1-barrel brewpub in the works

The scenic top part of the Garden State is in line to get another brewpub.

Maryann and Dion Harris, owners of Tuscany Brewhouse, a restaurant-bar that already keeps its patrons' glasses filled with craft beers, plan to add a 1-barrel brewery setup to create their own line of house ales. (Nearby brewpubs in the area are Krogh's, nine miles west in Sparta, and Long Valley, about 30 miles south in Washington Township.)

Tuscany Brewhouse filed an application for a restricted brewing license with state regulators a little over two months ago. The application is among at least four pending with the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control, and one of three for licensing as a brewpub.

The year-old establishment (it celebrated its first anniversary last month) sits along Route 23 in Oak Ridge, a community that straddles West Milford in Passaic County and Jefferson Township in Morris County. The area is New Jersey's black bear country, hilly and picturesque with lakes and streams.

Tuscany Brewhouse is a place were you can find Jersey-made beers, such as High Point's Ramstein Winter Wheat doppelbock, plus regional brews like Victory's Hop Devil to go along with a surf-and-turf dinner or burger. 

"We have 16 beers on tap ... Ramstein, everyone loves Ramstein; Ithaca IPA, we sell a lot of that ... Cricket Hill over in Fairfield, beers from Vermont ... We try to put on a lot of local or regional beers," says bartender Tom Gilroy, whose mother owns the restaurant and is a longtime restaurateur. 

The idea to add a small brewing system in the restaurant basement is part business, part beer enthusiasm. It evolved, Tom says, from positive feedback on the homebrews (some IPAs and pale ales) he made and shared with family and friends. 

"It started off with the love of good beer and brewing your own beer," says Tom. "It didn't start off with the idea of making money." 

Keith Jennings, another Tuscany Brewhouse bartender, will share brewing duties with Tom. Production is targeted to be about 4 barrels a week. The restaurant is looking at equipment (including bright tanks) from Stout Tanks and Kettles.

A planned brewpub & blessings through beer

Just two years ago, word that the Garden State was getting a new brewery was enough to make it seem like the Earth had moved.

After all, Iron Hill brewpub was the first craft brewer to open in the state after a 10-year drought, and that opening came just three years after the loss of well-regarded Heavyweight Brewing.

But that was then. This is now.

And 2009 is starting to seem more like a whisper compared to the shout that is this year's pace of new brewery openings and breweries in development: Kane Brewing, Carton Brewing, Cape May Brewing, Great Blue Brewing – those are just the ones to be licensed since January; there six more craft beer-makers in development, from a production brewery to nanobrewers to a brewpub.

Count among those in development Laetare Brewing Company, the brainchild of Brian Donohoe, the Rev. Brian Woodrow and Casey Cavanagh, whose project on the drawing board is a brewpub that would pour Belgian and Irish ales, among other styles, and serve a menu of burgers, woodfired pizzas and steaks.

But they also envision Laetare – Latin for "rejoice" – as something else: a place where beer can bring some spirituality to people's lives through conversation, counting blessings and enjoying the things in life. “Crafting exceptional beer with the intention of bringing people together in an atmosphere of celebration!" is their tagline.

"We're hoping to show that it can be enjoyed in a spiritual sense, in a family and friends atmosphere," says Donohoe. "We want beer to bring people together, not have the end goal of just becoming drunk."

"Laetare Brewing Company is close to striking out into the drinking world in effort to re-educate folks about a lost art, rejoicing," says the Rev. Woodrow, a homebrewer-priest and parochial vicar at St. Theresa Roman Catholic Church in Little Egg Harbor. "In my ministry, I come across so many folks who are down on their luck and unfortunately turn to the drink as a sort of self-medication.

"The drink is a gift from God and like many of his gifts, we tend to overdo it a bit. Enjoying a beer for the sake of enjoying a beer seems to be a lost art. It's our hope to change that, one fine drink at a time."

