Tun Tavern homebrewer contest

The Tun Tavern in Atlantic City has details on the homebrewer contest it's sponsoring with The Press of Atlantic City's At The Shore entertainment publication.

The top prize is a chance to scale up your recipe and brew it on the Tun's 10-barrel system under the guidance of brewer Tim Kelly. The finished beer will be served at the Atlantic City beer festival, April 1-2 at the Atlantic City Convention Center. It will also be on tap at the Tun.

If you're interested in entering here's what you need to know:

• Entrants must submit six bottles of their homebrew (or the equivalent of 72 ounces).
• All bottles must be clearly labeled with the homebrewer's contact information (name, phone number and email) and the style of beer.
  
• Entries must be dropped off at the Tun Tavern by Monday, Feb. 7. (The Tun is located in same building as the Sheraton hotel, across from the convention center. The phone number there is 609-347-7800)
• Judging will take place Thursday, Feb. 10.

Meanwhile at Cricket Hill

The brewery says it's turning a homebrew recipe into a 2011 specialty brew (see beernews.org brief here). The Russian imperial stout is the creation of homebrewer Bill Kovach and will become one of the reserve beers the Fairfield brewer releases four times a year in bomber bottles.

Kovach's brew was crowned champ out of 33 entries in a homebrewer contest sponsored by Cricket Hill. His American pale ale also landed him in a three-way tie for second place.

A Russian imperial stout marks a step away from the beer philosophy and business model on which Cricket Hill was founded 10 years ago.

Although it has in the past included a maibock among its seasonal offerings and some whiskey barrel brews, the core of Cricket Hill's lineup has generally been session beers: its East Coast Lager, American Ale and an IPA that trends on the lower side of alcohol content, to name a few.

The brewery has even branded itself as making transition beers for people ready to step away from lighter beers, like Bud and Miller. So an imperial stout – which would be, generally speaking, twice as strong as some of Cricket Hill's year-round brews – could indicate a transition for Cricket Hill itself.

w w w Port 44 Brew Pub dot com

Port 44 Brew Pub in Newark now has a presence in cyberspace.

Folks at the restaurant-brewery, New Jersey's newest beer-maker, put out the word this week that the site was up.

It trumpets what's pouring from the Commerce Street establishment's taps, as wells as offering some background details about those house-brewed ales. That's a standard practice for any brewery's dot-com existence, of course. (The food menu is also on the Web site, another SOP item; the site does have one glitch right now. It's rejecting attempts to sign up with the brewpub's mailing list.)

New on that on-tap lineup is a rather hearty Newark Bay IPA (Amarillo hops, 7.9% ABV). The others you'll recognize as Port 44's flagship brews.

In an interview back in November, Port 44 brewer Chris Sheehan lamented the brewpub was still playing some catchup after opening in the spring without its Web presence having been worked out.

Chris also noted a second point with regard to getting up to full speed: growlers, or a lack there of.

Well, situations resolved: www.port44brewpub.com ... There's a Twitter and Facebook presence to boot. And Port 44 is filling growlers now.

Coffee stout nightcap

Time to close a chapter: This video is from the release party held back in November for the coffee stout brewed at Iron Hill by homebrewers Scott Davi and Jim Carruthers as part of the Maple Shade pub-brewery's Iron Brewer competition.

And in this installment of the saga, we get to the bottom of how Scott and Jim's IH-brewed beer came to be called Luca Brasi, after the outsized thug Don Vito Corleone would dispatch to convince someone the offer on the table was indeed one that couldn't be refused.

Looking beyond this moment, though, pro-am brewing ventures are widening in the craft beer world. Boston Beer and its Samuel Adams brand, of course, sponsor the well-known LongShot homebrewer contest in which two winners at-large nationally plus a company winner see their beers brewed for the annual LongShot six-pack. (Dave Pobutkiewicz of Morris County, at left with Boston Beer's Jim Koch, was a LongShot finalist three years ago.)

The Colorado-based Brewers Association and American Homebrewers Association have been at the pro-am thing going on four years now, tying it to the Great American Beer Festival.

Here in New Jersey, High Point Brewing has sponsored homebrewer competitions with the Office Beer Bar & Grill, with winners producing their scaled-up recipes at the Butler brewery, and the finished product going on tap at Office locations.

River Horse Brewing in Lambertville toyed with the idea of sponsoring a competition a couple of years ago, but opted against it. Meanwhile, the Tun Tavern in Atlantic City has something in the works for a pro-am beer to be served at the Atlantic City Beer Festival next spring. (Last winter, the Tun welcomed an editor from The Press of Atlantic City newspaper to help brew a dunkelweizen that was served at the Celebration of the Suds, as the AC fest is known.)

