Uno holding first summer cask event

Brewer Chris Percello pours a half pint of cask ale.

Over the years, Uno Chicago Grill & Brewery has staked out territory as a champion of real ale, annually staging spring and fall cask events.

The most recent one at the Middlesex County brewpub last March saw a healthy crowd polish off 60 gallons of Jersey-brewed cask beer in about four hours. 

Now Uno's brewer Chris Percello is presenting a first-ever summer cask event on Saturday, with another Garden State lineup that this time stirs newcomer Bolero Snort Brewing into the mix. (Bolero launched as a contract beer company back in January, with its beers made at High Point Brewing in Morris County.)

Also featured will be beers by Carton and Kane Brewing, from neighboring Monmouth County, Climax Brewing, and Flying Fish. 

Kane cask

The pay-as-you-go event of half and full pints begins at noon at the Metuchen brewpub and will last as long as the beer does. Chris' advice is to arrive early if you want to get a taste of the entire lineup.

This incarnation will be Chris' fifth turn at the cask event, something he inherited when he took over as brewer from Mike Sella, who jumped to Basil T's brewpub in Red Bank in 2011. Mike started the Uno cask events in 2009.

"We're probably going to have at least three firkins this time around and about seven pins," Chris says. "The most important thing is making people aware of the great beer we have in our state."

Among Chris' own contribution of house beers will be a saison dressed up with lemon verbena and Szechuan peppercorn, thanks to a people's choice survey.  

"It's a basic saison recipe. I use French saison yeast. In the actual brew I use coriander and lemon peel," Chris says. "Then we put it out there and asked people how they would like me to treat the pin. The combination they selected is lemon verbena and szechuan peppercorn added to the pin. We're hoping to get a little more of that lemon character out. 

"The szechuan peppercorns, although not like a typical peppercorn – they're actually not even considered a peppercorn – have a nice woody, earthy, slight citrus taste, and actually leave a kind of a numbing, tingling feeling on your tongue. They're actually supposed to enhance other flavors."

Brewing up history: Ballantine IPA à la today

Harvest Moon brewer Kyle McDonald stirs the grist during
the mashing in of the  IPA collaboration at Carton Brewing.

At best, this IPA can only approximate the past.

But it can still satisfy the present. 

And who knows, maybe it will point toward a future.

Five New Jersey craft beer brands – production breweries Carton and Kane, joined by brewpubs Harvest Moon, Uno and Trap Rock* – convened at Carton's digs in Atlantic Highlands on Sunday to jointly strike a mash on an IPA that will ultimately surmise the taste, salute the legend, or simply speak the name of Ballantine IPA, a hearty gem born of Newark's now-gone brewing identity. 

Uno brewer Chris Percello
checks Cluster hops aroma

Ballantine was chosen, says Carton founder Augie Carton, as a way to give the collaboration a Jersey-centric theme. It also allows the team marshaled from the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild to reclaim some of the state's brewing lore, given Ballantine IPA's influence on modern craft brewing. 

"It's from Newark, New Jersey. The yeast that Ken Grossman cultured to make Sierra Nevada, the Chico yeast, was stolen from Ballantine IPA. So it makes its way back," Augie says.

Using the IPA bible written by Stone brewmaster Mitch Steele as a guide (Ballantine's IPA is referenced in the book), the five breweries crafted a sturdy 8% ABV recipe with some adjunct ingredients (flaked maize) and Bullion hops to capture some signatures of the original beer. (The collaboration beer is being fermented with White Labs California yeast.)

Ballantine IPA label. Note that
it mentions Newark, something
that would disappear as the
the brewery changed hands.

The 15 or so gallons brewed on Carton's pilot system will be served at the guild's festival June 22 from a guild-bannered table, but hopefully talked about by all who trod the fantail deck of the USS New Jersey battleship, where the festival has been annually staged for nearly 10 years now.

Ballantine India Pale Ale owns a place in beer culture as an American-made IPA that won a following generations before the Pavlovian response those call letters – IPA – would come to evoke in craft beer drinkers today: a thirst for muscled-up, super-hoppy brews turned out by U.S. brewers rewriting the natively British style's guidelines. 

Ballantine's IPA was apparently brewed on either side of Prohibition. Some historians say the first printed references to the company making a beer designated India pale ale appeared as early as 1878. It could have been brewed even earlier. IPA, as style was in demand in England in the 1840s, with advertising references to India Pale Ale existing 20 years prior. Brewing the style the U.S. around that period doesn't seem that much of a stretch.

