tasting room is still somewhat a work in progress: Some wallboard still needs to be hung, and the air-conditioning is getting a tweak. Thus, the soft opening. (Check with the brewery for tasting room hours; by the way, Flying Fish has logo'd growlers.)

•••

Casey on brewhouse steps

It's been several weeks since former head brewer Casey Hughes left Flying Fish for Tampa, Florida, and Coppertail Brewing, a start-up brewery of similar size to his New Jersey alma mater. But Casey, an avid fisherman, didn't leave without sharing a one-that-got-away tale, specifically, a beer with a Garden State-crop ingredient whose brewing eluded him during his 10-year tenure.

"Cranberry Berliner weiss. It's a style, being in the state of New Jersey, the one beer I've always said I wanted to make," Casey says. "That was the beer. I love Berliner weiss, and I'd love to do one down in Florida. It seems now that everyone brews Berliner weiss in Florida. The state seems to have really (glommed) onto that style, so I probably won't be able to do one for a while until it all calms down there."

Here in New Jersey, Casey says,  "somebody else will get to make that beer." 

A little longer wait for Sandy bottles

Boxes of labels for FU Sandy bottles

 

















Think July, not June.

Flying Fish has put out out an update on the bottle release of its wheat-pale ale, FU Sandy, pushing back the date a little bit.

The 6.5% ABV brew that initially appeared in February as storm-relief fundraiser made a draft return last week (notably at the start of Philly Beer Week), but it's going to take a couple weeks longer for the 750 milliliter bottles.

The beer is due to be bottled in a week. However, such schedules can be subject to change. Additionally, the brewery's handling of the 750s is a two-stage process: They get the labels put on a day or so after they've been filled.

There are a few other circumstances related to doing business in New Jersey to factor in. The upshot is, the beer's bottle release is now the beginning of July.

Philly Beer Week: Let the taps flow

Friday has three words for you: Philly Beer Week.

Let's toss in a fourth: collaboration, because collaboration beers will abound in Philadelphia over the coming days. 

The curtain on the 2013 Philly Beer Week observance lifts at 7 p.m. this Friday with opening-tap festivities inside and outside the Independence Visitors Center. 

A spotlight will be on a Belgo-American Dubbel (7.5% ABV) named Manneken-Penn, brewed at Brasserie de la Senne by Yvan De Baets, with an assist from Weyerbacher's head brewer Chris Wilson, Monks Cafe owner Tom Peters and Matt Hohorst, winner of this year's annual PBW raffle of a trip to Belgium. (The beer's name and label are a mash-up of the William Penn statue atop City Hall and Brussels' famed fountain whizzer statue, Manneken Pis.)

The devil's in the details, so here you go: The beer features American Calypso hops, European Slovenia, Aurora and Styrian Goldings woven through a grain bill accented with oats and molasses. 

Last year's brew born of the Philly Beer Week Belgium trip was Spéciale Belge, a smoky amber ale brewed by Brasserie DuPont's Olivier Dedeycker in conjunction with Iron Hill Maple Shade.

As a beer city, Philadelphia has major mojo; it's gravitational pull from finding, creating and serving world-class craft beers tugs inescapably on the Garden State. Even beer enthusiasts across farther-away North Jersey get caught under the spell. 

"Until recently, if you lived in New Jersey and wanted a great beer, chances are you had to shell out a few bucks to the DRPA and visit Philly. But South Jersey bars are finally catching on … and it's gotten a helluva lot easier to find not just local crafts, but exotic imports and West Coast micros throughout the Garden State," says Don Russell, PBW's executive director. "That's why you'll increasingly find solid Beer Week events across the Delaware in New Jersey."

You'll also find some New Jersey hands involved in Brotherly Suds 4, the beer whose tapping outside the visitors center gets things rolling for the 10-day soiree that launched the national trend of city beer weeks six years ago.

The English summer ale is a collaborative effort by Gene Muller of Flying Fish in Somerdale and Mark Edelson of Iron Hill brewpub in Maple Shade; Philly's Tom Kehoe of Yards Brewing; Bill Covaleski from Victory Brewing; and Gordon Grubb of Nodding Head brewpub.

Don credits Flying Fish and Iron Hill for breaking down some barriers that had slowed the Garden State's progress in the craft beer industry.

"I heartily encourage the good folks of New Jersey to charge up their E-ZPass and visit the city during beer week. They can do a bit of bragging while they're at it, because our Brotherly Suds 4 collaboration brew, available on draft throughout the week, was partly the work of Muller and Edelson," Don says. 

There's some more Jersey in PBW: River Horse Brewing, which is on the cusp of exiting Lambertville and taking up their new digs in Ewing, will also be pouring at Opening Tap. (By the way, the brewery's production bids its founding location in southern Hunterdon County adieu with a final brew of its Tripel Horse Belgian ale on Friday. But RH will have some lingering business – think tasting room – in Lambertville until late June.) 

Here's some more on the PBW lineup (get PBW's mobile app):

• Dock Street Trappiste Pale, a Trappist-style IPA inspired by Orval, brewed by Dock Street, Scott Morrison, Tom Peters and George Hummel (Home Sweet Homebrew), fermented with saccharomyces in the primary fermentation and brettanomyces in the secondary fermentation for a moderate sour character, plus Sonnet and East Kent Golding hops for grassy, citrusy flavor. (Available in 750 milliliter bottles from Dock Street exclusively during PBW.)
• Johnny Berliner, brewed by Dock Street and Johnny Brenda’s, a Berlinerweiss.
• Standard Pale, the sixth collaboration between Sly Fox’s Brian O’Reilly and Standard Tap’s William Reed, an American pale ale brewed with new hop varietal Calypso, which will be tapped by the Hammer of Glory when it makes its way past Standard Tap on the HOG Relay, en route to Opening Tap, and poured for free until the firkin is empty.
• DNA UK, from Dogfish Head and Charles Wells, a transatlantic collaboration that brings together the “DNA” of Dogfish Head’s famed 60 Minute IPA and a strain of yeast from Brit brewer Wells. DNA is making its debut at PBW.
• Brewvolution II, a collaboration between Prism, Evil Genius and Boxcar that is a hard root beer drawn from Lancaster County’s Amish community and infused with root herbs and spices for all the character of a root beer with none of the saccharine sweetness.