But in the Garden State, it has been the New Jersey State Fair and Krogh's brewpub in Sparta that are the old hands at homebrewer contests in which the winner brewers on the small, but still pro-level equipment at Krogh's to make a beer for the brewpub's taps. In fact, just such a State Fair championship launched the beer career of Brian Boak, whose Belgian brews and imperial stouts are contract-brewed by High Point.

Hordes of pro brewers got their start as homebrewers (nearly all of Jersey's craft brewers can make that claim). Homebrewer contests celebrate that lineage and make the bond tighter.

Perusing NJ's regulations

Food for thought:

As detailed in the state Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control's handbook, you only have to be 18 years old to buy beer (wine and liquor as well) for the purpose of reselling it.

But you have to wait three more years to legally taste it. Seems out of balance, no?

Exit 13 follow-up

So if Forrest Gump drank this beer, would he say, "Life's like a box of chocolate stout ..."

Anyway, FF folks put word out today that cases of Exit 13 have been hitting their exit, on their way to stores in New Jersey, and should be available soon.

Shout-outs to Dave Kovalchick (loading bottles) and Greg Genovese (loading the boxes) in the video.

Aggregator moment: Graft beer

This item out of Chicago by Crain's is rather interesting.

Maybe it's Star-Ledger + beer = boring

Guess what? Beer and food pairings are boring.

Don't take our word for it, just follow the link and the comments.

Guess the folks at Boston Beer who have championed enjoying food with beer have been wrong all along. Food and beer pairings are boring. Not to mention Garrett Oliver from Brooklyn Brewery, who seems to have wasted a lot of time on The Brewmaster's Table. Alas.

Guess the folks at the Brewers Association have been on a misguided mission for the past three years with SAVOR because food and beer pairings are boring. Ditto for CraftBeer.com. Sigh.

Guess White Dog Foundation and in Philadelphia and Victory Brewing in Downington, Pa., have been barking up the wrong tree with the Brewer's Plate for six years, uniting great regional cuisine with beers made within a 150-mile radius. Beer and food pairings are boring. Zounds! Flying Fish, River Horse, Triumph, Climax, Boaks and Iron Hill must have all got suckered on that one.

Speaking of Iron Hill they must have been led astray, coaching their staff to know about food and beer, and how they complement each other. Damn it all! Food and beer pairings are boring!

OK, enough sarcasm.

Craft beer enthusiasts, and not just the geeks, know food and beer go better together than wine and food, and let's hand it to wine, because it does an admirable job with food. It's just that beer, in its creation, welcomes more ingredients – hops for starters – into the fold than wine, resulting in a more expansive gamut of flavors that fit with more kinds of cuisine than its fermented cousin wine.

Beer and food pairings boring? Hardly. It's very much where beer, namely craft beer, belongs, especially right now, amid an era of wonderful beer choices. Otherwise, we might as well settle for Pringles and a Coors, or Bud and Doritos, instead of crab bisque made with a bourbon reduction complemented by a pint of Climax ESB; pork loin with a dunkel from Triumph; jambalaya with Flying Fish Farmhouse ale.

Yes, Virginia, better beer deserves better food.

Perhaps what the Star-Ledger thinks is, writing about beer and food together is boring, overdone. As if taking the days from Thanksgiving to Christmas and playing beer advent calendar is a fresh peach at the top of the tree, not easy, low-hanging fruit.

But that's not an entirely fair comment, because suggesting beers for the yule season has been done well many times in the past. Just like suggesting great beer for great food.

The fact is, beer and food always fit comfortably side by side, can seamlessly exist in the same breath. Because they can go in the same mouthful.

Sláinte. And bon appétit.

Exit 13: chocolate indulgence

Chocolate stout met glass at Flying Fish today, where the packaging crew at the Cherry Hill brewery began bottling Exit 13, the sixth installment in FF's limited-batch specialty brew series.

The labels that tell you it's a chocolate stout get added next week in the second step of the packaging process. (The lone labeled bottle of 13 at top right was pulling photo-op duty. The beer hits store shelves sometime in December.)

But the beer's chocolate cred is truly in its flavor. And waiting beneath a super-dense head of deep-tan foam is a big, fat chocolate taste that would make hedge fund manager/cocoa market mogul Anthony "Choc Finger" Ward take notice.

