Cape May Brewing opens doors to public

A week after supplying its first draft account, nano-sized beer-maker Cape May Brewing welcomed the public with its first open house, a four-hour meet-and-greet on Saturday that featured beer sampling and a tour of the brewery's facility nestled in an industrial park-like building alongside Cape May County Airport.

More than a dozen craft beer enthusiasts paid a call on the state's smallest beer-maker and were treated to tastes of a one-off malty brown ale-like dark IPA, and the brewery's launch beer, a deep-golden IPA informally called Jump The Jetty.

Cape May Brewing kicked off July by picking up a tap handle at Cabanas, an oceanfront bar and grill, with Jump the Jetty, which is actually registered with beer industry regulators as Cape May IPA.

Located just a bottle cap's toss from the brewery, Cabanas (on Beach Avenue in Cape May) quickly blew through the IPA over the Fourth of July holiday weekend but is now pouring the beer again thanks to a second sixtel delivery.

Notching nine brew sessions since getting its state license in mid-May, Cape May Brewing is right now the Garden State's only producing nanobrewer. Somerset County nano Great Blue, licensed in March, has been idled with some technical problems with its brewing equipment.

Cape May Brewing cranks out 25 gallons for fermentation, a production rate that for now has the brewery at about one-third of its capacity. The batch volume is produced via combined brews on a horizontal brewsculpture fashioned from repurposed 15-gallon beer kegs, a setup not unlike what you would find in a homebrewer's garage. For its sixtels, the brewery relies on Cornelius kegs, saving money by forgoing the purchase of more traditional kegging equipment.

"It's a brewery, but it's a very small brewery," says Ryan Krill, who's a partner in Cape May Brewing with his dad, Robert, and college friend Chris Henke, an engineer by profession who built the company's brewing rig. "We're not trying to take over the world, and we're not trying to get nuts. It's an affordable business plan."

Ryan says the trio were pleased with Saturday's open house turnout, which had them filling growlers of both IPAs, selling pint glasses and logoed baseball caps, and discussing how the brewery is trying to establish itself.

"I didn't really know how many people would show up today. The only advertising we did was put it on Facebook," Ryan says. "Everything for us so far has been a slow release, a soft open at Cabanas, see how the beer's received ... A lot of people want to carry us, but the whole plan is to take our time, be slow, feel out the beer business, see what we can get ourselves into."

Ryan explained how Cape May Brewing will pace its output: "We're just doing Cabanas now. After about a month, we'll have a good feel for how much they need and how much we need at the tasting room. After that point we'll see how much extra we have, then we can work on new accounts. But we're not going to try and get a new account and then find out we can't supply a new account."

Chris adds: "As we've been saying, it's just figuring it out. We go slowly so we don't get ourselves in a situation where people are yelling at us for not keeping up the supply."

As far as the beers go, if you've had the opportunity to taste Jump The Jetty, you can expect some tweaks to dial up the hop character. The ale trends toward a milder take on IPA, less bitterness up front. "It's good, but it's not exactly where we want it to be ultimately," Ryan says. "The next batches have been hopped up more."

The dark IPA, likewise, sidesteps some of the more traditional hallmarks of the style, and answers some of those variations with a toasty character.

The beer is the result of attempting something off the beaten path with ingredients on hand. "We had an extra day to brew. We said let's brew something different – before that we had four batches of IPA – so we said let's try something different," Chris says. "So we collected all the hops we had in our freezer ... doubled up on our dark malt, which is crystal 50, and we got a very interesting beer.

"We really don't know what to call it. I've been calling it dark IPA because the base was kind of an IPA, but they were older hops so we didn't get the extraction that we thought we'd get out of the hops, bitterness-wise. But you do get the dark malt; that hits you at the end. You get that dark, toasty feel to it," Chris says.

NOTE: Check with the brewery's Website or Facebook page for future open houses.

Cape May licensed; another nano emerges

Just as Cape May Brewing scores its state license to begin making beer, another Cape May County nanobrewery is emerging, hoping to fire up a kettle in the fall and launch with an American pale ale in New Jersey's southern shore draft beer market.

Tuckahoe Brewing Company is a foursome of homebrewers from Atlantic and Cape May counties who have been brewing together since 2006. They established their company back in January and earlier this month leased a 1,000-square-foot building at 369 Woodbine-Oceanview Road in Dennis Township, about a 20-mile ride up Route 9 from Cape May Brewing, which just became New Jersey's newest brewery and the state's second nanobrewery (behind Great Blue Brewing in Somerset County).

State regulators gave Cape May the green light to strike a mash following an inspection of their facility on Thursday. (Federal regulators signed off on the brewery in early April.) Ryan Krill, one of the three owners, says they expect to begin brewing sometime next week.

Matt McDevitt, one of the guys behind Tuckahoe Brewing, says he and his partners – Tim Hanna, Chris Konicki and Jim McAfee – have filed paperwork for a brewers notice with the federal government and for a limited brewery license with the state.

"Our goal is to get started around October/November, depending on how that gets processed," says McDevitt, whose day job is teaching at Mainlaind Regional High School in Linwood. Hanna and Konicki are also teachers at Mainland Regional; McAfee is an architect in Cape May County.

Ahead of them now is the task of getting a floor plan together and turning that into brewing space.

"We all get out of school in mid-June, and at that point we'll do some work on it, make it brewery-ready," McDevitt says. "We looked around for about two months for different places down in Cape May County and found a place that has pretty much everything we need, as far as a new-enough building that we don't have to do that much work to it."

The four plan to brew two to three times a week on a 3-barrel set-up to feed an inventory of sixtels and possibly half kegs. If all their recent outreach to Cape May County bars and restaurants to generate interest leads fortune to smile upon them, they'll look to boost their brewing capacity.

"Once things start to move in the right direction, the next step will be a 10-barrel system," McDevitt says.

The partners have been looking at brewing systems from a couple of fabricators who have become central to the burgeoning nano sector of craft brewing.

"Psycho (Brew) is one of the systems we're looking at. Obviously money is a factor, and that's one of the more affordable systems," McDevitt says. "The other is, we've looked at a system from Premier Stainless, which makes another 3-barrel model and will custom-fabricate a system."

Long-time followers of New Jersey's craft beer scene may remember the planned Tuckahoe Malt Brewing Company, which failed to get off the ground back in the mid-1990s. McDevitt says he and his partners approached the owners of that name about opening a brewpub under that banner, but opted for a nanobrewery instead and formed their business as Tuckahoe Brewing Company.

On their blog site, the four say they intend to launch with four styles: pale ale, wit, porter and another ale or pilsner made exclusively with agricultural products grown in New Jersey.

The pale ale, hopped with Cascade, possibly Centennial, and finished with Mount Hood, will likely be the company's flagship brew, McDevitt says.

"That will be what we start with. It's going to be high production with that," he says. "The plan is, right now, to make two seasonals, like a Belgian wit in the spring-summer and a smoked porter for the fall-winter.

Locally made, locally served is a guiding light for Tuckahoe Brewing's business model. McDevitt believes that's something the buying public is keen on these days.

"This area for the longest time hasn't had any local beers besides Flying Fish (from Cherry Hill), but even that is, a little bit, a ways away," he says. "So hopefully, we can do some good for the Cape May and Atlantic County areas, hopefully get some people excited about drinking some locally made beer."