Whatever the case, Ballantine India Pale Ale, a 7.5% ABV wood-aged beer (60 IBUs) with its signature aroma owing to hop oils added to the aging vessels, went on the market post-Prohibition in 1934, about a year after the 21st Amendment had officially taken effect and the 18th Amendment was truly buried.

From left: Carton brewer Jesse Ferguson,
Kyle McDonald, and Uno brewer Chris Percello 

Overtime, as production shifted to other states via corporate changes, the brewing techniques evolved, with the alcohol content ultimately trending down a couple of points, after the IBUs were reined in. 

By the time Sierra Nevada Pale Ale was undeniably making a name for itself, Ballantine IPA was fading from the landscape, becoming a setting sun, but still revisited on homebrewer and beer enthusiast Internet discussion boards. Not to mention chat among brewers like the guild crew, pondering its quest to make something like it, or honoring it.

Stepping away from the brewing, Kyle McDonald, Harvest Moon's brewer, took some time to reflect on the moment, calling the gathering a chance to build a buzz about the guild's festival and what he hopes will be a "great IPA" plus a brewing camaraderie that continues.

"Collaborations are very trendy right now in the brewing industry. For us to do something like this, (it) offers something special at the battleship to encourage people to come out," Kyle says. "I hope to see more of this type of collaboration moving forward." 

*EDITOR'S NOTE: Trap Rock Brewery and Restaurant supplied hops for the brew, but brewer Charlie Schroeder was unable to attend the actual brewing. Also, a shout-out JessKidden, an email friend and an ongoing source of historical guidance to BSL. Thanks again. 

Clockwise from left: Michael Kane, Kyle McDonald,
Augie Carton and Jesse Ferguson

Guild collaboration brew set for Sunday

How many Jersey brewers does it take to make 20 gallons of beer for a summer festival?

As many as can fit around a Tippy brew set-up at Carton Brewing on Sunday.

The Atlantic Highlands brewery, in conjunction with Kane Brewing from nearby Ocean Township, will brew a throwback IPA that echoes Ballantine India Pale Ale. 

The beer will be served at the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild Festival on June 22. 

Planned to track toward maltiness, the beer is also targeted to finish out at 8% ABV, with Bullion hops walking point. 

Joining the two Monmouth County breweries will be guild members Trap Rock brewpub (Berkeley Heights) and Uno's (Metuchen), and possibly some others. 

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."

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."

Brewers and roasters, the quest for flavor

Kane's tasting room board

A couple of draft-only coffee brews emerged on the New Jersey craft beer landscape in January.

Aside from being well worth your glass, they train a spotlight on a couple of New Jersey coffee roasters and underscore how the pursuit of great coffee mirrors the quest for good beer.

Rojo's Roastery, a must-stop for any flavor-seeker visiting Lambertville, lent its expertise to River Horse Brewing for a coffee turn on the brewery's oatmeal milk stout seasonal. The roaster worked with River Horse to select the right variety of coffee bean to give the the 6.7% ABV stout some added bounce. (See Rojo's coffees here.)

Likewise, Rook Coffee Roasters teamed with their neighbor, Kane Brewing in Ocean Township in Monmouth County, for a velvety infusion of cold-brewed Sumatra in an imperial porter, called Morning Bell, that rings the bell at 9.2% ABV. 

Jamie Arnold and David Waldman

Taphandle says it 

Rook, located about a half-mile from Kane, has the added distinction of plying the coffee craft in the building where Heavyweight Brewing produced artisanal beers before exiting New Jersey in 2006 to re-emerge as a brewpub under a new identity in Philadelphia.

"They're like-minded people," says Michael Kane, whose eponymous brewery took last year's St. Patrick's Day collaboration with Rook to the next level with Morning Bell. "What's important to them about their coffee is as important to us about our beer business here."

Such is the bond among artisans, says David Waldman, who opened Rojo's in a north-end neighborhood in Lambertville in 2006. "There's a mutual respect for the respective crafts we practice," he says.

Rojo's coffees are prepared from organic, fair trade beans with a 1956 Probat roaster, a machine that echoes a golden era of coffee bars (think Beat Generation and Jack Kerouac), a roaster that David can trace back to its only other owner in Lille, France. He lovingly rebuilt it for his shop and has declined requests from the manufacturer to buy it back for their museum. "This is what we do. We don't put them in a museum," David says. "We put them to work, as they're intended."

