Blackthorn Brewing buildout under way

Blackthorn Brewing is: Jason, Jacqui and Chip

New Jersey's recent streak of adding at least one craft brewery a year appears safe for 2013.

The run started with the opening of Iron Hill's Maple Shade brewpub in 2009, at the time the first new brewery in the Garden State in 10 years. Amid continued craft beer industry growth, nationally and regionally, New Jersey's chain has gone unbroken since.

Now, Irish-themed newcomer Blackthorn Brewing is poised extend the streak to a fifth year, as the  production brewery in development forecasts opening in Toms River some time in 2013. 

"Originally, we were hoping to be up and running by Memorial Day weekend. That might be a little tight at this point," says Jackson resident Chip Town, who founded Blackthorn with his daughter, Jacqui.  

Tight is a realistic assessment. 

Blackthorn is well into a brewery buildout at its 6,500-square-foot unit in a business park along Route 37, the main commercial artery that takes Toms River from the Atlantic Ocean west toward the Lakehurst Navy base, immortalized by the 1937 Hindenburg explosion.

The brewery's floor drains are in, and a work crew has been framing out the tour taproom, positioned forward from the brewhouse area, where other interior work is taking place. The front office is being furnished, and U.K. brewery-trained Jason Goldstein, hired last month as Blackthorn's brewer, has begun piloting recipes (so far a session blonde ale) on a Tippy brew setup delivered a week ago. 

It's progress, but there's still plenty to do, especially with the big, shiny stuff that makes a brewery a brewery.

Blackthorn's 25-barrel brewhouse and 50-barrel fermenters are expected to arrive in mid-April. They're on order from Florida-based Brew-Bev, the company founded by retired Anheuser-Busch engineer Neal Knapp that has been affordably equipping U.S. and Canadian craft brewers with Chinese-made brewhouses and tanks. 

"It's coming out of China; that's the reason it's being delayed," Chip says. "But it's incredible prices; nobody could touch it. There are (some) problems with Chinese steel, but (Neal) tripled the industry warranty. To make everybody happy, he put a three-year warranty on all the steel and all the welds."

Taproom framing in progress

Chip, 56, who handles Blackthorn's business matters, says the obligatory licensing and tax paperwork is being finalized for filing with federal and state regulators. 

A bottling line is also part of the brewery start-up plan, to backstop Blackthorn's draft business in the target craft beer market of Monmouth and Ocean counties. (A red ale and stout will be among a quartet of Irish- and English-style beers that Blackthorn plans to brew.)

"We didn't want to limit ourselves to just the kegs. For bars that don't have the tap space, we wanted to have an alternative, and then also the opportunity of going to the liquor stores," says Jacqui, 27, whose duties include Blackthorn's marketing and sales. "If we can start with a few different options and go slowly, with the kegs and the bottles in the bars and the bottles in the stores, we're hoping that'll give us greater exposure within the market in general."

Tailoring the beer offerings to work with supportive bars also figures into Blackthorn's model. The same thinking goes for the brewery's taproom – treat the tour patrons to one-off, reserve brews.

"Around here, I can find beers that are from anywhere, like the West Coast," Jason says. "However, what you see is their mainstream beers. You don't see their local beers, the things you'd only find if you were maybe within 25 miles of that brewery – the small batches, the 5-barrel batches. Things like that.

"That's what we can pride ourselves on. You can come down here, you can come into the taproom, and this beer you will only see here, and maybe at a few bars in the local area that really are excited about our products. Why not give back something to them for being excited about our products, something to separate themselves from every other bar?"

Taproom work 

There's room in that scenario for cask ale, too. 

"Eventually, when we're settled, I'd like to have cask in our taproom and have cask any place that's willing to undertake that," Jason says. "That's a very large venture for a bar to go into: a shorter shelf life and a lot more knowledge for the cellarman."

Once licensed, Blackthorn stands to become the 13th production craft brewery in New Jersey, and the ninth Garden State craft brewery to be licensed since 2009, including two that went out of business (Great Blue in Somerset County and Port 44 Brew Pub in Newark).

Blackthorn could also become the first brewery  licensed since the state relaxed regulations for craft brewers last fall. (Among other things, the regulatory change did away with the limit of two six-packs on brewery sales to the public. It's a change that could prove critical to fledgling breweries, giving them a vital source of income outside wholesale distribution.)

If you're keeping score, New Jersey now has 25 craft breweries (a dozen production breweries and 13 brewpubs), plus a trio of brands whose beers are contract-brewed. (The newest contract brand is Bolero Snort, launched in January-February; the company's beer is brewed at High Point Brewing in Butler, but plans call for Bolero Snort to have its own brewery sooner rather than later.) Besides Blackthorn, there are two other breweries in development: Tuscany Brewhouse in Oak Ridge and Pinelands Brewing in Little Egg Harbor. Additionally, Iron Hill expects to open a second location in Voorhees in July.

