Semper Fi, Part 2

Here are additional photos from the Tun Tavern and its salute to the US Marines' 233rd birthday. Here's the direct link to Photobucket.

Live Blogging From Tun Tavern: Semper Fi!

9:46 p.m.
Just spoke with Torin Barnes from Beachwood and his friend Kyle Minichino from Pine Beach in Ocean County (both 2004 grads of Toms River High School South). They just got out of the Corps, Torin a a month ago and Kyle a year ago. Torin did two tours in Iraq.

"It's an awesome event (the birthday bash)," says Torin, who was drinking the pumpkin spice lager on the beer list. This was Torin's first-ever trip to the Tun Tavern. His father, an Air Force veteran stationed in Germany, homebrewed, so that's been a guiding force for Torin's beer palate.

Beyond the Marines, Kyle's looking to teach history in high school, and Torin heads to Stockton State College in January, looking to get into medical school after undergrad work.

9:30 p.m.
Menu item: A fighting force travels on its stomach, and what military menu would be complete without chipped beef on toast (shit on a shingle)? It's here along side the Tun's hot wings and other munchies that go great with beer.

8:30 p.m.
Just spoke with Monty, who says the Marine Corps birthday bash is a tradition at the Tun, going back to when he opened it more than 10 years ago. Monty served in the Marines in the 1980s. He says the Tun bash draws Marines from all around the tri-state region and beyond. (One year, a couple of Marines came up from New Orleans area and bought over 250 growlers to take with them. It took a couple of days to fill the jugs.)

The crowd is now singing the Marine Corps Hymn, the third time tonight the pipers and drummers have played the Corps' anthem, ending with a loud collective Ooo-rah!

8:20 p.m.
Mark Haynie, co-author of the New Jersey Breweries book is here. Mark says sales of the book are going pretty good. If you recall, the book came out in August. Mark says he and Lew Bryson, his co-author, plan some more signings soon, possibly next at Cricket Hill Brewing in Fairfield.

Meantime, Mark is hosting a beer night at Somers Point firehouse. Food and beer, and the conviviality that are both.

8:01 p.m.
It's Nov. 10, and it's the United States Marine Corps birthday.

What better way to salute the Corps than to blog from the Tun Tavern, birthplace of the Marines?

As many a military history buff knows, the Marines were formed at the Tun Tavern in Philadelphia in 1775, at a site that's now Penns Landing and where I-95 cuts through. We're at the Tun Tavern in Atlantic City, the brewpub/restaurant started by former Marine Monty Dahm.

The bagpipes have just skirled a welcoming Marine Corps Hymn followed by God Bless America. Brewer Tim Kelly just tapped a pin of cask-conditioned Irish Red Ale. The crowd is cheering and we're drinking and saluting 233 years of Marine Corps heritage.

Birra frontiera

Looks like there's a new zone in Europe for beer pilgrimages.

We've seen the drays and rams when Young's was outside London, know loads of people who beer-tour Belgium, talk to brewers with professional ties to Germany.

But the New York Times has a piece on what may be the next hot ticket for craft beer: Italy.

Happy Halloween

Holy flurcking shnit!!!

Hey homebrewers, do you know your ABC?

Yeah, those state beer police you never thought you had to worry about when you struck a mash in your back yard.

Turns out the State of New Jersey requires a permit to brew at home, 15 bucks. Son of a &%$@$!!! This is something we stumbled across while poking around on the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control’s Web site.

Here's the form in all it's glory, but you can also find online here.

First off, do they enforce this? Thankfully, apparently (or hopefully) not. Haven't read about, nor heard of, anyone getting pinched for it. No one we initially asked today knew about it. And we never, ever had one, nor did the nice folks at the Red Bank homebrew supply shop on Monmouth Street ever say “you need this” when they sold us the starter kit 15 years ago. (For the record, we didn’t call ABC about it. Not going to, either. Beyond this blog post, why alert them to an army of homebrewers defying them?) However, Dan Soboti of the Gaslight brewpub in South Orange, which also has a homebrew supply shop, says the permit has been around for quite some time, but shop owners aren't required to check patrons for them. Dan says they keep copies on hand for patrons to deal with on their own. (For the record, Beercrafters in Turnersville was unaware of it.)