Kane Brewing offering hops lesson

Think you know hops? Have a passion for hops?

Then this event is sure to please.

For its June 1 brewery tour day, Kane Brewing will train a spotlight on hops, taking its Head High IPA as a base beer and turning it into a flight of nine single-hopped brews for a lesson on the flavors and aromas that hops provide and some insight into the green-yellow flower cones' power to turn a single beer into many different beers. 

"So many IPAs out there use tons of different hops to blend the flavors together," says Matt Czigler, head brewer at Kane. "A lot people who are into IPAs, or are getting into IPAs, aren't sure which flavors come from certain hops. So, we want to give (them) that experience while celebrating everyone's love of hops."

So think of A Wolf Among the Seas, as the event has been dubbed, as creating a knowledge bank, a foundation for your taste buds and nose to begin teasing out flavors and aromas in your favorite IPAs or pale ales, beers no doubt shaped by the typical brewing conventions of multiple hop additions. 

(About the event title: The Latin genus and species names humulus lupulus roughly translate to wolf among the weeds; Kane Brewing is located in Ocean Township in Monmouth County, a little over three miles from the beach, so A Wolf Among the Seas. The event runs from noon to 5 p.m. at the brewery.) 

As a brewing ingredient, hops are hardly two-dimensional. They're more than mere bittering and aromatic agents. And in a single varietal, you can get quite a range of qualities.

"There are times even in a hop itself you get different qualities off the flavor and off the aroma," Matt says. "Certain hops may be very heavy in grapefruit in the aroma but the flavor might give a sort of different citrus (taste). We want to let people know that when we say we're using certain hops in there, these are the qualities we're looking for, and we're blending them together for this reason."

Head High, Kane's 6.5% ABV flagship IPA, is normally brewed with a blend of Columbus and Chinook in the boil for bitterness, with later additions of Cascade, Centennial and Citra to lend a grapefruit signature beneath a nose of citrus, pine and tropical fruit. It's dry-hopped with Cascade, Citra and Columbus.  

For A Wolf Among the Seas, Matt pulled off a few barrels of wort from a Head High brew day, and finished out single-hopped batches with Citra (citrus and tropical fruits); Columbus (citrus, slight woody flavor); Amarillo (spicy, orange-like bouquet); Simcoe (varied aromas of pine, passion fruit, citrus, or earthiness); Legacy (a spicy hop with black currant notes; Kane used Legacy in some recent specialty batches); Nelson Sauvin and Pacifica (New Zealand-grown varietals, with fruit flavors or orange marmalade signatures); Bravo (floral aromas and fruitiness); and Mosaic (floral qualities and tropical fruit). 

Besides having the same grain bill, the beers all have the same IBU level and were fermented with the same yeasts to ensure even comparisons across the lineup.

"They're all sort of apples to apples, just different hops in them," says brewery founder Michael Kane. "It might not be the best beer in the world, but it's a good way to understand what a hop tastes like. We've also been working on a pale ale, a lower-gravity American style beer. We're hoping to release that that weekend as well, if it's ready."

Kane's event is reminiscent of one Iron Hill Brewery held at its Maple Shade brewpub a couple of years ago. Brewer Chris LaPierre turned out an Irish red ale without using finishing hops, then dry-hopped individual quarter kegs with several kinds of American hops, plus Czech, Slovenian, German, English, and Japanese hops.

But specifically, Kane Brewing's tour-day event is really an echo of its highly successful afternoon of stouts held in March. Back then, Kane took its Port Omna Stout and spun it several ways with adjuncts like coffee, vanilla bean and orange, or whiskey barrel-aged it, effectively demonstrating for tour guests how brewers can rewrite a beer with some later conditioning and tweaking. 

Offering a lesson on hops made for a natural a follow-up. New Jersey beer enthusiasts can expect more such events on a semi-regular basis from the brewery. 

Beyond that, though, the event provides something else to consider: Given the new liberties to retail to the public and serve beer, freedoms that Garden State craft brewers were handed last fall by the Legislature, Wolf Among the Seas and events like it become effective uses of production breweries' tasting rooms. They're ways to interact with the craft beer-drinking public that take brewery tours beyond the big, shiny stainless steel tanks people often get to see. 

Likewise, such events distinguish production breweries' serving pints of beer from the idea of the breweries acting like bars. In the case of the hops and stout events, for example, tour guests comparatively taste and smell how a particular beer ingredient is used. That's something a bar or restaurant can't really do, and it speaks directly to the spirit of regulatory changes craft brewers won last year.

"Brewery tours are designed to be an educational experience, so this is a logical use of the tasting room," says Flying Fish Brewing's Gene Muller, who helped lead the push last year to change the state's craft brewing regulations.

The tasting rooms then truly supports brewers' products and help build followers, who in turn buy the beers in bars and packaged goods stores. 

"It's a good tool, especially to educate about some of the styles that we do that are a little different," Michael says. "Some of the beers we make are a little more unique. So we can talk about that, the process by which we do it, other things we're working on, new hops, new malts, different yeasts, different barrel-aging techniques and products we're using.