An idea takes flight

Chip, a 17-year homebrewer with a couple years removed from a banking industry career, and Jacqui, a College of New Jersey alum who also worked in sales, took Blackthorn from idle homebrewer conversation to an on-paper idea in 2010-11, to finding space last year for a brewery. 

Located four miles west of the Garden State Parkway, their brewery space once housed part of the Bacchus School of Wine School and a gymnastics studio. Blackthorn leased the space last summer and started the renovation work last month. Jacqui and Chip have also used the brewery development time to build a rapport with Tipperary Pub in Lakehurst, a likely first draft account.

Says Jacqui: "I started homebrewing with Dad once I moved back home from college. He always did it, and I said, 'Yeah, whatever, he's making beer.' Once I came home from college – I had a chemistry background – I started kind of taking an interest in the chemistry and the biology of the beer. So when I came home I said 'I'm going to start brewing with him, see what it's all about.'"

It wasn't quite grad school, but certainly a new frontier of study for Jacqui. She then stocked up on books about yeast biology and brewing chemistry.

"I got really into the geeky side of it. In 2010, in the summer, we were just making a bunch of batches of beer and said it would be kind of cool to have a brewery," she says. "It was just a fleeting thought. We started thinking about it more seriously, started doing a little bit more research. I was doing marketing-type research, market analysis; Dad was checking out the numbers, seeing if it would be feasible.

"Little by little, we started doing more work on it and more work on it. Summer of 2011, we were both let go from our jobs within two weeks of each other and sat home unemployed, and said this is a door that just opened for us. Our full-time job became finishing our business plan."

Originally from Queens, N.Y., Jason, 23, comes to Blackthorn with a Campaign for Real Ale background. A passionate homebrewer, he studied food science at Ohio State University and worked part-time at Elevator Brewery and Draught Haus in Columbus. He studied brewing at Brewlab in the UK, and worked at Mordue, Double Maxim and Darwin, all CAMRA/cask ale-style breweries. 

Ohio State's food science program, and its dairy industry emphasis, offered clear advantages for Jason, who applied them to hobby brewing. 

"I had a little bit better homebrewing equipment than most people would, because I was working in multimillion-dollar labs using steam-pressure boilers and things like that," he says. "I could have even pasteurized my beer if I wanted to just because that equipment happened to be there."

Hobby brewing, for Jason, went from small step to giant leap.  

"It was a baby-step thing," he says. "I was homebrewing and going the food-science path. My homebrewing kept expanding. It's definitely an addicting hobby, to the point I was doing 5-gallon batches; it grew to 10-gallon batches, all of a sudden going from 10-gallon batches to building a $5,000 home brewery ..."

Now, as Jason works out the recipes, Chip orchestrates the brewery buildout, and Jacqui pores over a list of bars across the state to plot marketing strategy.

"We're putting dots on a map of where everybody is," Jacqui says, "taking out the summer bars where everybody wants just whatever's on special – Bud Light, Miller Lite, so excluding those for now – and going to the pubs and the inns in Seagirt and Spring Lake where there's a lot of Irish Heritage, and the Irish pub, just looking at those. We're looking at places that are going to have the demographic that's going to be asking for the type of beer we have."

And then FU Sandy poured

FU Sandy tap

Yep, FU, Sandy

It doesn't take long to kick a freshly tapped keg when it's pouring for a good cause. 

Bars and packaged goods stores with growler stations were doing just that Saturday, selling pints and jugs of the hybrid wheat-pale ale, FU Sandy.

Flying Fish brewed FU Sandy, its first new beer for 2013, to help raise money for hurricane relief. And has been noted since the announcement in December, the brewery will steer all proceeds from the beer to a Jersey-based charity to be chosen from suggestions offered by Twitter and Facebook followers of the brewery. 

All 86 kegs of Sandy are long gone from the Somderdale brewery, dispatched into the hands of the bars and stores that got one each; many of those establishments followed the brewery's request to tap the beer on Saturday, but some did so the day before; others will feature FU Sandy at later dates. Check here for the the list. (Glassware and shirts will continue to be available.)

Denise at the Office pours Sandy

Whatever the case, when the beer was tapped, business was brisk, with lines for growler fills. 

At Spirits Unlimited, a Sandy line

At The Pour House, the keg kicked around 2 p.m. The bar in Westmont in Camden County put the Facebook shout-out up around noon. The Pour House's faithful promptly did the rest.

Then there was the Passion Vines store in Somers Point, an Atlantic County shore town not far from where the center of the storm made landfall but did considerably less damage (that's because it's the northeast quadrants of hurricanes that are the worst: storm surge and sheering winds).

Over in Toms River, in central Ocean County, two kegs of FU Sandy were flowing across the street from each other: at the Office Lounge & Restaurant and the growler station inside Spirits Unlimited, in a plaza across busy Route 37, within sight of the Office's parking lot. 