The Rev. Woodrow, who has known Donohoe since Donohoe's senior year at St. Rose High School in Belmar, has supplied ample guidance to the project. In all, there are six people involved in the project, but Cavanagh and Donohoe, both students at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, are the ones taking the lead.

Hailing from Manasquan, Donohoe, 22, is majoring in hotel and restaurant management and will graduate from James Madison in December. Cavanagh, 21, of Frederick, Maryland, is majoring in graphic design and will graduate next May. (Cavanagh created the company's chi-rho logo.)

Right now the project is in the very early stages, says Donohoe, who spoke from Washington, D.C., by phone on Monday. The goal is to have a location chosen by this Thanksgiving, with an eye toward a December 2012 opening. Their preference for a location is Monmouth County, with Asbury Park an early possibility. (They have also considered Belmar. The company's location for now is given as Spring Lake, owing to some investors in that area who have signed on.)

Laetare's lineup of brews would include St. Patrick's Irish Red (a tribute that resulted from spring break trip to Ireland), Chapter XL Belgian Ale (a nod to St. Benedict and the guidelines for imbibing), an American-style IPA, a black IPA (called Man in Black, à la priests' garb), and a nut brown ale or kölsch.

Nearly a year so far in development, the brewpub project is an extension of Donohoe's interest in homebrewing and his crossing paths with Cavanagh after a performance at James Madison by the four-piece rock/alt-country band that Cavanagh fronts (he plays guitar and seven-string banjo). Donohoe says he introduced himself, and the conversation touched on music homebrewing and craft beer.

A homebrewer for 2 1/2 years, Donohoe learned the craft from his father, a hobby brewer whose beers were made using malt extract. Donohoe's quest for more brewing information led him to all-grain brewing. Brewing beer, or simply enjoy some craft beer, and enjoying conversation with friends became an activity that followed Sunday Mass, Donohoe says.

At school in Virginia, Saturdays took on a similar themes: brewing beer or just enjoying beer and conversation, often to a soundtrack of Cavanagh and his band playing. Those Saturdays "got more people into craft beer and brewing," Donohoe says.

Ultimately, Donohoe says, it all became an inspiration – Laetare.

Port 44 in Newark is now brewing

For the first time in years, there is beer being brewed in Newark that's not coming from Anheuser-Busch.

After a long, frustrating wait and an accompanying share of anticipation, Port 44 Brew Pub has begun making beer.

Port 44, New Jersey's newest brewery and the second Garden State brewpub to come online in a little over a year, now has an inaugural light ale in the fermenter, and plans call for another day of brewing on Wednesday.

"The good news is, we're up and brewing," owner John Feeley says, adding that regulators signed off on Port 44's licensing on July 28th.

After months of renovation at the 44 Commerce Street location, Port 44 opened for business in late April, standing beers from guest breweries on the bar for patrons, while the owners continued to navigate the sometimes choppy waters of securing the licensing that would allow them to make their own ales.

A grand opening is planned for this Thursday, but again guest brews will be featured. Alas, the brewpub's license was not issued in time to have house-made brews ready for the event.

Feeley says Port 44 will follow up the grand opening with some sort of bash to herald the brewpub's entry into the Garden State craft beer scene.

Newark was once a big player in the brewing industry, but Prohibition (1920-33) was a death knell for a number of the city's beer-makers. Industry consolidation in the years after Prohibition's demise left Budweiser as the last brewer standing in Newark. (Pabst shut down its Newark plant in the mid-1980s.)

Until now.

Meanwhile, over the past year, New Jersey has seen its brewing landscape reshaped with the addition of the two brewpubs and a production brewery.

Iron Hill in Maple Shade dragged the state out of brewing dormancy in July 2009 when it became the first new Garden State brewer since the bar-restaurant Krogh's tucked a 5-barrel brewing system into its confines in Sparta in 1999. (For the record, contract-brewed beers also emerged in this time.)

Last spring, New Jersey Beer Company in North Bergen began turning out a pale ale, stout and abbey single as its flagship brews.