Holly and Shawn

Founded by Shawn Kingsley and Holly Migliaccio, Rook opened three years ago with a small roaster in the Oakhurst community of Ocean Township. Another shop in Long Branch, a quick trip north, was added a little over a year later, as was the location near Kane, where the company's roasting of organic, fair trade coffees is done (on a new larger roaster) and their cold-brewed Sumatra coffee is made (Cornie-kegged and bottled) for their retail shops, including a new one in Little Silver. (Check out their coffees here.)

"Holly and I have an appreciation for anything craft. We love wines and beer and coffee," says Shawn. Collaborating with Kane "has been a great opportunity. They're in line with what we're focused on, which is craft, quality, service ..."

Says Holly: "It was such a great experience; our eyes were opened to the world of brewing beer. Then we found out that this particular location used to be a brewery."

Two worlds, single-minded passions

Coffee people move in a world that parallels their beer bretheren: Producers and aficionados are both drawn to exploring the global regions that are home to fine beers (Belgium, for instance) and beans (Costa Rica). And, among people who have experienced the rest, then became compelled to find – and/or make – the best, some overlap is inevitable.

Like coffee beer. 

Coffee beans for roasting

But that said, coffee in beer is hardly new. For that matter, neither is prevailing on local roasters to provide the beans. Yet, as a go-to beverage, coffee always suggests a new day, revisiting an old friend  – or idea. Thus, the coffee-beer combination enjoys healthy representation among stouts and porters, even Irish reds. Plug the word "coffee" into BeerAdvocate's search engine, and you'll get nearly 300 beer-name hits, nearly 50 for "java". (That doesn't even count brews like Flying Dog's Cujo, which opt for less-linear names, like Morning Bell.)

Jersey brewers are wont to give their brews espresso expression, too. The list of Garden State coffee beers includes both brewpubs (Basil T's, Triumph, Long Valley, Iron Hill, and Tun Tavern) and production brewers (Tuckahoe's New Brighton Coffee Stout and Flying Fish's Imperial Coffee Porter, both using beans from roasters local to the breweries). 

Barley and beans

At River Horse, jazzing up the oatmeal milk stout the brewery has been turning out since 2008 meant an opportunity to share some flavors the brewery staff appreciates at Rojo's in a one-off beer. (The stout is out now; check River Horse's Facebook page for availability. But hurry; it's a limited brew: Only about 60 barrels were produced.)

"It's phenomenal coffee. It's where we get our coffee from," says head brewer Chris Rakow. 

Chris teamed with Jamie Arnold, a roaster at Rojo's, to get the surest coffee flavor from the most complementary variety of bean. They chose a Guatemalan bean (Huehuetenango growing region) over Brazilian and Cost Rican, favoring its more harmonious tones and lower acidity; they opted for whole bean over a grind to minimize oxidation of the coffee and control how much coffee was imparted into the stout. They also decided to let the beer itself do some of the work post-fermentation.

"The majority (of brewers), what they will do is cold-brew and add the coffee," Chris says. "What our idea was, instead of cold-brewing it with water and adding it in, we would age the coffee on the beans. Essentially, you're doing a cold-brew with the beer and not water."

The beans were roasted on a Monday, then added two days later to the beer in a conditioning tank, a proportion of 20 pounds per 40 barrels of beer. 

"That also lends clarity to the finished product," Jamie says, "and this way, your window is a lot bigger, like when you're going to get the right amount of flavor added. The difference is in days."

Adding the cold-brewed coffee to the beer, though effective, wouldn't, for their palates, allow for the nuance they were seeking, Jamie says. "You're deciding right there how much coffee flavor is going in, and once it's in, it's in," he says.

The result of their efforts is a layered stout that unfolds with inviting coffee aroma and a friendly coffee flavor that doesn't overwhelm the beer, but rather, gently wakes it up. 

"Next year I'd like to do a specific coffee beer with them. This was just real quick," Chris says. "We just decided to take one of our beers and age it on coffee. Next year, we might try to do a separate recipe for a coffee beer."

Next year is this year for the folks at Kane Brewing. 

The question there was, how to revisit the success of last year's additions of Rook coffees, including their Sumatra, to create variations of their 6.2% ABV Port Omna Stout, done for a St. Patrick's Day tasting room event, without just repeating themselves (not that the brewery's fans would mind much). 

The answer was go back to the drawing board. Michael explains the Kane-Rook collaboration's second act: 

"People wanted us to do a coffee stout, or make more of that coffee stout. I really liked the way it came out, but I thought if we brewed a beer specifically with that coffee in mind, we could make it a little better than just adding coffee to the stout we'd already made.

