Cricket Hill goes big on hops, little on ABV

From the brewhouse, a word on
 Jersey-brewed from Rick Reed.

You say you like hops but want your fix in a session beer, not a brew that does IPA with a lot of ABV?

Then Cricket Hill Brewing has the answer for you: Big Little IPA, a small-batch beer that's waiting in the wings of a July 1 release. 

Think of Cricket Hill Hopnotic India Pale Ale's sessionable 5.2% ABV but with a more robust bitterness (Nugget and Willamette hops), nearly twice the IBUs, in fact. 

Big Little IPA was included in Cricket Hill's offerings last Saturday on the Battleship New Jersey at the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild festival, served up as a teaser to its release.

At a time when a lot of hops lovers are finding comfort with a brew like Founders session brew All Day IPA (4.7% ABV, 42 IBUs) Big Little IPA offers a way to keep your quest for hop-kick in a session beer in the home state.

"We're giving the IPA flavor in Cricket Hill fashion," says founder Rick Reed. "We're not going to knock you down; we're not going to bowl you over. We're going to give you a good hop flavor, 76 IBUs, and you can drink it all day long."

Rick says the Fairfield (Essex County) brewery is winding down this year's production of its Jersey Summer Breakfast Ale, the end of the line of 225 barrels' worth for the hot-weather season. You can expect a big smoked rye for September release, plus another fall seasonal.

"For the first time ever," Rick says, "we're going to abandon the Reinheitsgebot. Under pressure from distributors, we're going to come out with a pumpkin beer. We've never done it before ... the market's there, so we're going to try it."

*ABOUT THE PHOTO: Folks who have been to Cricket Hill brewery tours know Rick usually gives a little speech from the brewhouse deck, a sort of comparative assessment of craft beer's advantages over the big factory beers. 

A pint of Jersey fresh

What’s better than fresh beer? Fresh beer dry-hopped with freshly picked Cascades and Nuggets.

We spent some time Wednesday in the brewhouse at the Tun Tavern in Altantic City, where brewer Tim Kelly put on tap a special take on the Tun’s All American IPA, dialing up the beer’s aromatics with a few pounds of hops grown in South Jersey.

The beer’s a lightly filtered version of the Tun’s IPA, trending toward malty but smoothed out with the Cascades and Nuggets. The lighter touch with filtering gives the brew a hint of English real ale, however the carbonation is what you’d expect with American craft beer.

This is the first time Tim’s had a chance to use locally grown hops in a brew, but his preference is to be able to do it more frequently.

The cones came by way of Tim’s friends, Ray Gourley and Kathy Haney, whose small-space garden in Haddon Heights has produced an impressive crop of Nuggets, Cascades, Glacier and Goldings, among other varieties (check out the photo by Ray, cones as big as your thumb).

What got sacked up in a mesh bag and tossed into the serving tank smelled really great, so you can bet the beer’s worth moving up on your list of pint choices. (We took home a growler pulled early from the batch; haven't sampled it yet, but it will be more like real ale IPA, nice hoppy nose and low carbonation with the malty signatures.)

While waiting for the IPA to filter, we sampled a couple of the California brews – Lost Abbey Judgment Day and Moylan Brewing’s Hopsickle Imperial IPA – sent this way by the Thirsty Hopster.

Judgment Day, wow, the Cecil B. DeMille of beers, a quad as big as its biblical name. It’s got a warm alcohol kick (10.5% ABV) right from the start, in the nose and first sip, plus some chocolate notes before you get to the raisin flavors (it has raisins as an adjunct, plus some special B in the grain bill). Let it breathe and relax in the glass and some really big flavors unfold.

Hopsickle (9-something % ABV) was a beer that smelled better than it tasted, and that’s not a slap at its flavor, just an observation. You sort of expect an imperial IPA to be as bitter Paul McCartney’s ex, but the chorus of hop aromas were a nice preface to each sip from this pumped up IPA.