"Our primary business is brewing and (wholesale) distributing. That's what we do. But it's nice to be able to interact with people who are interested in what we're doing, explain a little bit more and focus on what's going on around here and keep people informed. We're always adding new equipment. It gives people a chance to come in and see what's new, see what's going on around here."

Work goes on for new Flying Fish tasting room

You'll have to use your imagination for now, but at some point – around June – the construction work shown here will have transformed into a nicely appointed bar with 10 taps pouring Flying Fish beers for folks who visit the brewery's tasting room.

Flying Fish has been brewing in the new Somerdale location for a while now. But there are still some finishing touches being done to the brewery.

The tasting room is part of that; it's been under construction for a few weeks now. (There are also some new tanks coming.)

Something to note about tasting rooms: The Brewers Association mentioned last month in its state-of-the-industry presentation at the Craft Beer Conference that there's an uptick in sales out of breweries' tasting rooms. 

Here in New Jersey, last fall's change in the laws that governor craft brewing elevated the importance of tasting rooms for production brewers, creating the opportunity for a much more viable revenue stream.

Tasting rooms have always provided a good way to talk to the beer-drinking public.

But the difference now is, brewers don't have keep telling tour guests, "No, we can't serve you more than a sample" … "No, we can't sell you a case" … or "No, we can't sell you a keg." 

Beer enthusiasts can now get all of those things in a more accommodating visit that's not just about a sip of beer and buying T-shirts and glassware. And brewers can more effectively use their tasting rooms to launch new beers or hold events tabbed to whatever theme they can think of. (Not that they hadn't been doing that, but now the experience can be fuller and more satisfying to tour guests. )

EDITOR'S NOTE: The bottom photo is a shot from head brewer Casey Hughes' office overlooking the brewhouse and packaging areas.  

A sign of more things to come

The new sign at Flying Fish's Somerdale home is up, just in case you need a beacon to follow.

There are more cosmetic things going on at the brewery, such as work on the tasting room. That got rolling around mid-March.

It hardly seems like it, but word leaked out about Flying Fish finding new space in Somerdale around this time of year two years ago.

By fall 2011, the official word about Somerdale was put out, with shiny new brewing equipment getting delivered in the early part of last year.

Beer started happening a few months afterward.

Time flies.

Oh, here's one for sheer milestone coincidence, Exit 4 turns 4 next month.

Happy 4th.

Pour another round.

FU Sandy, and the storm you rode in on

Flying Fish has released it's fundraiser beer, FU Sandy.

To find the hybrid wheat-pale ale that's intended to raise money for people affected by the Oct. 29 superstorm, check here.

The beer was a limited run in draft only, so hurry. Also, each bar that got a keg will have a case of FU Sandy glassware to distribute.

Jersey's Finest, and a new age of NJ craft beer

Sen. Norcross draws first pint

Call it a great beer collaboration, if you want.

But Wednesday evening's release event for Flying Fish and Iron Hill's third swing at a Jersey's Finest brew had the hallmarks of a new day dawning, an ushering in of New Jersey Craft Brewing Industry, Version 2.0.

An American IPA dosed with experimental hops was the feature, the vehicle to celebrate the camaraderie of Jersey craft brewing; the industry neighbors that production brewer Flying Fish and brewpub Iron Hill are; and the growth spurt that New Jersey's industry has been experiencing on either side of an overhaul of the state's regulations. 

New Jersey has moved into a new era, thanks to the state Legislature and a bill signed by Gov. Chris Christie last September. Flying Fish president Gene Muller and Iron Hill co-owner Mark Edelson walked point on the legislation, logging a lot of hours talking to lawmakers and attending committee hearings.

Jersey's Finest ice sculpture

Coming at the end of a Garden State Craft Brewers Guild meeting, Wednesday's event was attended by a bevy of Iron Hill-Maple Shade faithfuls, plus new and longtime Jersey craft beer industry faces, and featured a trio of other brews put on tap for the occasion. 

On had for the ceremonial first pour were Michael Kane, founder of Kane Brewing (Ocean Township);  Ryan and Bob Krill, owners of Cape May Brewing (Rio Grande); Becky Pedersen and Ben Battiata, owners of Turtle Stone Brewing (Vineland); and Tim Kelly, brewer at the Tun Tavern brewpub (Atlantic City). 

Michael Kane and Casey Hughes

Kane and Cape May Brewing both celebrated first anniversaries last summer; Turtle Stone's one-year mark is coming up in March.

Flying Fish, as many people know, is up and running in a newer, larger home in Somerdale, while Iron Hill just started work on its second New Jersey location (its 10th overall), targeted to open in Voorhees in mid-summer.

If you looked a little closer in the crowd you would have spied John Companick, whose Spellbound Brewing is on the drawing board.  (Savvy beer folks know of John's association with Heavyweight Brewing, the former Monmouth County brewery that closed up shop in New Jersey in 2006, but morphed into the Earth, Bread + Brewery brewpub in Philadelphia.)

A closer listen to crowd chatter would have cued you to the news that Bolero Snort Brewery just launched and has two beers that will soon be hitting taps in North Jersey.

Such growth, lawmakers say, was the goal when they and the governor updated New Jersey's craft brewing rules. State Sen. Donald Norcross, who took the honor of drawing the first pint of the Jersey's Finest IPA, calls the current quick pace a bonus.

The senator, a Camden County Democrat, was a key sponsor of the legislation that freed New Jersey craft breweries from a regulatory chokehold that made it not just tough to launch a brewery in the Garden State, but to keep one in business. One of the event's brews, a dry-hopped, cask-conditioned blend of Flying Fish Hopfish and Abbey Dubbel, paid tribute to the legislation, taking its name for the Senate bill number, S-641.