"What I wanted to do was to make it a little bit different, make it a bigger beer, something that would stand up well to their Sumatra roast – the dark roast. We wanted to make it a porter base style to back off on the roasty malts that would have been in a stout, the roasted barley, the black patent – the darker roasts – and not have so much of that in the base beer.

"We thought it would be good to maybe pull a little bit from the milk stout category and pull in some of those unfermentable sugars, sweeten it up a little bit. We thought that would balance the roast and bold flavor of the coffee. We thought the higher alcohol, a bigger beer would stand up, because that's a pretty dark roast they use; we used a really concentrated version of that.

The brewery did three or four pilot batches, winding up using 15 gallons of the Sumatra cold brew in the porter. The result is a velvety porter, deep and flavorful. (Morning Bell came out the second week of January; check the brewery's Facebook page for availability and bars.)

That coffee in it, by the way, has a wide following among Rook's fans.

"It has a dark, syrupy tone to it, with chocolate notes," says Shawn. "We characterize it like dark chocolate. When you cold-brew it, it produces this concentrate, which is must less acidic than hot coffee ... When you mix it into something, it holds its flavor. Usually, when you have hot coffee poured over ice, it sometimes gets diluted. This is very smooth, very rich, very flavorful."

Rook and Kane landed on each other's radars via Nip-N-Tuck Bar & Grill in Long Branch. Holly and Shawn are friends of the owner, Bob Burtchaell. The bar's also one of Kane's draft accounts. 

"We we first went to him and started pitching the beer to him, he brought up Rook, that they're really good people, and it's a local product," Michael says. 

The same thing about Kane Brewing was pretty much happening in conversations Holly and Shawn had with Bob. 

For the brewery, one that has sourced locally produced apple cider, hops and even yeast for some of its beers, Rook was another great find. What followed was a mutual appreciation and ultimately a friendship. And opportunities to work together.

"We had tasted their beer locally," Holly says, "and knew it was far superior than other things we'd tried. So we were very excited."

"And humbled," says Shawn.

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.'"

Apples, IPA & getting in Over Head

Owner Michael Kane tops off a growler

There's beer in wooden barrels, beer in bottles and, of course, fermenting wort in the shiny stainless steel tanks off the brewhouse.

Kane Brewing, one of last year's additions to New Jersey's craft brewing landscape, has been a busy fledgling brewery. Since opening its doors last July, the Monmouth County ale-producer has been well received, and is running ahead of its own projections of where it would be in the Garden State's craft beer market at this point.

"At the holidays – the night before Thanksgiving, the night before Christmas Eve, because Christmas Eve was a Saturday – those nights were mobbed, probably two of our best days so far," says founder/owner Michael Kane, "and it was only a couple of hours that we were open."

And that's just in the tasting room, the cozy rally point for tours of the 20-barrel brewhouse, visible through the taproom's window. Outside the brewery's doors, busy translates to servicing between 70 to 100 draft accounts from northern Ocean County and along coastal towns in the brewery's home county, to select spots in North Jersey and oasis-like good beer bars in Sussex County.

"What surprises me is the number of accounts we're on," Michael says. "That's gone a lot better than we had forecast. You obviously hope for more, but the plan was to be on a lot less accounts than we are. The local restaurants and bars have been responsive to having a local beer on. They also enjoy the beer, too. A lot of people will try it because it's local, but they keep coming back for it because it's pretty good beer."

Outrunning your projections also means playing some catchup with cooperage and laying some plans for the approach of summer (the population in the shore area jumps sharply with the beach season). The brewery has been bumping up its stock of sixtels, buying those new, but looking for used half barrels to hold down expenses.

"We don't really want to bite the bullet and buy those new, so we're going to keep looking and stretch what we have for now. Cooperage is an issue," Michael says. "The summer is the concern, between the kegs and the capacity. It's a good problem to have, I guess."

Since opening, Kane has produced a clutch of brews, including some one-offs (to keep the tasting room's taps dynamic) and some specialty creations awaiting release. Others, of course, form the backbone of the brewery's beer lineup.

Head High (6.5% ABV), a West Coast-leaning IPA, is a Kane staple, dosed with Columbus and Chinook hops (boil), and Ahtanum, Citra and Centennial (late addition and dry-hop); the IPA has also appeared as a one-off with Zythos, a new blend of hops that Kane opted to give an audition. Afterglow (5.5% ABV), a rye pale ale, is another flagship brew.

"Our plan was to push out more variety," Michael says. "I think we got bogged down a little bit with the beers we have, just trying to keep up with the demand for those."