Looking ahead
Leather Neck stout, which has been off the Tun’s taps for a little while, is returning soon, and Tim plans to get rolling on an Oktoberfest (a Märzen fermented with Munich lager yeast) in a matter of days (just a tad behind schedule). Deeper into the fall, think spiced beer, and another lager will probably be coming back around.

Also, look for the Tun beers – four to six of them in fact – at a dinner at the Laguna Grill in nearby Brigantine about the third week of October. Plans for that were starting to take shape on Wednesday. Stay tuned.

Northwest IPA & East meets West

The Ship Inn reports (via newsletter) it’s got a new brew in the mix, Northwest IPA (inspired by a visit to Seattle) ... Cascades in the nose, Centennial for bittering. Ship folks say they’re initially pleased with the brew but are still fine-tuning the recipe.

We’re gonna have to book a trip to Milford and The Ship (maybe on the return from Easton and Weyerbacher on Saturday), especially since the Brit-style pub's got Fuller’s ESB on tap as one of their imports.

Speaking of IPAs, and the West Coast, we did a beer trade with The Thirsty Hopster. That would be Jessica Jones, who keeps, we think, the best beer blog in the US, and travels far and wide, sampling beers (Japan, Continental Europe, the Great British Beer Fest).

Jess made a trip earlier this summer to Pennsylvania (think Philly in March ’09, Jess, Philly Beer Week), with Troeg’s Nugget Nectar and trip to Harrisburg on her radar. Alas, it was a beer out of reach. (But check her archives, she did get to experience Pennsy's drive-through stores).

So we offered Jess a couple bottles of NN via UPS, complementing that shipment with Victory’s 12 and Baltic Thunder, and Weyerbacher's Double Simcoe™ IPA. (Yeah, no Jersey beers in that mix, maybe next time.)

In return, we got The Lost Abbey’s Judgment Day, Moylan’s Hopsickle Imperial Ale, Hair of the Dog’s Blue Dot Double IPA, Arrogant Bastard Ale and Green Flash’s Imperial IPA. Arrogant Bastard is on some shelves in New Jersey, but hey, this Bastard's not gonna go to waste.

We hear our glass calling.

Catching up

Word from Beertown (the Brewers Association) is that SAVOR, that craft beer plus fine food event, was a hit, a sellout over its two-day (May 16-17) run in the nation’s capital.

That’s 2,100 beer enthusiasts over three sessions. Friend of the blog John Holl, a brethren from our journalism days, filed this for The Star-Ledger of Newark.

SAVOR isn’t really breaking new ground here, as far as beer being a dinner guest goes. But it does keep a porch light on for the wider realization that beer and food, à la fine cuisine, aren’t just a winning combination, but a natural one.

That’s another way of saying if you haven’t noticed beer shedding its plebeian image, you’ve probably been watching Beerfest over and over.

It almost makes you wonder why beer has that image to shed in the first place. Well, maybe not when you remember Coors created a bottle label that turns blue to signal the beer’s cold and ready to drink. Then you recall how dumbed-down gimmickry imposed upon the public can steer the car into a ditch.

But make no mistake, beer’s roots include the supper table. Historically speaking, in the days before folks got a good handle on bacteria, beer was relied upon as a potable beverage, while drinking water was a gamble. So talk of beer at the dinner table is just beer reclaiming what belongs to it.

Speaking of beer and food, here’s one fans of organic foods and locally grown/locally served community sustainable farming will be interested in: The Ship Inn (Milford, Hunterdon County) is committed to that philosophy in a big way.

We caught up with brewer Tim Hall on an unrelated topic, but the subject came up in our discussion. Tim says the pub composts discarded vegetable matter, while spent grain from its brewery, which now goes to a local farmer, likely will wind up in the compost, too. The pub’s thinking is to avail that compost to local produce growers who supply the Ship Inn.