"There was an article today (Wednesday) about Pennsylvania," says Sen. Norcross. "They have gone from 10 to over a hundred breweries in the last decade, and that's the type of expansion we're looking for in the state of New Jersey. The design was to try to increase the productivity of our craft brewers in the state. We have the added benefit that this is actually turning out the way we had it planned."

From left: Ryan Krill, Tim Kelly, Casey Hughes

Indeed. 

New Jersey's first craft brewery, Ship Inn, opened in 1995.

Until Iron Hill opened its Maple Shade brewery-restaurant in 2009, New Jersey slogged through a 10-year drought of new, home-state beer-makers. Though still not the friendliest of business climates in which to site a brewery, the state licensed five new breweries in 2011, and two last year.  

Right now there are at least four brewery license applications, such as one from Pinelands Brewing in Ocean County and Tuscany Brewhouse in Passaic County, pending with state regulators. Other projects across the state are in various stages of development, like Spellbound Brewing.

"If not for that bill passing, we were seriously thinking about putting our production site in Pennsylvania or New york," says Bob Olson of Bolero Snort Brewery. "The fact that it has will definitely keep us here." 

Gene Muller (right) talks to Ben Battiata

Bolero Snort launched this month with a pair of contract-brewed lagers, Ragin' Bull and Blackhorn. Bob, who spoke by phone Thursday, says the business plan for self-distributing Bolero is to have its own brewing facility, ideally sometime next year. In the interim, High Point Brewing (Butler), makers of the Ramstein wheat and lager beers, will do their brewing, stocking Bolero's warehouse in Bergen County.

Working together

Brewery collaborations continue to be popular. In Garden State, the Jersey's Finest banner owes to a Garden State Craft Brewers Guild initiative from a few of years back. 

Flying Fish and Iron Hill were the first breweries to put their minds together for a Jersey's Finest beer, offering a mashup of stouts (chocolate and coffee versions brewed independently and later blended) in January 2011. The Tun Tavern and Basil T's in Red Bank followed suit with a brace of chocolate-chili pepper beers. 

By that summer Flying Fish and Iron Hill's brewers, Casey Hughes and Chris LaPierre, were working together to produce August 2011's Iron Fish, a black Belgian IPA that, with a tongue-in-cheek nod, employed about every beer trend you could think of back then.

Flying Fish and Iron Hill's latest round of collaboration is much more straight-forward, using some hops from a Washington State farm that also grows apples and berries. 

"It's a nice hoppy IPA, using all experimental hops," Casey says. "I'm really happy with it. I think it turned out really nice: golden, light, dry, crisp, drinkable with a nice hop character, nice bitterness to it. 

"We kind of went by the seat of our pants and just brewed, and played around with the hops as we had them. It's funny. If you look at our recipe, it says 'high alpha hop, low alpha hop, and Roy Farms hops.'"

Medal works

Call it the Bronze Age, Iron Fish edition.

Flying Fish, now officially calling Somerdale, NJ, its home, took a bronze medal at the Great American Beer Festival, while Iron Hill Brewery notched a silver, plus a pair of bronze medals. (Here's the complete winners list.)

Bronze finisher Exit 8, a chestnut Belgian Brown ale, debuted just before spring 2012 as the last new Exit Series brew to come out of Flying Fish's founding location of Cherry Hill.

You may recall FF's Exit 4 won gold in 2009, while its Abbey Dubbel won a silver the year before.

Speaking of Exits, Exit 16 is now a year-round beer in 12-ounce bottles and draft, giving Flying Fish shelf and tap representation in the double IPA heading.

That tidbit has been out in the beer headlines for a little while now, but it's worth repeating. Double IPAs have been immensely popular for sometime now, and this wild rice take on the style is worth your glass.

Meanwhile, Iron Hill kept its winning streak alive with a silver medal for its Rauchtoberfest (Lancaster, Pa., location), and bronze medals for its Roggenbier (Phoenixville, Pa.), Black IPA (Wilmington, Del.) and Russian Imperial Stout (Media, Pa.).

This year's medals extend Iron Hill's impressive winning streak to 16 years. That's how long the nine-location brewpub chain has been in business and more than half the existence of the GABF. 

About the pictures:
Flying Fish held an open house back on Sept. 29, an event that coincided with a town festival in Somerdale. It was a one-off open house, since the brewery is putting some finishing touches on the new digs before it begins brewery tours on a regular basis. Check the brewery's multiple feeds (Facebook, Twitter and website) if you have any questions about tours.

Putting his stamp on things

Catching up with Chris Sheehan, brewer at J.J. Bitting brewpub ...

In a few days' time Chris will be heading west to the Great American Beer Festival, catching up to the five beers the Woodbridge restaurant-brewery sent to this year's gathering in Denver.

Bitting is one at least four Garden State breweries sending beer to the Oct. 11-13 festival (according to the GABF website, the other three are Flying Fish in Somerdale; Harvest Moon in New Brunswick; and Iron Hill Maple Shade, a bronze medalist last year for Vienna lager).

Bitting selections that Chris sent are Victoria's Golden Ale; Knockout Bock; a dunkelweizen; the hoppy foreign export Onyx Stout; and Bad Boy Oktoberfest, a GABF bronze medalist a dozen years ago. (They're all entered into competition.)

With just over a year under his belt at Bitting, having arrived shortly after Newark's Port 44 Brew Pub closed over the summer of 2011, Chris has spent his time in Woodbridge bringing to tap beers from his own recipe catalogue.

For instance, this year is the second go-round at Bitting for his wet hop Harvest Ale made with home-grown hops. Onyx Stout is a Jersey remake of the well-received Black Hole XXX Stout he turned out at Chelsea Brewing in New York.