Variety is in the pipeline, though. So is an extended reach for the brewery, tucked in small business park off busy Route 35 in Ocean Township.

A Belgian wit is development, and distribution to the Princeton area (Kane self-distributes) is coming more into focus.  South Jersey? Well, that's a far-off story, one where some patience is asked. But it's not off the radar, however: Kane plans to be at the Atlantic City beer festival March 30-31. (They'll also be at Beer on the Boards festival on the Point Pleasant Beach Boardwalk March 24.)

As winter fades, some of the Kane brews are passing the baton.

Like the fall seasonal oatmeal brown, Drift Line (5.8% ABV), which proved popular enough to hang around for a winter encore. "The response was really good and the demand was there," Michael says, "and we kind of kept brewing it." But it's now ready to give up the stage.

Single Fin Belgian blond (5% ABV), Kane's launch brew from last July/August made with a well-attentuating Trappist strain from East Coast Yeast, is working its way back into the lineup for the summer.

But ahead of that is a recently released American extra stout, Port Omna (6% ABV) for St. Patrick's Day ("We're big fans of the celebrations that happen down here," Michael says); on the heels of Omna is an imperial IPA, Over Head, that's finishing up in the fermenters and timed for the end of this month; another brew, Malus (9.5% ABV), was racked off into 750-milliliter bottles, corked and caged, three weeks ago. Two hundred white-box cases of Malus are stacked around the brewery, bottle-conditioning now for release in due time.

"It's just a matter of waiting for them to do their thing," Michael says. "We have to make sure they're carbonated, make sure they taste right, get some labels on them. It's up to the beer whenever they're ready."

Besides being a specialty item for the market, the apple-infused Belgian strong ale was the crash-test dummy for a six-head, gravity-fed wine filler the brewery will use for bottling its barrel-aged and other unique brews. (The inaugural bottling went well, Michael says. The cork-and-cage 750s are Kane's only bottled offering; the lion's share of the beer is draft-only.)

The reddish-colored brew was made with a reduction of 100 gallons of freshly pressed apple cider, used like an addition of Belgian candy sugar in the boil, plus cinnamon and grains of paradise.

"It took us actually a couple of days to reduce (the cider) down. We ended up with 25 to 30 gallons," Michael says.

Meanwhile, a stand of just over a dozen whiskey barrels (Jim Beam), most of them filled with an imperial stout made last fall, sits along a brewery wall, just off the tasting room. (Recently, a Wild Turkey barrel was filled with Port Omna for aging.)

"It's 11% percent and change," Michael says of the imperial stout, racked into the barrels Oct. 10. "It will probably pick up a point in the barrels. They were pretty bourbony."

Brew trifecta for Kane

Three brews in the fermenters at New Jersey's newest craft beer-maker, Kane Brewing.

The Monmouth County brewery broke the seal* on its brewhouse earlier this month with a Belgian single (a blonde ale) dosed with a Trappist ale yeast from East Coast Yeast.

After a short production break to fine-tune some of the brewery's control systems (i.e. gylcol), brewer Clay Brackley and founder Michael Kane fired up the kettle at the end of last week, brewing an American pale ale and a West Coast IPA.

"The first brew day was little longer, since were getting used to everything. The second and third days went smooth. We hit our gravities and volumes," Michael says. "The flavor profiles are looking good."

For beer geeks and the curious, German pils malt, some Vienna malt and wheat make up the grain bill for the 5.2 percent ABV Belgian blonde that's likely to be just one batch this summer but is expected return next year as Kane's summer seasonal. It's hopped with Styrian and Saaz.

The brew also serves as a step-up for the Trappist ale yeast, since it will get used in an upcoming big Belgian brew intended for the fall season taps, although the actual style hasn't been decided yet.

Michael traced the specifics of the second brew, the American pale ale, describing its grain bill as 2-row with some Munich malt, a touch of rye, and crystal 77, and hopped with Columbus and Hallertau in the boil and finished with Cascade and Centennial. You can expect the "C" hops for the dry-hopping.

"We hope (the rye) will add a little spiciness, more than you get with the average pale ale," Michael says. The brew will be around 5.5 percent ABV.

The third beer features pils, 2-row, cara-pils and crystal 44 malts, angling for a lighter color and drier finishing IPA at 6.5 percent ABV. "We weren't going for a super malty IPA, but we wanted to make sure there was some body to it," Michael says.

The brew was hopped with Columbus and Chinook in the boil, with later additions of Citra, Ahtanum and Centennial. Michael says it will be dry-hopped with some combination of those varieties.