Both locations were symbolically fitting, given that Ocean County's barrier islands got shredded by Superstorm Sandy on Oct. 29th and the hurricane-nor'easter's full-moon high tide.

A lot of repair work is taking place up and down the coast (such as Belmar's boardwalk repair getting under way last month), and there's been plenty of progress. But the tracks of the Star Jet roller coaster rising from the surf in Seaside Heights still make you think you're staring at the ruins of a civilization. Rebuilding the boardwalk reminds you otherwise. 

FU Sandy growler

A fill for the cause

Perhaps its fitting to also take a moment and remember those still displaced from their homes ruined by Sandy. In either case, that's where FU Sandy comes in, a little help and a resonant name.

And at the Office, a lot of people were saying "FU Sandy," promising to kick the keg before the afternoon was done. By 3 o'clock, the bar had already run out of the commemorative pint glasses that were also for sale.  

Located just off the Garden State Parkway's exit 82, the Office is a Toms River fixture. It's within walking distance of the county courthouse, a proximity that makes it the Ocean County Bar's bar. It's a place that's a bit ahead of its time, too.

Back in the mid-1980s, long before it featured the respectable craft beer lineup that it has today – and well before New Jersey had its wave of craft breweries – you could get Bass ale in bottles, a huge contrast to what was the norm then. 

Office beers include Jersey beers

The Office is also known for its signature quirk of handing cash-paying patrons $2 bills and 50-cent pieces back as change (nowadays dollar coins, too).

Thomas Jefferson looked up from a 2 in the stack of bills parked in front of Anthony Petrocelli, an Office regular who sipped a pint of FU Sandy in a logoed glass, one of two he would later take home. 

A phys-ed teacher in Asbury Park, Anthony lives in Toms River (his uncle is Rico Petrocelli, Bo-Sox shortstop and third baseman: two homers in Game Six of '67 Series, a .308 hitter in that classic Reds-Red Sox '75 matchup).

Anthony's sister, Aurora, a banker and new mom, also lives in Toms River, only she can't return to her home on the east side of town. The storm surge that rode over Barnegat Bay sent 4 feet of water through her place. An uncle of Anthony's with property in Point Pleasant Beach to the north is in the same displaced situation. 

Anthony Petrocelli: FU Sandy 

So Saturday afternoon found him at his regular bar, for reasons well beyond thirst and college basketball on the bar's TVs.

"A friend of mine works here, and she told me they were getting a keg of FU Sandy," Anthony says. "So I said I'm going to come here and have a beer or two, get a couple glasses, give her one, I'll take one, and help support all the victims." 

Wurst case scenario

For a moment, set the märzen aside.

Because there's also plenty of hearty food rolled into this 2 1/2-week thing called Oktoberfest.

And you don't have to be in Münich to find it.

Try Toms River for some of that Old World flavor.

Detlev Barsch's business, D.A. Barsch German Butcher Shop, is tucked inside in brown, single-story building along Route 9, in the northern part of town where used car dealerships practically outnumber the people.

(Incidentally, for beer in Toms River, it's along Route 9 that you'll find the more well-stocked packaged goods stores, not busy, main-drag Route 37 into Seaside Heights.)

German food is Detlev's life; the butcher profession is a family affair, going back to when he lived in Oranienburg, Gemany, just north of Berlin.

“We had a sausage factory with 150 employees … we had our own store and our own delivery trucks," Detlev says, his voice gently seasoned with a German accent. "I learned my profession in Germany. In competition, I was the best butcher in all of Berlin in 1968; I was No. 3 in all of Germany, and my mother was the only female master butcher for 15 years in all of Germany."

Detlev, 62, has been plying his profession in New Jersey for decades (he came to the US in 1970), and many people remember him from the German butcher shop in Forked River (Lacey Township), about a half-hour drive south of Toms River.

"I started off with the whole family in Forked River. In the '80s, I sold the business to my brother (Wolfgang), then I started my own business on a dairy farm in upstate New York. I had a butcher shop there, Hamden German Butcher," he says.

A flood in 1996 pretty much devastated Delaware County, New York, and Detlev returned to New Jersey, working for his brother for about 10 years. He opened D.A. Barsch 2 1/2 years ago.

Standing behind his shop counter, he flips the calendar page from September to October. The Saturdays of the months are marked with catering orders. Predictably, this time of year is busy, and finds his shop lining up area retirement villages, German-American clubs and anyone else planning a fall fest event with bratwurst, knackwurst, sauerbraten, schweinshaxe, potato pancakes, red cabbage and other traditional German and European foods.

But Oktoberfest has gained an even wider reach as a time to entertain.

"The younger generations that spent time in Europe, they just throw a party for their friends and want to make it an Oktoberfest," Detlev says.