The Harvest Ale went on tap a couple of weeks ago, the same day as the Central Jersey Beer Fest, the event Bitting has sponsored at a park near the pub for the past six years.

The 10 pounds of wet hops (of differing – some unknown – varieties) were used mostly for finishing, though some did get a 30-minute kettle addition. They came from upstate New York and Chris' home in Bergenfield, where one of his bines was a big-time producer, providing a fifth of the fresh hops he used.

Chris has also been tweaking some of the Bitting flagships, but he has been rather conservative in that regard with the Oktoberfest.

"I reworked all the recipes, except the Oktoberfest because it's an award winner from years ago. I did have to take sack of grain out of it. I was getting better (mash) extraction from a change in the crush of the grain and just better brewhouse techniques."

Good luck in Denver to Bitting, Iron Hill, Harvest Moon and Flying Fish.  

Next stop, governor's desk

Vote tally, 39-0

Greater freedoms for New Jersey craft brewers, and the subsequent benefits for their followers – beer drinkers, now come down to a tough-talking, über Springsteen fan who has in the past shown support for homebrewing and craft beer.

Just exactly how Governor Chris Christie will act on the legislation handed off to him on Monday remains, of course, to be seen.

But the Garden State Craft Brewers Association, the industry organization that backed the bills, is optimistic that the governor will sign the bill, endorsing changes to the rules that brewers say have hemmed them in since 1995, the headwaters of the beer renaissance that has seen New Jersey brewery ranks since swell to two dozen.

Still, as the legislation enters this final phase, the opposition that has trailed it upon its introduction earlier this year isn't going away. The powerful New Jersey Restaurant Association is likely to seek the governor's ear and appeal to him to veto the bill, renewing its complaints that the proposed regulatory changes fly in the face of the three-tier system governing alcoholic beverages.

The association contends the changes would diminish the value – think six and seven figures – of licenses that bars and restaurants hold to serve beer, wine and liquor.

So, supporters of craft beers brewed in the Garden State will just have to stay tuned. But there are some significant things to consider.

Coming on the heels of Saturday's 16th annual guild beer festival aboard the USS New Jersey, Monday's Senate action sent the craft brewing bill to Governor Christie with a 39-0 vote; last Thursday (June 21), the Assembly gave its stamp of approval, 64-13.

Those wide vote margins should play to the guild's favor with the governor's office. And the economics of giving the state's craft brewers a freer hand command attention as well.

For instance, as with the opening of its Maple Shade location three years ago, Iron Hill brewpub projects it will create 100 jobs when it opens its second New Jersey pub in Voorhees around the end of this year. (Iron Hill has nine locations spread among Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.)

Under the current craft brewing regulations, brewpubs are cut off after two establishments (and thus Voorhees would theoretically cap the number of jobs Iron Hill could create in the state). But the measure (A1277/S641) passed last week and Monday would allow brewpubs to operate up to 10 establishments and sell their beers through distributors.

Outside Senate chamber, after the vote

(The legislation also would allow production breweries to retail beer to tour patrons for consumption on and off-site. Right now, the most you can buy upon touring a New Jersey craft brewery is two six packs or two growlers. If the governor signs the bill, that would retail limit would become a 15-gallon keg.)

Additionally, and this is perhaps a reflection of the continued vibrant national market for craft beer, some of the Garden State's newest breweries, specifically ones launched last (Cape May Brewing, Carton and Kane Brewing), have added assistant brewers, sales staff or tasting room employees on their payrolls, all before crossing the threshold of being in business a full year.

Meanwhile, Flying Fish Brewing is on the verge of launching its new $7 million automated brewery in its new home of Somerdale. (Last October, Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno paid a visit to Flying Fish.)

So with that those circumstances as a backdrop, all eyes turn to the governor, an outgoing guy known for batting down critics, tough talk at town hall forums he's held across the state, and his preference for taking in a Bruce Springsteen concert over prepping for a campaign debate.

To his credit, the governor signed legislation in January to dump a 20-year-old state regulation that obligated homebrewers to obtain a permit to make beer in their backyards and garages. In May 2011, he also signed a proclamation declaring the second week of that month Craft Beer Week in New Jersey, to coincide with a national observance.

Again, stay tuned. A new era of craft brewing in the Garden State is closer to reality than it has ever been.

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."

Flying Dog's Matt Brophy talks of his Jersey ties

Flying Dog's Matt Brophy

When you think about it, Matt Brophy's beer aspirations were meant to have wings.

His foot in the door to the craft brewing world was Flying Fish in Cherry Hill in the 19990s. And for nearly a decade now,  he's been with Flying Dog, taking a Denver-to-Maryland route where there's greatness in gonzo, some wild and wicked label art by Ralph Steadman, and the Hunter S. Thompson echo of the Celtic axiom "Good people drink good beer."

No shit.

But long before his pro brewer days, while he was a youth in South Jersey (by way of Pittsburgh), beer, as in brewing, found Matt. It poured from the radio as homebrewer talk, a tide of inspiration that was really a wave of ambition. Matt went with the flow.

Recently, Matt took some time for a Q&A to talk about how he got his start in brewing, his hearing the call of out West, and the Flying Dog beer culture that unleashes the hounds to come up with those cool bat-winged brews. It seems like a fitting interview to mark this Saturday's National Homebrew Day.


BSL: You're a South Jersey guy, can you talk a little about that?
MB: I actually moved to South Jersey in 1990, as a freshman in high school. I went to Woodbury High in Gloucester County, and started homebrewing when I was a junior

BSL: Flying a little bit under the radar?
MB: Yeah, I was 17 years old ...

