Fresh-hopped ales & a hop farm to watch

Jersey-grown hops in two Garden State pub-brewed beers, and a small Burlington County hop farm to watch ...

For as long as he's been in charge of the kettle at the Tun Tavern, brewer Tim Kelly has used hops grown by his friends, Ray Gourley and Kathy Haney of Haddon Heights, to do a fall dry-hopping of the Tun's All-American IPA, a popular beer at the Atlantic City brewpub.

This year is the fourth for the IP-Ray version of the brew that's part of the Tun's regular tap lineup.

Tim (pictured at left with a load of hops on the bine) added to the serving tank just over 3 pounds of the Camden County hops – Cascade, Nugget, Chinook and Zeus cones picked Sept. 3.

(The beer was brewed with pellets of Chinook and Centennial for bittering and flavor. It finishes out at just over 6 percent ABV.)

One hundred miles north, in Woodbridge, Chris Sheehan, brewer at J.J. Bitting brewpub, has his annual hop harvest ale bubbling away in a fermenter.

Mostly Cascades, but with some Mount Hood, Cluster and Fuggle, Chris says he used the 6 pounds of hops grown (pictured below) at his mom's property in Delhi, N.Y., in the Catskills, and the 3 pounds from friends' hop gardens, adding them throughout the boil, supplementing them with some commercially grown whole leaf hops.

Chris has made the beer six years running, last year at Port 44 brewpub in Newark, and prior to that at Chelsea Brewing in Manhattan. (He has typically called it Catskill Hop Harvest Ale, but thinks the name will get shortened this year.)

The harvest ale is the second brew Chris has made for Bitting since taking over the brewhouse there this month, fresh off his year-plus stint at the now-closed Port 44.

Meanwhile, down in Burlington County, Sarah Puleo and Mike Visgil are looking to double the size of the hop yard they started at the 166-acre farm Sarah grew up on in Buddtown in Southampton Township.

The farm is an area where the open space and country roads seem to take you out of New Jersey. But it's also a ground zero for New Jersey farmstand staples like blueberries, asparagus and raspberries. You'll also find Chinese growers on neighboring farms, raising cabbage and snowpeas for restaurants in Philadelphia and New York.

Against that backdrop, hops are a non-traditional commodity. But then again, with the bines' inclination for a towering reach, and the high ceiling of blue skies, a hop yard seems like an easy fit at Isaac Budd Farm. (Sarah and Mike share the place with her parents and brother, and some chickens, peacocks, dogs and a lake.)

After trial plots over the past three years, the two went bigger, planting an eighth of an acre last spring, setting out rhizomes of Cascades, Centennial, Nugget and Fuggles, among other varieties.

"Cascades and Centennials showed well, yielding a few pounds of wet weight. Nugget and Fuggles flowered, but there was not a whole heck of a lot in terms of harvest," Mike said last week via email.

The two have networked with the Northeast Hop Alliance and Rutgers agriculture extension folks (Rutgers raised trial plots of several hop varieties back in the late 1990s, and also provided technical advice to Weyerbacher Brewing in 2008, the first year of a now-annual crop grown by the brewery that ends up in a Weyerbacher harvest ale.) Sarah and Mike also tracked this summer's progress on their Isaac Budd Farm Facebook page.

"Our main goal here is to establish community," Mike says. "For our first few years, we anticipate it being more of a homebrewer/homebrew shop presence. If we get a couple nanobreweries, a couple microbreweries in the area, that's great."

Some of this year's crop, dehydrated and vacuum-packed after picking, was passed along to the Barley Legal Homebrewers, the South Jersey-Philadelphia homebrew club Mike and Sarah are members of.

(Last spring, the two scored a second-place finish in the annual pro-am contest Iron Hill brewpub sponsors for homebrewers who brew with wort drawn from the second runnings of The Situation, a super-high gravity beer that IH brews during the winter. Mike also did an internship in 2010 with Cricket Hill in Fairfield, a gig that helped him with enrolling in the American Brewers Guild.)

"Sarah and I also will be toying with the therapeutics of hops by making some homemade sleep pillows, as well as some hop teas," Mike says.

Make no mistake, a hop yard, even a small plot, can be a lot of work. But the two dived into the task with a dedication that speaks a lot to their belief in and commitment to producing a local farm commodity.

"It's our evening job, our second shift," Sarah said during an interview back in May, on a picture-perfect Saturday that found her and Mike cutting and laying planters paper around the hop mounds to control weeds. "As soon as we get home from work, we're out there – if it's not raining – pruning, digging, planting, putting up (irrigation) hose."