The Ship, known for its British-slant on atmosphere and ales, has organic foods on its menu and takes a novel approach toward beer-to-go with its beer a box (think of it as a cardboard growler, although the Ship still offers the glass version, too.) But here’s something else about the pub that commands attention – session beers.

That’s hardly going to get Wolf Blitzer Situation Room treatment, a brewpub standing session beers on the bar. But when you consider the unyielding grip of the big beer trend – heavy on hops, high in alcohol – the Ship’s session ales are a welcome step back in time.

Nearly all their ales are under 5% ABV, with three in the range of 3.5-4% ABV. Their IPA – which puts more emphasis on India pale ales’ tradition for hop aromatics and less on bitterness – is the highest at 5.5%. But even that’s fairly light in the face of the 7% beers that are as nearly ubiquitous as iPods now.

The Ship's beers invite drinking and conversation, and prove flavor is not sacrificed when the ABV is comes back down to earth.

Happy landing.

Defiant brewing determination

Promptly going out and buying 55 pounds of pilsner malt ... Consider that the homebrewer equivalent of getting back on the horse that bucked you.

Fresh from his trip to the Samuel Adams LongShot homebrewer contest, “ESB” Dave Pobutkiewicz is saddling up again. He has a score to settle.

Dave’s maibock, or helles bock ( pick a label), took him from Pompton Lakes, NJ, to Denver and the final round of LongShot judging at the 2007 Great American Beer Festival. But that’s where things sort of stop. Notice we said "stop," not "end."

The judges opted to not include Dave’s brew in next year’s LongShot sixpack (which Boston Beer will brew and send to package stores near you beginning next February). That distinction goes to a double IPA by Mike McDole of California, a weizenbock from Rodney Kibzey from Illinois, and a grape ale from Boston Beer employee Lili Hess. (A Samuel Adams staff homebrew competition is part of the LongShot contest, if you recall. )

But back to Dave.

Ask him what he’ll enter in 2008, and he’ll say that he’d rather not say, revealing only that every beer style category is fair game.

He’s an experienced homebrewer with plenty of honed recipes that have won over an array of contest judges (in state and regional competitions) and colleagues in his club, the Defiant Homebrewers, whose members, by the way, have done well in past versions of the LongShot contest, but still find that top prize – the sixpack – elusive.

Dave thinks he can remedy that. He is, after all, a Defiant Homebrewer. And that 55 pounds of malt is a good start.

NOTE: Special thanks to Russ Pobutkiewicz for the photos of Dave with Boston Beer's Jim Koch (top) and Dave during an interview (above).

Throwing your beer a curve, Part 2

The taste-test results are in.

That new, curvy Samuel Adams pint glass won’t make your favorite Jersey-brewed beer taste like champaign.

It will, however, help the beer taste more like what it was intended to, complementing the flavors and aromas of malt and hops. But a word of warning to you fans of big beers: The glass seems to wreck their flavor profile. More about that later.

A quick recap:

Boston Beer Company created this tulip-meets-shaker pint glass for its flagship Boston Lager after some R&D by some topnotch beer palates and technical minds. Folks at Samuels Adams stick to their proviso that the glass is intended for their lager’s malt profile and Hallertauer Mittelfrüh hops.

Fair enough -- their glass and their beer. (Their marketing, too.) But we suspected what’s good for their lager could be good for our bitters.

So we put the glass through the paces, pitting it against the sturdy and bar-ubiquitous shaker pint glass, enlisting the sensory help of Flying Fish head brewer Casey Hughes and two of his crew -- brewer Tim Kelly and cellarman Frank Winslow. The Fish’s brewing operations chief, John Berardino, also popped in with some observations.

(Note: Both John and Casey were skeptics. John: Looks too much like a vase and its undulations rob the beer of a uniform appearance when held up to light; also looks tough for bars to clean quickly and slip back in their rotation. Casey: Chatter about the glass sounded like a lot of hype; wonder how it stacks against a Chimay glass …)

For the test bench, the Jersey brews sampled were: Cricket Hill’s East Coast Lager, Climax Brewing’s Extra Special Bitter and Flying Fish’s HopFish India Pale Ale.