We thought it may have been something new (1/08 – January 2008? – appears in small print below the signature line), but then it seems old. Who except the most Internet/graphically challenged person would create a modern application form using ugly-ass Courier New as a typeface? (FYI: Courier New resembles typewriter fonts, that's old school, baby.)

Secondly, what the f*%k?!?! How is it the State of New Jersey can shake you down to use your kitchen and back yard for the same ingredients as bread, just because you’re adding yeast at a different moment? OK, yeah, you intended to make beer from the get-go when you bought 12 pounds of Maris Otter pale malt and a pound of 40 Lovibond crystal, but still, what the f*%k?!?! In your own home? In this country? In a state with Colonial/Revolutionary heritage, where making beer at home is damned near birthright handed down by Founding Fathers? Richard Stockton and William Paterson are probably rolling over in their graves (assuming anyone in Ben Franklin's orbit automatically tipped a tankard).

Thirdly, it gets worse. Read the permit: The beer you make is for consumption only at the address where you made it. So if enforced, that could mean no giving it to friends, taking it to parties, or son of a &%$@$!!! going to Homebrew Day! (The application even asks if you have any ownership stakes in or employment at a brewery, and requires it be named.)

Consider this a tax (voluntary, if unenforced) on homebrewers (and home winemakers, because guess what, there’s a permit for that, too! Son of a &%$@$!!!). Not to mention an intrusion into your home. Or more cynically, it's a backdoor tactic for knowing who's got booze so the Nanny State can ferret out anyone who has the capacity to serve to minors. But we won't go there.

Enforced or not, it needs to go, be stricken from the books. Everyone knows New Jersey is broke, but hitting homebrewers for an apparently one-time 15 bucks ain’t gonna cover the red ink by any stretch of the imagination. Or fund ABC.

New Jersey's commercial beer regulations are known to be overbearing, business-strangling and otherwise screwed up. But what the f*%k?!?!

In the Bears' den

Some thoughts on the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild festival last Sunday ...

Best thing: The guild did two events this year – a North Jersey festival, at that – instead of the usual single, summertime festival that has essentially found a home over the past three years aboard the battleship/museum USS New Jersey in Camden.

The fall fest’s location, the Newark Bears stadium, proved more than viable: plenty of space, shelter in case of rain, and a boatload of seats in case you wanted to sit for a while.

Tied for best thing: A real ale/cask-conditioned beer station, where the 10 participating Guild breweries could feature live-beer offerings in one stop. This was a worthy addition, a way to break up the monolithic set-up of brewery, brewery, brewery. It’s also a selling point. We hope it carries over to next summer’s festival, then repeated in the fall.

Good thing: The festival had a theme. OK, so it was a no-brainer, Oktoberfest, but themes speak to deeper planning than just setting a date and putting tickets up for sale. Themes add to the marquee (that selling point) and create specialty attractions for festival-goers.

Another good thing: Mass transit to Newark. It was a cinch by train.

Yet another good thing: Great weather. Blue skies, sunny and comfortable. Not hot, not cold. Obviously out of everyone’s hands except Mother Nature’s, but still you couldn’t ask for better fall weather.

Buzzkill: Attendance. It was low by a lot of people’s standards, less than half of what the Guild’s summer festival did. But that shouldn’t be a deal-breaker. We’ll explain why in a minute.

Buzzkill No. 2: Some Guild members, notably Long Valley, Ship Inn and J.J. Bitting, skipped the festival. Long Valley has had some doubts about the bang for the buck, and stayed away from June’s festival, too. We don't dispute their argument, just hope this fall fest can spark a new interest. Meanwhile, this has been a hectic year for the Ship’s brewer, Tim Hall, just too much going on to worry about the festivals (the Ship was likewise absent in June). But it was curious that Bitting passed.