This year has been an especially active one for craft brewery start-ups in the Garden State, with three licensed so far. Right now Kane Brewing is the state's newest craft brewer, a title it's not likely to hold for long, as Carton Brewing in Atlantic Highlands moves closer to licensing and its official launch. That could come sometime next month.

Calling Ocean Township home, Kane occupies industrial park space not far from where Heavyweight Brewing made its celebrated artisanal beers before closing shop five years ago. The closing left Basil T's brewpub in Red Bank as Monmouth County's sole craft brewery.

Basil's opened its doors in 1996 – a big year for craft brewery start-ups in the state – and Red Bank in particular has been at the forefront of craft beer in New Jersey, with the long-defunct Red Bank Brewery and its craft lagers part of that history. (Departing Basil's brewer Gretchen Schmidhausler got her start with Red Bank Brewery.)

In addition, Triumph Brewing once eyed the artsy town for a second location. (Triumph opened in Princeton in 1995 and followed that up years later with brewpubs in New Hope, Pa., and Philadelphia).

Triumph is again considering a presence in Red Bank. If that comes to fruition, Monmouth County could end up with four craft breweries, more than any other county in the state, and outpacing its neighbors to the north, Middlesex County and Essex County, by one. (Middelesex County is home to brewpubs JJ Bitting, Harvest Moon and Uno Chicago Grill & Brewery. Essex County has craft brewers Cricket Hill, Gaslight brewpub and Port 44 Brew Pub. It's also home to the outsized mainstream brewer Budweiser in Newark.)

*Figuratively speaking, of course. Not an equipment malfunction.

A chat with Kane Brewing's Clay Brackley

It's beginning to look like a stretch run at Kane Brewing in Monmouth County.

Floor work is finished, and the brewhouse, fermenters, and bright tanks that arrived months ago have been set in place.

Founder Michael Kane expects electrical and plumbing work to be largely finished this week, setting the stage for necessary local inspections and final inspection by the state. The current forecast is for brewing by the end of June (barring any hitches with inspections).

Since late March, when he arrived in Ocean Township to take the job as head brewer at Kane, Clay Brackley has been conducting pilot brews (among other tasks), testing both malts (brands and varieties) and yeast strains, resolving some quality preferences that will be crucial to Kane's inaugural batches of beer (think American IPA) and beyond.

Clay, a Nevada native who homebrewed while he studied forestry in college, came to Kane via a somewhat circuitous path: Nevada (BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse chain), Alaska (head brewer at Sleeping Lady brewpub in Anchorage) and Pennsylvania (Victory Brewing).

Michael describes Clay's fit, aside from his obvious brewing experience, as something of a shared vision, an understanding of what Kane Brewing should be in New Jersey's craft beer market.

"We were trying to find someone who would fit in well with what we wanted to do ... someone who had the same interest in the style of beer we're going to be making and seemed to really enjoy brewing beer and was really into the craft beer scene and had the energy we're looking for," Michael says.

For his part, Clay says his time in Nevada taught him the nuts and bolts of large-scale beer-making, instilling in him what makes for best practices in a brewery. Alaska, rich in beer culture and ironically a place where you could get craft and import brands unavailable in Reno, was where he began hitting his stride as a brewer. (It also landed him in the winner's circle of the Great Alaska Beer & Barley Wine Festival.) Pennsylvania was a brief layover in his return to the lower 48, and Victory Brewing in Downingtown, Pa., imparted some important lessons from an automated brewery. But at the same time, Clay notes, it separated him from that certain intimacy with the product that a craft brewer experiences.

Clay, who just turned 30 last week, recently took some time to chat and talk about his brewing experiences and his path to New Jersey.

BSL: What got you into brewing?
CB: I started to make beer in college to save money. I liked craft beer from the beginning. When I was younger, I remember tasting my dad's Coors Light or Budweiser and I thought it was terrible. I thought all beer was bad until I got a taste of some Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, some hoppier beers and some English beers.

I liked them, but it's really hard to afford $8.99 or $6.99, $7.99 a six-pack when you're in college and just scraping by. I found out you could spend like 22 bucks on ingredients and make five gallons of beer. Sure, it takes time and effort. I thought it was fun at the time and started doing it and got the brewing bug. It's like people who love to cook. You learn how to do something, you love to do it and you keep doing it.