Carrying things out a few more decimal places, so to speak, we also tasted a great, 8% ABV whiskey barrel-aged version of the Fish’s Belgian Abbey Dubbel. (And we can't wait to leisurely sip this baby again.)

The findings
Generally speaking, the Sam Adams glass topped the shaker pint, providing:

• Cleaner malt and hop aromas
• Readily noticeable malt flavors (unlike an initial bitterness you got drinking from the shaker pint)
• An overall support for the delicate flavors of the beers

Yes, these are the pretty much the same claims Boston Beer makes about the glass. But it’s what we tasted and what we found to be the case.

Another observation: Your palate won’t tire with the Sam Adams glass. For that, you can credit a laser-etched ring on the bottom. It triggers a constant stream of CO2 bubbles over the life of the pint to produce aromatics. (Chimay’s Belgian beer glasses have similar etching to create the same effect.)

Now, about those high-gravity beers ... The shaker glass and its wide V-shape proved friendlier to the Fish’s dubbel, holding the alcohol-warmed malt flavors and fruity aromatics in a tighter integration of pleasing sensations.

Not so with the Sam Adams glass.

It slammed the nose and palate with the booze, a jet stream of alcohol heat that shut out the vanilla notes that should have come from the oak barrel aging. The alcohol in that dubbel is a flavor that should do more weaving and less sensory cleaving. (For comparison sake, we also sipped an Old Ale from Sam Adams’ LongShot sixpack and got pretty much the same impression from that 10% ABV beer.)

Overall, says Casey: "For what the glass was made for, it does very well and complements a variety of beers ... styles that are hoppy and malty but don't have the extreme alcohol."

And, just for kicks …
On our own, we put the Sam Adams glass through a separate test, using River Horse Brewing’s ESB, Flying Fish’s Farmhouse Summer Ale and a black and tan made from Guinness and the Fish’s summer seasonal.

The results were largely the same as with the first round of sampling. But the black and tan was really interesting, a blend of Guinness tang swirling with Summer Ale tang and a tinge of its malt sweetness, all up front but nicely giving way to some slightly muted hop flavor in the Summer Ale. (The head was kind of cool, too, a tan-against-white froth. And by the by, the Summer Ale was excellent by itself in the Sam Adams glass.)

So why all the fuss over a pint glass?
Because beer has such a range of flavors that it deserves some an attention toward capturing and enriching those flavors. Plus, matching the proper glass to a beer is a common practice in Europe.

As it should be here, too.

NOTE: We're not going to offer a buying recommendation. But we will point out the glass is priced at $30 for a set of four, with shipping to New Jersey and tax boosting the grand total to nearly 41 bucks.

Throwing your beer a curve, Part 1

There’s something about beer in a glass.

It’s inviting and relaxing, mesmerizing almost, as it settles beneath a foam crown, bubbles rising.

It’s a siren in the classical sense.

So when we heard Boston Beer Company (aka Samuel Adams) was shaking up the reliable pint glass, giving it the heave-ho in favor of a new 16-ounce model styled for its Boston Lager, we were suitably curious.

After all, the sturdy, simplistic shaker glass is practically the icon of poured beer. It blew the chunky, workhorse mug of our fathers’ generation off the bar years ago to become the alpha glass.

But this new Sam Adams glass … it has starlet curves. And we wondered if it would make the shaker pint a Sony Walkman in an iPod world.

For some answers, we turned to Boston Beer.

And happy to explain what was on their minds by commissioning the design, engineering and manufacture of the glass was brewing manager Grant Wood (a different Grant Wood, but an American artist in his own right, albeit in the media of malt and hops).

With a dozen years at Boston Beer, Grant has a hand in the 20-plus beers produced under the Samuel Adams brand. So he knows beer.