Another buzzkill: Festival held on a Sunday, during football season (and there may not be a simple solution to this, given the brewpubs' schedules and some other issues). During the festival, the Giants-49ers game was on the big, outfield TV screen, but the distance made it look small; plus, you couldn’t see the chyrons of scores from the other games going on. Simpsons moment: “Moe’s Tavern, home of the world’s biggest small-screen TV …” Trivia moment: Bartender Moe Szyslak is modeled in part on Jersey City bartender Red Deutsch of Tube Bar fame.

Bottom line: Have faith and look forward to a 2009 Guild Oktoberfest, thanks to some foundations laid this year.

So yes, we’re saying that even pulling off this festival qualifies it as a success, despite a turnout that could throw a log on the fires of critics wont to point out the gate didn’t do a blockbuster return. The key point is North Jersey is an underserved demographic, when it comes celebrating Jersey-made beers and the Guild getting across that message. It's a circumstance made more puzzling when you consider most of the Jersey craft brewing action happens above Interstate 195. So this is the start of new push to turn things around, find some equillibrium.

The venue is something Dan Soboti of the Gaslight brewpub has chased for a while, for either the summer festival or follow-up second festival. The difficulty, Dan says, has been changes, time and time again, in the front office of the Bears. Whenever he’d get some momentum rolling, one of those changes would send him back to the starting line.

By the by, Dan counts himself among those who saw the turnout as a downer. But, like Greg Zaccardi of High Point Brewing, he concedes the compressed time between getting a final greenlight for the festival (mid-September) and the day of the event left little time to get the word out and build a buzz among beer enthusiasts.

But ask either brewer, and they’ll tell you the location worked well, and the gate can be boosted with sufficient advertising and advance ticket sales at Guild breweries’ open houses and tours. That’s something that wasn’t in the cards this time out.

Speaking of …

• The Gaslight’s Web site has undergone some redesign and should be up and running by the end of the month. The South Orange brewpub has a Halloween party set for next Friday, featuring their pumpkin ale, Prince of Darkness dark mild, Warrior ESB (hopped, of course with Warrior hops), and Abbey Normal Belgian dubbel. Plans are also taking shape for their Victorian Christmas dinner in mid-December.
• High Point’s November open house comes early this year, on the 8th. They’ll be rolling out the ’08 Ramstein Winter Wheat Doppelbock, a big beer with a big following. The Butler brewery’s open houses are held on the second Saturday of the month; hence the heads up about it falling early next month.
• The Tun Tavern’s buffet Oktoberfest ($24.95 per person) is 1-5 p.m. this Sunday at the brewpub in Atlantic City. Brewer Tim Kelly says he just filtered a pumpkin lager that will be served along side his Märzen. The Tun will also have a keg each of Hacker-Pschorr and Paulaner Oktoberfests, thanks to an assist from their beer distributor (remember, AC is a convention town, so the Tun keeps some tap space set aside for mainstream brews). Next month, look for a cask-conditioned Irish Red, dry-hopped with East Kent Goldings. Tim just got a pin, and hopes to make a monthly cask ale feature (like a happy hour).

Off to the next one

The start of a fall classic? Could be.

The Garden State Craft Brewers Guild pours at its inaugural Oktoberfest event today, from the confines of Riverfront Stadium, home of the Atlantic League baseball's Newark Bears.

Not to feed the North Jersey-South Jersey biases, but a lot of people above I-195 are happy to again have a Jersey-brewer festival that's closer to home.

Whatever the case, here's a look at the Guild's summer festival on the battleship.

Hi-ho, Silver!

Congrats to Flying Fish for winning a silver medal in Denver at the Great American Beer Festival over the weekend.

FF placed for their Abbey Dubbel, a brew that a while back won kind words from the late Michael Jackson, the Beer Hunter himself.

Bishop’s Tipple Trippel, from Main Street Brewery in Corona, California, took the gold out of the 53 entries in the Belgian-Style Abbey Ale category.