And now Port 44 boosts New Jersey count to a combined 19 production and pub brewers since craft brewing arrived in the Garden State in the mid-1990s.

Iron Hill Maple Shade, a year later

Iron Hill will mark the first-year anniversary of its Maple Shade brewpub on Saturday with a fitting soiree that runs from 1 to 5 p.m.

That's brewer Chris LaPierre in the video above, shot June 26th during the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild festival. Below is what Chris put out in his email notice to Iron Hill devotees and mug club members about Saturday's happenings:

As usual we'll show our appreciation with a complimentary buffet from 2-3 p.m. and raffling off a slew of prizes at 4 p.m. As for the beer, (can't forget the beer!) we've got a lot of special stuff saved up for you. ... we'll be tapping our Anniversary Ale (Sour Cherry Belgian Dubbel), Christmas in July (our Winter Warmer that's been aging in a used Bourbon barrel since the holidays), and vintage kegs of English Strong Ale and Flemish Red. I've even got a special cask for you (I haven't yet decided whether to tap the last firkin of Dark Situation or the last pin of our Bourbon Quad).

Follow this link to see what it was like on that inaugural day of business when Iron Hill opened its first location in New Jersey and became the first new brewing enterprise in the Garden State since Krogh's up in Sparta jumped into the game in 1999 with a 5-barrel system.

Iron Hill's reputation with its eight locations (spread among Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey) is one of great beer. But its backstory is about three Jersey guys who had to leave the Garden State to pursue their vision just to be able to return to their home state with that vision. (Are you listening Gov. Christie? IH's saga concerning high-cost, commerce-unfriendly New Jersey is not unique.)

But the expansion has been rewarding.

The Maple Shade location has become one of Iron Hill's busiest (are you sorry you spurned them like you did, Sagemore plaza in Marlton?), drawing a lot of beer enthusiasts from throughout the South Jersey region. And that's happened despite the rather confounding interchanges with Routes 73 and 41 that lead to the brewpub.

Iron Hill's success says something else about South Jersey: That it truly was looking for another player in its beer scene.

And South Jersey scored big time.

A look at Newark's Port 44

Newark is in line to soon get its first craft brewery, an alehouse brewpub under construction within a five-minute walk from the New Jersey Devils' home ice at Prudential Center Arena and NJ Transit's trains at Penn Station.

Port 44 Brew Pub will celebrate Newark's heritage as a onetime beer industry giant whose glory shriveled to a lone producer, mega brewer Budweiser.

Greg Gilhooly, who owns the Venetian facade building at 44 Commerce Street that houses Port 44, says old photos and memorabilia will pay homage to the likes Newark's heyday names of Krueger, Pabst, Feigenspan and Ballantine, and set the ambiance for Port 44's planned eight taps at street-level and second-floor bars.

"We're so excited to bring beer back to Newark. Most of the people we talk to that come in have a relative that worked in the brewery business," says Gilhooly.

And that's just people passing by who are curious about the renovations to turn the former site of Europa restaurant into a brewpub. Just wait until there's beer pouring.

"If there's 10 people at the bar, I can rest assured five of them – at least half of them – will have a grandfather or uncle who worked in the (city's) brewing business," Gilhooly says.

Gilhooly, 50, a longtime Newark cop, hopes to buy into the brewpub side of the business when he retires this summer from the police force that's been a part of his family for four generations. John Feeley, a retired deputy fire chief in nearby Orange, is the actual owner of the brewery and restaurant.

The pair hopes hockey and concerts at the Rock – the Prudential Center Arena – will bring in crowds before and after shows and games. But Port 44 is also smack in Newark's office district, with the gleaming Gateway Center, home to powerhouse law firms and lobbyists, within walking distance. The people who populate those offices are likely to have a taste for craft brews, Gilhooly says. The same goes for students from Rutgers and Seton Hall law schools.