BSL: So, talk a little about that early start ...
MB: My mother knew about it, but I think she was just happy I was interested in something. But my story starts – of course, I had been drinking beer a little, you know what we kind of refer to these days as factory beer – I was home sick from school one day and heard Charlie Papazian on Radio Times promoting his book, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, and it really captured my imagination. I kind of learned a lot in the course of an hour about how interesting beer really is, the history behind it and world beer styles, a lot of things I just wasn't aware of.

So I went out and bought his book that same day, and I read it cover to cover in just a couple of days, and by the weekend, I was out buying homebrewing equipment. I fired off my first batch and waited, you know, two or three weeks and finally got in the bottle and waited another week or two for bottle-conditioning and had a couple of my 17-year-old friends over, and we cracked the bottles open and took sip, and it was terrible but we drank it anyway (laughs).

BSL: But clearly you were undaunted by that ...
MB: I kept trying, I kept brewing and quickly was able to improve the quality of the beer I was making. Pretty quickly after that, mostly motivated for economic purposes, I switched to all-grain brewing but also saw some other benefits once I started doing that. 

BSL: So in your youth you were marching to a completely different drummer altogether.
MB: Pretty much.

BSL: What kind of music were you listening to?
MB: We were kind of old school kids. We listened to some oldies and stuff, into some classic rock, that kind of thing, that morphed into a little more jam band kind of thing, Grateful Dead stuff. Since then it's gotten a little more eclectic but pretty traditional, at least Americana type 20th century music.

BSL: There's a common thread with jam band music and beer ...
MB: We have a beer, our Double Dog, and the way the hopping works on it, you know we start with a bittering hop and then we kind of fade into another hop as the first hop kind of fades out. So sometimes when I'm talking about the beer, I describe it as a little bit like what happens at a Dead show where some elements stick around as it morphs into something else.

BSL: Where did you get that first homebrew kit? Did you get it from the now-closed BeerCrafters, or did you go across the river (to Philadelphia)?
MB: Is it Home Sweet Homebrew on Samson in Philly? I might have gone there first. I don't remember what year BeerCrafters opened, but I remember being there, too. I think Philly was first, but pretty soon afterward I was solely shopping at BeerCrafters.

BSL: What was your very first good batch of beer, the one where you said 'I zeroed in on this, this is really, really good'?
MB: I remember brewing a pilsner. At that point I had a beer fridge going, too, and I put the carboy in the fridge and watched it – that's what's great about glass carboys, you can see the action, where with big stainless conical fermenters, you don't get to see inside ... So I put the carboy in the fridge, the temperature was probably in the mid- to upper-40s, it was pretty cool, and it had that nice fermentation. I'd check on it day after day. Those bubbles would continue to slowly rise and it finally ended its fermentation. I put it in secondary, let it lager for a little while longer and I got in the bottle. I entered it the Moon Madness competition in Pennsylvania. I don't remember how old I was at this point, I think I was 18, I remember my mom having to drive me over because I won a second place. I thought it was kind of cool winning this ribbon for a pilsner I brewed, I was particularly proud of it. I thought it was a great representation of the style; I felt that I'd followed pretty much all the traditional techniques and everything to get it to where it was. It was a little ironic for the award: I got a ribbon and a Munton & Fison pilsner kit (laughs). I just brewed a pretty good pilsner, I really don't need the kit.

BSL:  When was it that you knew this was a career, that this is what you wanted to do?
MB: It was about at that time. By the time I left high school, I knew that I wanted to pursue this professionally. I also knew I was kind of too young to really get too far into the industry. I went to Gloucester County Community College for a while, business type classes ... I was also doing some work, some carpentry stuff, installing laboratories for a little while, traveling up into Manhattan, like at NYU, and into Pennsylvania at some of the pharmaceutical manufacturers. I found it to be pretty gratifying work; I liked working with my hands, I liked being a true craftsman. I remember my observations then that anyone who's a craftsman, who's done anything for any length of time, really becomes an expert, and it's second nature to them. I knew that's what I wanted to be, a great craftsman. But I wanted to be a great beer craftsman.

I remember working with these guys and talking to them on our trips up and down the New Jersey Turnpike, telling them I was going to be a brewer. I think they thought I was full of shit. When I was 20 years old that's when I approached Flying Fish and (then FF head brewer) Joe Pedicini.

BSL: And that's where you were able to get your foot in the door?
MB: They were still kind of in the construction phases, the equipment had been dropped in place. I was sweeping floors, cleaning lines, whatever needed to be done around the brewery. It was a great experience, hanging around Joe and Rick (Atkins, the assistant brewer). I learned a lot from those guys, good-hearted, passionate people, very passionate about beer and the craft.

I felt like I was able to spend some time there to get some practical experience under my belt, to see the actual inner workings of a production brewery.

BSL: But at this time you were also eyeing some formal schooling at the Seibel Institute?
MB: I took the program there, and when I returned from Seibel, Joe Pedicini was actually leaving and Rick Atkins became the head brewer, and I became the assistant brewer. I did that for about another year, and this gets us up to about 1998. It was the beginning of 1998 when I started traveling around the country. Nothing against Jersey, but I wanted to travel around a little bit.

BSL: Get some different perspectives, right?
MB: I also wanted to immerse myself in another market that was a little more craft-centric. New Jersey at the time was – Flying Fish was one of maybe just a handful, tops, of craft brewers in the state. There was some craft brewing activity in Philadelphia. But amongst my friends in Gloucester County, there weren't too many who were interested in it, and I just wanted to change the culture I was immersed in.

I kind of did that classic road trip, traveled across the country, north, south, east, west, kind of everywhere and visiting breweries along the way, talking to brewers, taking pictures, checking out their equipment, you know, just getting some advice on what path I should take.