At 7% ABV, the Dubbel is the biggest beer in FF's year-round lineup. (BigFish, a 10% ABV commemorative barely wine, tops the Dubbel as, indeed, the biggest Fish in the brewery's pond.)

FF's Web site says the Dubbel was first released in January of 1997. We seem to recall its inaugural brew on a Saturday in the fall (October?) of 1996, a brew day that also served as an open house, a couple months or so after beer started flowing for FF.

Folks who popped in at the brewery in Cherry Hill that day got to try their hand at an essential element of the commercial brewing experience – cleanup! The handful of beer aficionados got to help dig out the mash tun, but were rewarded with some samples of FF's Extra Pale Ale and ESB, first two styles under the brewery's belt.

FF's Web site lists demerara sugar as one of the adjuncts in the Dubbel, but we seem to remember Belgian candy sugar at some point (or more like we remember seeing sacks of candy sugar stacked in the brewery.)

Nonetheless, congrats. Next year, gold.

Speaking of MJ, congrats also goes out to Lew Bryson, who was named one of the three Michael Jackson Beer Journalism Award recipients. Lew won for trade and specialty beer media.

The complete winners list can be found here.

Dark beers, new frontiers

We shot up to Lambertville on Saturday for a return visit to River Horse Brewing’s Oktoberfest observance.

But that’s only half the story. The lead is what’s going on with RH. The hippo’s got a new swagger.

Sure, the O-fest was fun, and if you’ve never been to one of RH’s two-day affairs, you should go. Good bands (519 South rocks, no lie), good food, good time. That's Rich Dalrymple (above right) sporting the lederhosen. Rich just returned from a two-year stay in Hamburg, Germany, for work purposes. (He had to skip Oktoberfest in Munich this year, but was there last year.)

Rich gets rock ’n’ roll points for exiting Germany via the Reeperbahn, the city’s happening nightlife district that's also famously remembered as the place where The Beatles honed their chops before going on to wider glory.

Rich says he made one final tour of the Reeperbahn before catching his flight to the States.

But the story here is the beer.

When Glenn Bernabeo and Chris Walsh, two beer enthusiasts from the finance world, took over RH a little more than a year ago, they knew there would be some changes to come under their stewardship. To their credit, Chris and Glenn spent some time getting a feel for the topography before making those changes.

That’s the backstory. What’s new is this: gold medals, dark beers and new frontiers.

For instance, RH’s Double Belgian Wit and Cherry Imperial Amber, the first two installments of RH’s Brewer’s Reserve series (a stout will be the third; more on that in a bit), each won World Beer Championship gold medals. The wit was popular enough to earn a place in RH’s regular beer lineup. The cherry, well, we recommend you try it. Some nice flavors unfold with this beer, and cherry is just one.

But there’s more.

Dunkel Fester, RH’s draft-only dark lager for the autumn, proved so popular that demand outpaced availability (RH did a limited brew of one tank with Fester). Rest assured, that lesson has been taken to heart and Fester will come back in 2009 in bottles, too.

(Fester was in a lot of glasses on Saturday, and one chap we talked to had this to say upon being told of the bottling plans: They better!)

Did we mention there’s more?

Down the road, look for a double IPA, featuring Perle hops. But next month get ready for Brewers Reserve 003, an oatmeal milk stout that we got an advance taste on Saturday. It’s silky smooth from the oats, roasty in a lot of places and sweet in between. The fusion of oats and milk was the brainchild of Jeremy Myers, RH’s assistant brewer since May.

A Penn State grad, Jeremy’s a product of Lambertville, and comes to the brewery by way of Churchville, Pa. When he’s not helping brewers Christian Ryan and Tim Bryan, he’s probably working with his screen printing business, Jump Start, in Philadelphia.

Jeremy’s friends had a hand in RH’s new packaging (photo above): Jon Loudon did the layout on the new variety packs, and Bruno Guerreiro designed that hippo with some attitude.

Wait, there’s even more.