The two started the hop yard on a shoestring budget. The hose purchased for drip irrigation is probably their biggest expense. For other project needs they improvised. Their trellising was fashioned from bamboo cut from the 1- to 2-acre cluster of the stuff that grows wild and skyward on the farm.

"We figured that if we can do it with what we have right now, put all the work in," Sarah says, pausing, "the second year if it goes well, then maybe we'll put more money into it."

Homebrew Day, the video

This year's video from National Homebrew Day/AHA Big Brew, shot May 7th in the back lot at Iron Hill brewpub in Maple Shade, where the year-old Barley Legal Homebrewers club pretty much calls headquarters.

Special thanks to Chris LaPierre at Iron Hill and Tim Kelly from the Tun Tavern.

Remember to support your local homebrew shop.

And brewery.

Cheers.

Carving a different kind of pumpkin beer

Six-packs of pumpkin beer hit the store shelves long before autumn and the first leaves fell from the trees, while a few pub brewers held off, waiting until late this month to tap their versions of the seasonal and eclipse the annual Märzen invasion that is Oktoberfest.

As is typical with this gourded rite of fall, most of the pumpkin beers in the patch this year have been ales, with fruity aromas rippling with spices that entice the senses before the first sip washes over the palate.

Except one. It's a lager.

At Atlantic City's Tun Tavern brewpub, the pumpkin beer is crisp and brisk, like the fall season itself, with just enough spice and zest suspended in a clean lager profile that allows the delicate flavor of the 230 pounds of roasted pumpkin that brewer Tim Kelly used to come through.

"Most of the pumpkin beers you get are ales," Tim says. "They're heavily spiced, like pumpkin pie. A lot of them don't even have pumpkin in it – because what people equate is the spice – and that's fine.

"I like a good pumpkin beer. Weyerbacher has a bronze-medal imperial pumpkin ale. It's delicious; I love it. But really, how many of those are you going to sit down and drink? They're more of a dessert beer – you're going to have one."

However, Tim's version, even at 7.6 percent ABV ("imperially evil for Halloween," he calls it), beckons a second round. Perhaps a third. And that's by design.

The Tun's pumpkin lager comes from Tim's days of homebrewing and an idea that rests on the notion of less is more.

"I went for a lager yeast as opposed to an ale because ales generally lend a lot of their own characteristic flavors to beers, particularly through fruity esters, whereas lagers tend to be clean," he says. "Pumpkin is a very subtle flavor, if you can taste it at all. I wanted to make a beer that tried to bring the pumpkin out. I didn't want to mask it with ale flavors, so I wanted to ferment it clean with a lager yeast, spice it very lightly."

Tim introduced pumpkin lager to Tun Tavern patrons in 2007, during his first year in Atlantic City. It didn't exactly wow the crowd, whose tastes trended toward the ale and its pumpkin pie bouquet. But a funny thing happened the subsequent fall: when Tim made the ale those patrons pined for, most wistfully remembered the lager version.

"I made it the first year and heard nothing but complaints from all the people who wanted the sweet, spicy ale," he says. "So the second year I made the sweet, spicy ale and heard nothing but complaints about where's that wonderful lager you made last year."

So the lager's back, in all its smoothness, just in time for Samhain, and a little beyond. (Tim supposes pumpkin brews have a three-week window in which they're in demand. Thus, he brewed accordingly.)

As a lager, the brew leans a little toward steam beer, a warmer fermentation to let the yeast have a bigger say in the finished product. But Tim steps the process down from 63 degrees after three days to about 55, reining in the yeast signatures that, within ales, help buoy the aromas of the traditional pumpkin-friendly spices (nutmeg, clove, ginger, cinnamon and allspice).

"I'm not trying to go totally clean with it, but I am trying to avoid a lot the esters and other ale characteristics," he says.

Right now, the pumpkin lager joins another of Tim's homebrew recipes gracing the Tun's taps. A couple weeks ago, his wee heavy Scotch ale debuted. At 7-plus percent ABV, Tim's is quite rich, with deep folds of caramel and just a hint of warmth on the back of the throat.

"It's the first time I've made it here. I tried to be as traditional in the production of it as possible. I fired up the kettle before the wort went into it, so I got some good caramelization off that (and added) a little bit of peated malt to it," he says, suggesting the beer be allowed to warm up some in the glass before drinking.

Looking ahead, Tim and brewer Gretchen Schmidhausler of Basil T's in Red Bank plan a collaboration brew, "something with a dark chocolate, with some end notes like cinnamon and a hot pepper, like an ancho or pablano, something along those lines." (Last month, Gretchen marked a decade as Basil's brewer.)

Until then, there's a pumpkin beer that stands out in the patch.