BSL: And then, perhaps, on grander scales.
CB: I never really thought I would ever be a professional brewer. When I was in college (University of Nevada, Reno) I went for forest and range management. I just thought this is a dream job, this is something that would never happen ... I never knew how I could get into it. I'd even talked to some of the brewpubs, and their brewers had been there for years, and they weren't going anywhere. So I was like, 'I can't work there, that guy's not quitting.'

BSL: But you did get in the door, at BJ's. Talk a little about that first paid gig at a commercial brewery. How did you land the job?
CB: They had a little hiring thing when they first opening the BJs, it was mostly for restaurant people. I went to the restaurant hiring lady, I said, 'Look, I already have a job, I don't need a job ... I really love making beer, I want to learn more about making beer. I want to volunteer to work for the brewery, who do I talk to?' She got me in contact with (brewmaster) Dan Pederson.

At the time I was making pretty decent money; I was actually in the restaurant industry as a sous chef. It was a good job because I didn't have to work a lot of hours. I made good money and it worked well with my class schedule. (Dan) was offering me a Monday through Friday, 40-hour job, which was actually a pay cut at the end of the month when I looked at it. I was like, 'This is going to be a struggle,' but I thought it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up.

About three years into it, I moved from just basically a grunt assistant not really knowing what was going on, to actually running the brewhouse, just like the brewmaster. They were so busy dealing with the paperwork and the corporate stuff – logistics of getting certain beers to certain markets and the taxes. I was just basically doing what they told me to do on the brewhouse.

BSL: What was their capacity?
CB: We did around 27,000 barrels a year. They kept growing and growing. The facility was a 50-barrel brewhouse, 100-barrel fermenters. It was all draft-only, so there was quick turnaround.

BSL: What were some of the beers?
CB: Piranha Pale Ale ... the Brewhouse Blonde was a kölsch. We did Jeremiah Red, which was a high-gravity Scottish/red ale. Tatonka Stout, which is an imperial stout, and then we did some seasonals; we did a hefeweizen ...

BSL: At what point did you get to Alaska?
CB: I was working there (at BJ's), and I had the experience, but the pay scale didn't go up unless you went and became a brewmaster, and there was no opportunity within that company to advance ... I really got tired of scraping by. You can only survive on $9.50 an hour for so long before you're like, 'Why did I go to school?' And student loans were coming due. I was like, 'If I'm going to do this brewing thing, I gotta do it, I can't just stay here. I would have to quit and get another job.' ... So I started looking on ProBrewer.com and saw an opportunity up in Alaska for a head brewer. They offered me a lot better money, also the ability to have creative control, to make a bunch of beer and see what I could do on my own. I just went up there and took over.

BSL: This was a brewpub, right?
CB: Sleeping Lady Brewing Company was the brewery, and the brewpub was called Snow Goose Restaurant (in Anchorage). It's kind of a remote area in Alaska. So they just took homebrewers that had experience. It's not like you can just tap into the local brewing community and find somebody from another state. They were kinda just picking with what they had; so basically they had homebrewers – smart dudes that made good beer – but they really weren't trained on how to operate the systems properly.

BSL: What challenges were you faced with working at a new place?
CB: When I started, I didn't have any training from the previous brewer. I basically started and three days later I was brewing. I saw a lot of things that were kind of jury-rigged, kind of just put together without someone who'd seen it done by professionals before.

For instance, dry-hopping. Normally, at a large production brewery you would dry-hop in your conical fermenter because the cone allows a lot of the hops to drop out, and then you can transfer off of that. They had dry-hopped in a serving tank without a standpipe. They basically took large bags of hops and threw them in the bright tank. This was actually hooked up on their draft lines to send up to the restaurant. I looked at the draft line one day and it was empty – and there's supposed to be 3 or 4 barrels of beer in this tank. One of the big balls of hops had rolled in front of the bottom of the tank and clogged it. There was beer in there that couldn't get out. So I had to open it up, and there was all this beer I had to dump and all these bags of hops I had to throw out. That was just one instance. There were all kinds of things. That's what I did up in Alaska – I just applied the stuff I had learned at BJ's to this brewpub.

BSL: So you tightened up their practices, put them on a better footing as far as brewery management went?
CB: Yeah, I got some decent paperwork going on, started doing (yeast) cell counts on all our beers, got a clean fermenting yeast, we were pitching with the right amount of oxygen, we were keeping everything clean. I don't even know how they sanitized their loop from the heat exchanger to the fermenters. When I got there, I had to rig up some stuff to make it happen until I bought hoses that allowed me to create this loop so you could recirculate hot liquor from the heat exchanger all the way back to the hot liquor tank, so the whole loop is 180 degrees and 100 percent sanitary.