So when will Port 44 fling open its doors? Gilhooly says they hope to be pouring beer by the end of the month, mostly likely a brand on a guest tap, since it would be too soon for house-brewed beers to be ready. If luck is on the side of two Irish guys hoping to be part of the better beer scene, those guest taps will flow for St. Patrick's Day festivities. That, however, is a wait-and-see scenario.

Meanwhile, renovation work continues at Port 44. Gilhooly says license applications are all filed, but a date for state and federal regulators to check out the establishment remains to be set. When Port 44 opens with its American bistro menu, it will be the second Garden State brewpub to open in as many years (Iron Hill opened last year in Maple Shade) and will take its place as the state's 12th brewpub.

Last month, as interior work continued throughout the building, brewmaster Chris Sheehan, on loan from Manhattan's Chelsea Brewery, was overseeing the installation of the second-floor brewhouse, four 15-barrel fermenters and five 15-barrel serving tanks. (Sheehan has the option to stay with Port 44 or return to Chelsea. He's pictured in the bottom of the image at left; Gilhooly is in the gray shirt.)

Given the limitations of the building, Sheehan says the beers brewed on site will be exclusively ales, including a light ale, an amber or red, an IPA, and stouts. The latter, especially robust ones, is a style on which Sheehan has staked his 18-year brewing career.

"We'll be serving some kick-ass stouts," says Sheehan, who got his start in the brewing business at Triple Rock Brewery & Alehouse in Berkeley, California, and also worked at San Francisco's 20 Tank Brewery.

The same goes for hoppy beers. Sheehan says the beers will be made with whole flower hops and a hopback to boost that signature flavor. "We'll definitely not be lacking hop character in these beers," he says.

Plans call for a single house yeast to ferment the beers. But special strains will also be used on occasion to stir some Belgian styles into the lineup. Gilhooly says Port 44 will dedicate its guest taps to beers made by fellow Garden State craft brewers. Cricket Hill, in nearby Fairfield, has been a big supporter of Port 44 and is a logical pick for a guest brew.

"Always a Jersey beer on the guest taps," Gilhooly says. "We really want to do more than anyone else has done ... extend an olive branch and get Jersey beer. We want to promote Jersey beer."

Newark was once home to dozens of breweries, but Prohibition and industry consolidation following the resumption of legal beer became their undoing. The Pabst brewery, with its landmark beer bottle water tower, closed in the mid-1980s, leaving Anheuser-Busch the sole brewer in the city. (The 55,000-gallon Pabst water tower came down four years ago; a year ago, it sat cut into several sections in a junkyard in Newark, off the New Jersey Turnpike.)

Friend of the blog and beer scribe John Holl, who has written occasionally about New Jersey's beer history and is now working on a book about Indiana's breweries and brewpubs, says brewing was once the fourth-largest industry in Newark.

Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, the city's beer barons oversaw a $20 million industry. That amounts to roughly $430 million in today's money.

Iron Hill: A sneak peak

What a way to spend a Saturday …

Iron Hill Brewery co-owner Mark Edelson was filling growlers (that's Mark on the left in the second photo), trying to get just the right pour in the half-gallon brown glass jugs, pausing between takes to tweak settings beneath a brushed-metal control panel door to a German-manufactured filler, the first at any Iron Hill location, and the first such growler device to be put into use by a New Jersey brewpub. (Production brewer Climax in Roselle Park has a six-head, counter-pressure filler for the half-gallon jugs the brewery uses for bottling. Owner Dave Hoffmann, a machinist before he turned brewer, designed and built his filler). After a while, it looked like Mark had the right calibration, and two growlers, filled with Pig Iron Porter and India Black Ale, were rung up for sale.

If you’re the kind of beer drinker who likes to take something home after your afternoon or evening at the brewpub, then you’ll appreciate Mark’s efforts, which came on a day that Iron Hill folks spent smoothing out everything ahead of their grand opening in Maple Shade on Monday (doors open at 5 p.m.).

The filler is of benefit to both the beer drinker and the pub.