When I got to Colorado, I just fell in love with the state and the fact that craft beer was booming; there were a lot of passionate people out there that I met. That was half way through my trip.

BSL: Onward to the West Coast, then?
MB: Way up the Pacific Coast to Portland and Seattle and Vancouver and back down to Colorado again. That was the summer of 1998. I came back and it was probably June or something, and I told my girlfriend, 'We're moving to Colorado.' We gathered all the cash we had between us, which was probably around 3,000 bucks and we loaded up my old Volvo, drove out to Denver.

BSL: How quickly did things come together for you out there?
MB: It was one of those deals where we were getting a little worried. The cash supply was starting to get a little low and we really didn't want to have to turn around with just enough gas money to get back to Jersey. But the timing worked out just right where I got a position at Great Divide Brewing, and my girlfriend, who's now my wife, got a position at Colorado State Bank.

BSL: How long were you in Colorado?
MB: We spent 10 years there. I worked at Great Divide from 1998 to 2003, and I've been with Flying Dog since 2003. In the interim, while I was working for both these brewers, I took care of the beer for a brewpub up in the mountains called Great Northern Tavern. It was a 10-barrel system and about a 90-minute commute each way; during ski season it was a ski resort area. It would keep me pretty busy. There were stretches of time where I would be brewing mostly in Denver, or one place or another, for 27 days straight with a day off, three or four weeks straight ...

BSL: That's a pretty tough schedule. They're had to be some benefits for keeping that pace.
MB: It was really good because I was able to get some good perspective on brewing at the pub level and brewing at the production level and all of the challenges associated with both. In retrospect, it was time well spent.

BSL: At the pub level you probably got to play around a little bit with styles, like having your own canvas to paint.
MB: Yeah, it was. There were a couple standard beers. A lot of tourists come through, a lot of non-craft-centric people, so you wanted to keep something on there that was pretty friendly, but yeah, I did a lot of special beers – I'm a hop-head, a bit, so I'd play with different hop combinations and do IPAs and ESBs, did a couple of Belgian-inspired beers and just had fun with it.

BSL: Talk about how you ended up at Flying Dog.
MB: I was pretty excited about the direction Great Divide was going, but I felt that it was good to get some experience at different facilities, different beers and different production methods ... Flying Dog was just a couple blocks away. All of the brewers would just hang out: the brewers from Flying Dog would come over to Great Divide or vice versa. Just in some conversation, just seeing what the Flying Dog guys and the culture was all about, I decided to make the move a couple blocks away. I'm glad I did. I was very proud to work for Great Divide, and still am. I'm very pleased at their high degree of success and the integrity and quality of their beers. They're doing really good work these days.

BSL: But how cool is it to work at a place that has Hunter S. Thompson as a guiding light?
MB: Culturally, Flying Dog is a great place. At this point, I'm in a leadership position, with others on a leadership team. It's great to really kind of guide the company forward. For me it's being part of a team, being a part of everything that goes on with the beer, which is where I wanted to be when I was 17 years old. From that perspective, it's a dream come true.

Culturally, everybody in the organization, you know, I don't think people are waking up in the morning and going 'Ah, crap I gotta go to work.' People come in here and they're happy to be here. They're passionate about what they do, and when I get off this call, I'll probably go out and have a beer with some of the guys. And when we talk, we talk about beer; we talk about the pilot (brews) we got going. We've got Disobedience, our abbey dubbel, in the fermenter right now; we're all excited about that, we're going to do some bottle-conditioning, some 750s, you know, just kind of working on the plans, just some of the shoptalk that's associated with it.

BSL: Relocating Flying Dog to the East Coast, you were involved in that? That was a monumental project.
MB: My role was to try to maintain consistency with beers. For about two years, we produced beer out of both facilities simultaneously. It's a challenge. It gives you a new respect for the big guys who have 13 facilities around the country or around the world and their level of skill at maintaining consistency. So that was a big challenge. Part of that obviously is just recipes, part of it is the processes and how people are being trained on the equipment. It was a big project, but it was a great learning experience for me.

BSL: And just a few years ago, everything was finally shifted?
MB: It was 2008 when we decided to concentrate our operation here in Frederick. It was January 15, 2008, when the last bottles came off the Flying Dog Denver production line. I stayed there for a few more months ... we moved a bunch of the fermenters from the Denver brewery here to Maryland to increase capacity here in Frederick. Then we kind of locked up shop and I was out here in the summer of 2008.

BSL: Different geographic regions, especially east vs. west, used to mean really different palates, different preferences, especially among tastes for hoppier beers. Times have changed, of course, but by all accounts, Flying Dog's focus really transcended that nuance.
MB: It goes back to the culture of the organization and our level of passion and our preferences for the beers that we make. I speak for most of the brewers and the production guys when I say we're hop heads. So we like the IPAs, but that doesn't mean that I might not go grab a Woody Creek White on a hot day. We've got a new beer, Underdog, coming out. It's 4.7% alcohol. We're calling it Underdog Atlantic Lager. It's brewed with Golding hops, nothing too assertive from the hop end of things, but something that's drinkable but has a good hop presence for people who like hops.

There really are no meetings at Flying Dog where we say, 'What does the market need?' We kind of say, 'What do we want? What do we want our portfolio to look like?' A beer like Raging Bitch is a perfect example of some experimentation; that came up as a concept a few years back. We wanted to do something new. Well, we're Belgian fans, we like hoppy IPAs. Can we take some elements of those two types of styles and put them together as something that's going to work? After a little bit of experimentation, we felt really good about it. And in the case of Raging Bitch, it's our No. 1 seller.