Tried RH’s lager lately? They switched to a Danish yeast and are bottling and kegging the beer unfiltered. It has a biscuity signature and gentle hop smack, quite drinkable at 4-and-change ABV. (The lager and Fester were the beers we had seconds of on Saturday.)

RH ... new swagger and making a splash.

More fests, g'suffa

Oktoberfest has ended in Munich; the 16-day bash in Bavaria wrapped up last Sunday.

Not so on our side of the Atlantic.

Fest beer will be with us for a little longer, and so will the conviviality that’s a hallmark of the celebration. With that in mind, here’s what’s coming up ...

• Long Valley Pub & Brewery holds its Oktoberfest from noon to 5 p.m. this Sunday. Check their Web site for more details.
• Tun Tavern has its O-fest set for Sunday, Oct. 26th.
• And as we’ve noted, River Horse Brewing has its two-day Oktoberfest this Saturday and Sunday at the Lambertville brewery's back lot.

RH has been hitting some high marks with new beer styles it added to its lineup just this year (think Belgian white and a cherry-finessed imperial amber). So by way of advice, RH’s event could be your last chance to grab some Dunkel Fester, a draft-only autumn seasonal that proved to be a huge hit soon after its release a few weeks back. (Co-owner Chris Walsh told us at the Sept. 20th Woodbridge festival that Fester was almost gone, but the brewery was holding some back for this weekend.)

In the Valley
Last year, the legions of Oktoberfest fans put away six barrels of Long Valley brewmaster Joe Saia’s copper-hued fest beer. That’s 186 gallons served up at last year’s annual pig roast in the side parking lot of the pub, housed in a scenic, two-century-old, stonewalled barn located in the Morris County community founded by Saxon immigrants in the 1700s.

Now in its 12th year, the event draws anywhere from 800 to 1,500 people, but there’s plenty of room to accommodate 2,000. If you go, expect a German menu served along with the pork, four other beers to choose from, including a cask-conditioned pale ale, and of course live music. (Parent alert: There’s also activities for kids.)

Joe’s Oktoberfest is actually fermented with an ale yeast, but done at a lower temperature to produce a beer that’s closer to the crispness of lager, with the signatures of the German malts and balanced bitterness of Tettnang and Saaz hops coming through. (FYI: Joe’s got five beers, including his Lazy Jake Porter, in competition at the Great American Beer Festival, which starts tomorrow in Denver. Lazy Jake took home a gold medal three years ago.)

Märzen by the sea
In Atlantic City, Tun Tavern brewer Tim Kelly describes his 2008 Oktoberfest beer, Tunfest Lager, as a slightly smoky brew, with a hearty 6.3% ABV. So what do you pair with a full-bodied beer like that? Try a buffet, a band and a live, remote broadcast by WAYV radio station.

Here’s the Tun’s Oktoberfest menu:

• Cucumber salad with sour cream
• German potato salad
• Sliced weisswurst over red cabbage
• Chicken with potato dumplings
• Meatballs in a mushroom cream sauce with spätzel
• Beer-basted bratwurst with sauerkraut and mustard
• Apple strüdel/cobbler with whipped cream

Check with the Tun for pricing and if reservations are required.

And toast the season.

Bis später.

Party with this Guy

Actually, the party gets the better of Guy. But you’ll still want to be there to see it.

The Ship Inn, the British-themed brewpub in Milford, is now taking reservations for its annual Guy Fawkes Night (35 bucks per person, includes banquet), set for the evening of Wednesday, Nov. 5th.

It’s a night of good food, good ale, mirth and merrymaking. Period costumes are encouraged.

Students of UK history will remember Guy as the guy who was nabbed red-handed in a cellar of Parliament in the early morning of Nov. 5, 1605, a torch in his mitts, about to light the fuse to enough gunpowder to launch the House of Lords into orbit.

As you can imagine, such treason was dealt with harshly. Guy and his co-conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot, if they hadn’t already been run down and dispatched in the name of King James I, met their fates at the hands of the executioner the following January.