On principle, it works much like a bottling line: It purges air in the jug by filling it first with CO2; then it floods the container with beer via a tube inserted down into the jug, topping off the fill with a jet of beer to kick up some foam as a final air purge, after which the jug’s cap is screwed on by hand.

What it means for you is better shelf life in your refrigerator (it doesn’t change the fact that once you open the growler, you should do what you can to finish those four pints, or risk it degassing). For the pub, it should be more efficient than the widely practiced approach of half filling the jug and letting the foam settle before topping it off. That can eat up precious time on busy nights, and you can end up with an underpour if a pub is slamming busy. (For the record, the only time we ever got an underpour was in Massachusetts.)

If you go back about 10 years or more, some brewpubs used to slip a clear, vinyl tube (like what many homebewers use for racking) onto the tap and fill the jug from the bottom up. That practice fell out of fashion for some reason. However, The Ship Inn in Milford still does it.

The grand opening of its eighth location is surely to be a sweet moment for Iron Hill, and comes after two years of scouting sites and seriously trying to finally bring to New Jersey the brewpub model that has worked for Garden State natives Edelson and his partners, Kevin Finn and Kevin Davies, first in Delaware and then Pennsylvania.

One Jersey site that had been under consideration was the upscale Sagemore/Promenade plaza on busy Route 73 in Marlton, a great location to be sure. And we say the folks who own that site screwed themselves by not working out a deal with Iron Hill, because Redstone and PF Chang’s can’t come close to what IH does.

The brewpub, at 124 East Kings Highway, is spacious and well-appointed, a relaxing atmosphere that's quite conducive to conversation. The wait staff is attentive and makes it their business to know as much about the beers as the food (after all, beer is food).

Speaking of the beers, Iron Hill’s nine taps are built on a foundation of five house beers. Toss in a tap always dedicated to a Belgian style – you’ll find a wit occupying that tap on opening day – a pair of seasonals and a nitrogen tap that right now features a must-try keller version of their Ironbound Ale (4.7% ABV), an American-style pale ale that went bronze at the Great American Beer Festival in 2005. To begin with, Ironbound is an even competition of malt and hop flavors wrapped up in a session beer. But the unfiltered, nitro version has this dense creamy head that stays with you to the bottom of the glass.

A beer that should pique your interest is that India Black Pale, an amped-up, IPA turn of their American ale (6.3% ABV), deepened with black malt and dry-hopped with Horizon hops.

But don’t just take our word for it. Find out for yourself on Monday.

Tankard time

OK, so they’re not really tankards here, but Basil T’s in Toms River does a commendable job with its mug club dinner, that occasion when you can renew your membership for the year or sign up to become a member. This year's is set for 6:30 on Friday evening (find details here; look under menus on the left column; the dinner link is at the bottom).

(FYI: If you actually are looking for tankards, need the feel of pewter in your hands, The Ship Inn in Milford uses them in its club.)

If you’re a beer fan in the Toms River area, then you probably already keep a seat at Basil’s warm and a pint of Dave Hoffmann’s pub-brewed beer in front of you. (Dave, as many folks know, is also the owner of Climax Brewing in Roselle Park; being the brewer at Basil’s affords him a beer alter-ego.) But if you’re a beer trekker and the brewpub is a travel destination, then it helps to know this event is one of two with beer as the centerpiece that Basil’s pulls out the all the stops for. The other is their Oktoberfest, and both are worth putting on your calendar.

Cheers. See you there.

Throwing stones

The Newark Star-Ledger, on a respirator and hemorrhaging money (so say the news sheets), is wading into the waters of magazines with Inside Jersey. It’s a business move, so whatever, that’s not the beef. (FYI, links to it may be gated and ask for birth year and ZIP code).

But their review of the state’s brewpubs, though not an utter trashing, is the point of contention. And not because it’s a review. There’s plenty of scoring (take that in a few definitions of the word) of Jersey brews going on at Rate Beer and BeerAdvocate. Beer is subjective (which is why we don’t venture down the review road. We know what we’ll have two or three pints of, and we allow you the same).