BSL: The kinds of beers that you were making there, what were they?
CB: We had 15 draft lines and seven of those were the standard beers. We had the Gold Rush Golden Ale, which was not even like a kölsch. I considered it like an American golden ale, but very light and dry. Then we had Urban Wilderness Pale Ale, Fish On IPA, Portage Porter, John Henry Oatmeal Stout, Forty-Niner Amber Ale and Old Gander Barleywine.

The other handles I could put on anything that I wanted to. The owner was really, really cool. He just let me brew whatever I wanted to. He was a banker, he made a lot of money, he wanted to have a brewery and he loved beer. His only requirement was anything that I put on, he could randomly show up at any time and he had better like it. Otherwise he was gonna come straight to my office. I made sure I wasn't going nuts, that I wasn't doing anything super-crazy. But I did a lot of fun stuff that was unique and different.

BSL: Such as?
CB: I made a pumpkin beer with real pumpkins. I actually bought sugar pie pumpkins, had to get there at like 4 in the morning to roast ... We brewed an ale with real squash and pumpkin, not just canned pumpkin.

We started a barrel-aging program (with both bourbon and wine barrels) ... I started experimenting with sour beers, but we weren't a packaging brewery so I really wasn't going to put sour beers through my draft lines. So I made only a couple of experimental batches that we were eventually going to hand-bottle just to have, maybe put it in a firkin.

BSL: What was the beer festival scene like up in Alaska, in Anchorage. Can you share your experiences with that?
CB: They don't have a lot of brew festivals in Anchorage. The biggest one of the year is the Great Alaska Beer & Barley Wine Festival. It's held in January, so it's freezing cold outside. It's a perfect time for barleywine, and it's been a thing they've been doing up in Alaska for a long time. Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Barleywine won in '97. A lot of guys have won in that barleywine competition. It's a very well-run competition, as well as a beer festival.

BSL: This is the 2008 competition you entered, right? Going into it, what did you think of your chances?
CB: I knew I had a really good barleywine. I brewed two different barelywines; all of it I just threw down into the barrels.

As soon as I got started and I had time to brew, I brewed barleywine and started it on my Jack Daniel's barrels. I had the barrels, and I knew it was going to take a long time for this beer to be ready. So I had some stuff to play with. And we didn't just take everything out of every barrel and put it in the tank. I took a couple select barrels, we blended those together, and some of the rest of the beer we continued to let rest. And that was our blend. That was our Old Gander Barleywine. It was a little bit unique because of the fact that it had multiple recipes, also differences from the different barrels – the same recipe in two different barrels might be very different. Some more vanilla, some toastier, some a lot more bourbon. We picked them all so it wasn't like over-the-top whiskey taste; one of them was actually a little hoppier, whereas the other one was sweeter. Blending all those beers together I think made a real big difference, and we came out with the first medal that brewery ever won. We got second place overall and we got best of show, or Best in Alaska.

BSL: What were some of the beers you beat?
CB: There was Deschuttes Jubelale ... there was Bigfoot Barleywine, Dogfish Head's Olde School Barleywine, all the Alaska barleywines from Midnight Sun's Arctic Devil to Alaskan Brewing Company's barleywine ... It's a huge, huge, huge haul. Pretty much everyone that has a barleywine gets entered in the competition. There's maybe 50 barleywines that get entered.

BSL: Talk a little about your decision to return to the lower 48 after being in Alaska.
CB: It was fun, and I really liked it up there but the seasonal aspect was getting too much for me. I wanted to be in a place that I was going to want to live for the rest of my life ... I stuck it out, I liked Alaska, but I didn't think it was a place I wanted to spend the rest of my life. So I just kinda looked for a better opportunity, and tried out with Victory for a little bit ...

BSL: And you landed with a start-up beer-maker, Kane Brewing, where you're, once again, the hand that shapes the flavor.
CB: The creative control, I didn't think I would miss it, but I did miss it.

Kane Brewing equipment in house

The components arrived just over two weeks ago, and now they await being slotted into place to become the brewery that will produce ales under the Kane Brewing brand.

But before that can happen, founder Michael Kane says officials in his host town, Ocean Township in Monmouth County, must green-light the site plans for the 7,000-square-foot industrial park space that Kane leased last August.

The brewhouse, trio of fermenters, bright beer tank and hot liquor tank were delivered Feb. 28. That's a little later that Kane had forecast back in January, but establishing a brewery is, no pun intended, a fluid process.

Stay tuned.