And if he’s not practicing what he preaches -- drinking what he’s brewing -- he may be inclined to sip a Belgian beer, a lambic perhaps. So he does peer through the bent-back tulips, so to speak, to see how the other half lives (if you don’t mind a Beatles metaphor).

That said, two of our key questions to Grant were:

Our old friend, Shaker Pint, you got a problem with it? (Pardon the phrasing, but this is New Jersey, you know.)

And …

If the new glass is good for a Boston Lager, what about a Princeton brewpub porter?

Second question first.

Grant says the new glass -- a fusion of the shaker pint and the tulip glass typically associated with some Belgian beers -- was indeed tailored for the Boston Lager, its malt profile and noble hops. Even among Samuel Adams’ stable of brews, the new glass is the province of the Boston Lager.

So, we surmise that for Garden State beers, we’re on our own, and our mileage is probably going to vary.

And to our other question, Grant says there’s no problem with the shaker pint. It has done quite a functional job at the bar. But …

“You can do better, and I think we proved that with this particular glass,” he says.

The devil is in the details. And that’s where the difference between curvy newbie and shaker pint comes in, Grant says. It’s the nuances of flavor and aromatics and how and when you encounter them. Smell then taste, sweet before bitter, and a dynamic in which that can continue over the life of a pint. (Smelling is a compass for the taste buds. The nose knows, and it delivers more than half of your flavor sensations.)

Some test tasting zeroed in on the shortcomings of other glassware.

The shaker pint wasn’t well suited for capturing aroma. “Especially when you get to the bottom of glass,” Grant says. Pilsner glasses and their tall V-shapes were worse, generating a lot of bubbles and allowing the beer to warm quickly. They were like chimneys “and aroma wafted away faster,” he says.

But the new glass -- Grant confesses he was an early skeptic -- and its somewhat double-goblet shape offered a different experience.

When you sip from it, he says, the rolled tulip lip fits to the mouth and puts the beer to the front of your tongue, so you taste maltiness, that sweet before hop bitter. (Reminder: He is referring to drinking a Sam Adams Boston Lager.) And, Grant says, he anticipated hop aroma, but the new glass also provided enhanced malt aroma. (Remember, the nose knows and the importance of that.)

The glass is also laser etched on the bottom, some engineering work that keeps feeding bubbles. The result is sustained beer aromas. (We’d like to reiterate that nose comment.)

It should be noted that Boston Beer wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, just create a glass for beer drinkers that brings out the best in its best-known brew, a “next step to bringing them to beer nirvana,” as Grant says.

He hopes the glass is something for other brewers to look at, perhaps consider, even if it’s just across beer culture.

So maybe it’s not autumn for the shaker glass after all, just a nice set of curves set on the bar that can make one beer better and beer in general more fun.

And for us …

Accepting what Grant and others at Boston Beer say about the new glass and the beer it was designed for (and we’ve enjoyed a Boston Lager from it), we’re still curious about how a Jersey ESB or IPA would fare within its contours.

Stay tuned. We’re going to find out.

NOTE: Boston Beer is providing the new glasses to its better draft beer accounts nationwide. So you could see it show up in the rotation at your favorite bar. It's also for sale in sets of four from Boston Beer (check their website), so you don't have to return to those days of slipping your server a sweeter tip so she'd look the other way as you swiped a glass.

Shore bet

Good news for beer drinkers along the Jersey shore who have discriminating palates.

Fairfield brewer Cricket Hill, purveyors of a quite quenching American lager, have added bottle and draft distribution to Monmouth and Ocean County. As Jersey beer fans, we hope this helps further turn the tide toward the side of taste and choice.

It’s been a month-plus since Cricket Hill widened its reach with its East Coast Lager, amber American Ale and Hopnotic India Pale Ale, the latter being a very enjoyable session IPA (so don’t go looking for the hop hammer to come slamming down. Instead, it's a cumulative hop taste balanced with a not-too-filling full body. No problem standing up two or three of ’em.)