The real issue here is the degree of outdated uselessness of the review. (Plus this piece is a warmed-over turn of something done by the Ledger four years ago – Aug. 27, 2004. We plumbed the Web and found it. Again FYI, that's a cached link, so it may crap out.)

For the record, we don’t care when they started putting this together, nor care about the amount of legwork involved. Or if it had to be done as a spare-time side gig to another newsroom duty, or that it took a while to get around the state and drink. The readers don’t know that, nor should they have to account for it; they just see the Sept. 16th date.

The Web’s immediacy demands being current. And anyone in the know about Jersey beer (and there are plenty of folks out there who are) can see the legwork here is utterly Jurassic. Yet the review was published in mid-September, when the fest and fall seasonals are going on tap and brewers are gearing up for winter warmers or a hearty, smoky Scotch ale. There's no mention they even do them.

A good example of the ancientness: Dave Hoffmann hasn’t had a maibock on at Basil T’s in Toms River for months (we called Dave on Tuesday to ask how long it’s been, he says four months at least). And it won't come back until next May because it's a spring seasonal, of course. (Yet here were are in the fall. Hmmm.)

One more: Tun Dark at the Tun Tavern in Atlantic City kicked at least a couple of months ago (again we checked with brewer Tim Kelly; we had guessed three). In late August, Tim put on a new version of their IPA, dry-hopped with some really floral-smelling Cascade and Nugget hops, fresh from his friends’ suburban garden. Guess the Tun gets no points for what they're doing right now – locally grown, locally served. Sigh.

Yet another point regarding the Tun: trashing the house light beer, Tun Light. Let’s face it, light beer is to real beer what Britney Spears is to real music. Most craft beer drinkers know what to expect with the house-brewed lights. They're light beer, meant to be less pronounced – hops, body, maltiness – than the rest of the beer list; they're the mainstream brew knockoffs, more bubbly than anything else. They're not for everyone, just like that double IPA isn’t, either. It’s a business decision (like, perhaps, the ailing Star-Ledger and its magazine venture?)

Yet another example: The Ship Inn’s Black Death Stout went on late June, early July, and kicked by the time we were back there in Milford in mid-August, which is when we tried their West Coast IPA, something new at the Ship.

And not for nothing, but word got out three weeks ago that New Jersey is getting another brewpub, Iron Hill, in Maple Shade. So what if that’s not for a few months; if you’re willing to talk about beers people can’t drink right now, or for that matter in quite a while, you can mention a place that opens next May. Iron Hill’s a fresh part of the beer scene in the Garden State. It's current.

Also, maybe it’s just us, but we think this is a misleading point in the review ... The brewpubs are conveniently spread around the state. Um, no more than say corners bar are. They, in fact, are the corner bar for many folks. But, as important, they're also destinations for those passionate about beer and interested in sampling the brews of New Jersey. So for the latter (especially South Jersey), it’s hardly convenient. We raise the point because the review attempts the statewide glimpse and because high costs for liquor licenses charged by local governments keep new brewpubs out of places where they would easily enjoy support.

So, spread out means traveling the state (trust us, we’ve done it – regularly), which brings up another point. Better guidance for the beer tourist. All of these places have their mainstay brews, styles almost always on tap, plus their seasonals, and even specialties (like Triumph in Princeton and those oak barrel-aged and cask-conditioned beers brought up from the cellar on the first Wednesday of each month), some clear, serviceable information there would have been nice. It's not always about what's on tap, but what the pubs do.

So yeah, we're throwing stones at others who threw stones. Defending the brewpubs? Sure, we'll cop to that. Many of them have just a lone brewer tending the kettle, fermenters and serving tanks, toiling in a state where pedestrian Bud and Coors Light dominate practically every bar.

If you're truly interested in navigating the Garden State’s brewpubs in one stop before you hit the trail, forget Inside Jersey. Just grab Lew and Mark’s book. You'll be doing yourself a favor.