In Britain, the foiling of the plot is still celebrated with a bonfire and fireworks (squibs). At the Ship, Guy will get burned in effigy in the parking lot, weather permitting (can’t have a stiff wind blowing hot ashes around), then everyone enjoys a banquet fit for, well, a king.

The Ship’s in the process of securing its permit for the open flame, a minor routine procedure before dealing with the traitor.

Brewer Tim Hall, who's of British lineage and whose family owns the pub, says Guy Fawkes Night has been a tradition at the Ship since 1985, a decade before the brewery was added and the Ship became the first New Jersey brewpub.

Speaking of the brewery, Tim has turned out a brown ale, Broken Silence, that’s a tweak here and there of a past brew called Dark Charger. The update produced a more robust beer at 5.7% ABV.

But the important thing to know is when you buy a pint of Broken Silence, proceeds of the sale go toward fighting ovarian cancer, which Tim’s mom, Ann, died of last summer.

Good beer, good cause.

Oompahs and umlauts

Some scenes from Basil T’s Oktoberfest dinner last Friday in Toms River, a winning combination of food and beer.

Oh, and the Mädchen servers bringing the dinner courses and beer were pretty delectable, too. Good job on the night. Danke schön.

(FYI: The pictures open large, and if you're one of the people who asked for a photo, just pull whatever you want off the page and save them to your drive.)

If this fest celebration gets any bigger, they’ll have to get a big tent and move it to the parking lot, where the Firehouse Polka Band can turn up the heat.

Last year’s crowd of 50-plus doubled this year, and, alas, some forlorn folks learned the event had sold out.

Think next year. Plan early.

The huge jump in turnout – in a troubled economy, no less – tells you a few things: Great beer, great food and a great time don’t take a back seat.


THE RUNDOWN
Credit for Friday’s menu goes to Chef Steve Farley and brewer Dave Hoffmann, who was obviously enjoying a celebration of his deutscher roots:

Light touch
The opening culinary salvo for the crowd's reception: Bavarian shrimp cocktail paired with Barnegat Light, an easy drinking lager.











Side pocket
The night's appetizer: German ravioli – Steve’s translation of Schwäbische Maultaschen – with veal and vegetables, demi-glace and crisp caramelized onions.

Whatever you want to call it, Dave gave it high marks, with a favorable comparison to his mom’s.

Maultaschen goes well, by the way, with Dunkel Hefeweizen. If you know Dave’s wheat beers, you know they skew toward banana aromas, not clove.

This one was a tasty steppingstone toward the night’s featured beer.

Teaming up
Hey, BMW and Rolls Royce have a joint venture, so why can’t you pair the best wurst you can find in New Jersey with an India Pale Ale, the British origins of which beer writer and emcee Kurt Epps traced for the night’s crowd.

The weisswurst, bratwurst and bauernwurst came from Schmalz European Provisions in Springfield (Union County). And of course, no one passes on the chance to riff on the best/wurst line. Just ask Kurt. And that IPA, well if this weren’t Oktoberfest …

Roll out the barrel
After a Munich-style ceremonial tapping of an Austrian oak barrel – the coopering was courtesy of Roger Freitag – the night’s Märzen flowed, a hearty match to the smoked pork loin and spätzel.

(With Dave's heritage, you'd expect nothing less than a topnotch fest beer, and he does not disappoint, with either of his versions that New Jerseyans can get their hands on. His toasty-rich Climax Brewing version, eponymously named Hoffmann Lager Beer Oktoberfest, has been out for a while now. Basil's put the pub's Oktoberfest on tap at the end of last month. Both go quickly, so grab your stein.)

Finishing touch
Black forest cake and a pumpkin porter closed the night. That porter rocks, by the way, and was one of our take-home beers.

Wind-up
Basil’s does Oktoberfest right. So maybe that tent isn’t a bad idea.

Prosit!

ADDENDUM:
Basil's makes The Star-Ledger ... Columnist Paul Mulshine (he's the fellow sitting on the far right in the photo above right) filed this for Tuesday (10/7). Thanks for the mention, Paul.