BSL: What does 2012 look like for R&D at Flying Dog?
MB: This year, we've cranked up the creative process here quite a bit. We're doing this Brewhouse Rarities series. It's pretty limited, basically 100-barrel batches. (In the fall of last year) we offered anybody in the brewery who wanted to pitch a creative concept, or basically a beer, to what we call the Remarkable Beer Team, which is kind of the group I work with that manages all of the processes and creativity here ... So these guys would kind of pitch their ideas, you know why we should do it ... (For example) this guy he does his pitch, he tells us what kind of hops he wants to use, what the gravity is going to be, he's got an idea for the name, you know, the whole thing ... We had about 18 ideas; we're using about 12 of them.

There were a couple instances where some ideas overlapped so much that we kind of teamed those guys up together, but a lot of them are individual brews. So now these guys went to work at the end of last year doing their pilot brews – we have a 1-barrel pilot system – you know they do a couple pilot brews, really dial in what they want to do, scale it up to the big system, then brew on the big system ... It helps kind of spread out the creative influence – my title is chief operating officer and brewmaster, but by no means do I take credit for the total creativity that comes out of this brewery. We have a lot of creative thinkers and a lot of creative minds out there in the production world, and then our marketing team, even the administrative staff, they're all passionate about beer, and that all came together with the project (and our other new beers) coming out this year.

BSL: How many people make up the brewing staff there?
MB: We've got 13 or 14 spread out through what we call, well, the front end of production, which is the brewhouse, cellar operations, filtration and quality. Then we have about another 15 or so that take care of the kegging and the bottling ... 40 sounds about right in total, maybe 45. We just hired a canning manager because we're going to be running cans. Underdog will be our first beer in cans; we're really looking forward to that. So we're growing, more people are getting added ...

BSL: You also have a year-round oyster stout coming out ...
MB: We do. Pearl Necklace Oyster Stout. We did this as kind of a collaboration, I'd call it. We've done a couple of projects, like Backyard Ale, which was a project with Bryan Voltaggio, he has his Volt restaurant here in Frederick. So we worked with him on a beer. And the idea is that it's a learning process, we want to find partners like that – Bryan wanted to learn more about beer, we wanted to learn more about the cool shit he does with food; this guy's amazing with everything he brings to the science of food preparation and culinary skills ... So that was a great relationship. We did a collaboration with Brewers Art in Baltimore, and it was good to just work with another brewer – Steve Frasier and his perspective, he's using the Belgian malts, putting together a recipe with him. That was educational.

We approached this (Pearl Necklace) from the same standpoint. There's a nonprofit organization called the Oyster Recovery Partnership ... With the Chesapeake, over the years there's been a lot of, you know, save the bay (talk). We didn't want to come out there and say 'Hey, save the bay, and we'll contribute this,' or just have some kind of corny promotion associated with one of our beers. We wanted to dig in a little deeper and make it a little more meaningful. So I went down to Cambridge, Maryland, with a colleague from the brewery, and we visited the Oyster Recovery Partnership's hatchery. It's pretty amazing what these guys do: They take oysters from the embryonic state and grow them up – they feed them algae – then they use something called the Shell Recycling Alliance, and these guys actually bring the spent shells from all the restaurants in a few different cities in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, and they'll use these shells as substrate for these oyster babies to attach to ... To date, I think they're responsible for half a billion oysters being added back into the bay.

Pearl Necklace, a portion of the proceeds goes to benefit this oyster recovery partnership. It is actually helping restore oysters to the bay. And if you read a little bit about osyters, you pretty quickly realize what a positive impact they have on the cleanliness of the bay. In 1850, the bay wasn't completely navigable because of the oysters in it

We also visited Rappahannock River Oysters there in Virginia. These guys have a little tasting room where they serve their oysters, and they also serve our beer. We went down there, spent a night with those guys. They took us out on their boat and showed us how to sustainably grow oysters. These guys have three different oysters that they grow, in different locations off the Rappahannock River. You learn about how the (water) salinity affects the flavor, and that's really the big difference between the oyster varieties.

So, again, a great learning opportunity, a great partnership, in this case a three-way partnership. We had the beer out in draft in November of last year, and it did really well. And that's the thing, with Pearl Necklace, it was so popular – I loved it, the production team just loved it – and we want it year-round. So we're going to make that a reality. So it will be a full-time beer available in draft and six-pack, 12-ounce bottles, and just like the original version, a portion of the proceeds from the sale go directly to the Oyster Recovery Partnership.

More tanks arrive at Flying FIsh

Click to enlarge image/diagram

Construction of the new Flying Fish brewery in Somerdale is really starting to come together.

There's still boatloads to do, after all, it's a quite an undertaking to set up an automated brewery that will triple the size of the one that has been producing 15,000 barrels of beer annually for a while now.

But on Monday, some more key pieces to the puzzle began falling into place. The brewery took delivery of six more tanks (fermenters and bright beer) from fabricators Paul Mueller Company of Springfield, Missouri.

The tanks arrived in pairs on flatbed trucks, and then, one by one, each was hoisted up to the roof and lowered through a hatch (specially created this purpose) and into the building.

From there, each tank was moved a few feet by forklift to make room for the next one. The tanks will be set on the concrete pad adjacent to the brewhouse over the balance of this week.

The work that took place Monday was the same process that played out back in February when the first round of fermenters and other tanks arrived from Mueller. The brewhouse equipment, custom made in Germany, arrived back in late January.

So when is all of this stuff going to be pressed into service to make beer? Well, that's a question best answered by the folks at Flying Fish (they say test brewing could start in May). But whenever that day comes, to quote Dr. Emmet Brown, "you're gonna see some serious shit."

Here are the photos from Monday.

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