Because of some distribution overlap, Cricket Hill may have already been available in bottles to some shore drinkers. So that means the best news here is the availability of Cricket Hill on draft, which we advocate as the preferred way to have any beer.

You won’t get an argument from Rick Reed, Cricket Hill’s founder, either. Bottling, he says, tends to beat up a beer. The extra handling that bottling necessitates can rough up a beer and change some of its character.

So on that advice, sign up for the draft. And hopefully some savvy and supportive bar owners will help you out.

About Cricket Hill
Founded about five years go, the brewery operates from a former welding shop in an industrial park in Fairfield (Essex County).

Capacity: 3,000 barrels, producing about one-third of that now, with healthy year-to-year growth.

Beer lineup: Besides its lager, American Ale and IPA, Cricket Hill produces the seasonal Paymaster’s Porter (draft only), Colonel Blides Altbier (with plans to bottle that German style offering) and a Belgian summer ale (draft) that’s looking to find it’s way out of the bright-beer tank soon and into a glass.

Name game: Cricket Hill actually has less to do with the insect that stars in the brewery’s logo and more to do with the game cricket. The name is a reference to a vantage point for watching cricket matches in Australia. The cricket hill is the equivalent of the bleacher seats, but the spot where the social atmosphere and camaraderie is more inviting.

You Better, You Bet

Here's a quick update:

State Homebrew champ Bud Usinowicz's 2006 best-in-show brew, Some's Better Double IPA, goes on tap at Krogh's Restaurant & Brew Pub in Sparta this Friday. That's Feb. 23rd.

And since this blog is dedicated to better knowing Jersey-made beers, Some's Better is a good one to get acquainted with. But you'd better hurry. Quantity is limited.

ADDENDUM, 2.25.07: The word from Krogh's is that 50-plus Bud fans turned out for the inaugural tapping of Some's Better Double IPA (7.5% ABV). And when we say Bud fans, we're not referring to anything close to beech wood aging and King of Beers.

Good Better Best

Bud Usinowicz is an English teacher. Nouns and verbs. Subjects and predicates, not math predicaments.

Until recently.

You see, Bud’s also a homebrewer (a pastime he took up 10 years ago), and last August he made a bit of a splash with his entry in the homebrew competition at the New Jersey State Fair in Sussex County. To the judges’ taste buds, there was none better than Bud’s Some’s Better Double IPA (7% ABV).

Bud’s reward for his zymurgistic efforts and best-in-show win: a tap handle at Krogh’s Restaurant & Brew Pub (the sponsor of the homebrew contest), a onetime chance to brew his beer for the masses. And sometime soon, you can treat yourself to a pint of Bud’s best amid the log cabin-like atmosphere at Krogh’s (in Sparta, in rural Sussex County, the place in New Jersey where you can probably find a bear as easily as a beer).


So here’s the mathematical problem Bud faced: His Some’s Better recipe, crafted from picking up brewer tips and secrets here and there, is great for 5 gallons, enough to entertain a gang of his buds watching the NCAA finals in his den. But Krogh’s brewing system is 5 barrels, a capacity more suitable for keeping bar patrons happy.

Since 1 barrel equals 31 gallons, Bud’s recipe was about 150 gallons shy of the 1,200 or so pints Krogh’s system can stand up on the bar. So how do you make that backyard 5 gallons become a thirst-quenching 155, without losing what the judges felt made your brew better than all the rest?

Enter David Cooper, the brewer at Krogh’s. With Cooper’s help, Bud solved for X and scaled up his Some’s Better recipe, mashing in with 455 pounds of malted barley for his commercial brew debut. That was late January. After some dry-hopping (what’s an India Pale Ale without some serious hopping?), Bud says, Some’s Better is expected to take its place at Krogh’s bar in late February. If you’re lucky, Bud might give you a caw, er, call.

And if you love big beers that echo hops, Some’s Better will probably be worth the wait.