Exit 13 was made with 580 pounds of Belgian chocolate, 200 pounds of cocoa nibs and 1,200 Tahitian vanilla beans.

"You can definitely pull that chocolate right out," head brewer Casey Hughes says, after offering a taste of Exit 13 from the brewery's holding tank. "When a lot people think about chocolate, they don't think about the vanilla that's actually in it ... That's why we have vanilla beans in there, to bring out that chocolate flavor."

The folks at Flying Fish planned a total of 150 barrels of the chocolate stout. Today's bottling made a dent in a run of 1,250 cases of the 750 milliliter bottles that have been a signature of the Exit Series.

Chocolate lovers may want to consider the box of 12.

Another look at Newark's Port 44 Brew Pub

Port 44 Brew Pub continues to find its footing with the lineup of house ales it has been producing for three months now.

It can take a little while to find the sweet spot with the newly installed brewhouse, some time to nail down the efficiency of the equipment as far as mashing and hop utilization go.

But brewer Chris Sheehan (pictured at left) says he's getting comfortable with the results of his recipes for Port 44's flagship brews that include a golden ale, red ale, wheat beer and a stout named for New Jersey bootlegger Abner "Longy" Zwillman.

The wheat beer, Siren's Wheat, will help serve as a fundraiser for college scholarships for children of police, fire and EMS personnel. Chris says the inaugural batch had an unintended hop signature that overrode the wheat flavors, so some tweaking is order.

But he says his Goldfinch golden ale and Devil's Red have hit the mark. "I'm locked in on those recipes," he says. (A pomegranate wheat and a winter seasonal strong ale were among his brewing plans earlier this month.)

Port 44 opened back in the spring with guest beers on tap and began turning out house ales in August, figuring in the crowds that hit the nearby Prudential Center for concerts and New Jersey Devils and Nets games into its business model.

A few lingering things remain to get squared away, Chris says, such as setting up a Web site, purchasing an inventory of growler glassware, and acquiring a keg washer so serving tanks won't stay tied up too long by a single beer.

"It's still a work in progress," Chris says.

Chris plans to have the keg washer custom-made with the help of a metal fabricator from the city's Ironbound section. Then the brewpub's stock of 30 Hoff-Stevens kegs can stirred into the mix to get more house brews on tap. (Brews from Cricket Hill and New Jersey Beer Company are two of the guest brews that remain on tap for now.)

"We have eight taps here but I have five serving tanks," he says. "The other three taps I want to fill with my own beer instead of having guest beers."

In the meantime, Port 44's second-floor bar area has been pulling in private parties from the corporate crowd in Newark (Prudential and Verizon, for example), as well as students from Seton Hall law school.

"We've been doing a fair amount of business that way," Chris says.

Exit 13 release set

The next stop in Flying Fish's Exit Series gets bottled on Friday, with a release event set for 7 p.m. Dec. 7 at the Pub on Passyunk East in Philadelphia.

Folks at the Cherry Hill brewery say the release event for the chocolate import/export stout that is Exit 13 (Port Newark-Elizabeth) may be your only chance for a while to sample the beer on draft.

The chocolate stout – the sixth in series of limited-batch brews that kicked off in April 2009, was made with 580 pounds of Belcolade dark chocolate (the port at exit 13 of the New Jersey Turnpike is the ingredient's entry point into the US), then aged with 200 pounds of cocoa nibs and 12 pounds of of vanilla beans.

The exit brews have been a Garden State study for FF head brewer Casey Hughes, who has dug into the back pages of Jersey to research ingredients for the brews.

With Exit 1, a stout released a year ago that used Delaware bay oysters, the brewery messages on the bottle labels took on a somewhat historical tone regarding the regions the brews represented, and in turn offered craft beer enthusiasts an engaging glimpse into New Jersey culture.

But Casey thinks he's the one with the leg up on Jersey lore.

"I'm learning the most from this, because I probably know more about Jersey exits than anybody now. I can go up the highway and say, 'This happened at this exit, this happened at this exit ...' from just researching all the stuff."

Another shot of caffeine & NJ proposed ban

As forecast, federal regulators threw a flag on caffeine added to alcoholic beverages, taking aim at concoctions like Four Loko and Joose that feature a sort of Jekyll-Hyde combination of ethyl alcohol (12% ABV) and caffeine jolt (three cups of joe).

The Food and Drug Administration warned the makers of those beverages, in addition to Massachusetts-based New Century Brewing and its Moonshot beer (4% ABV and 69 milligrams of caffeine), that caffeine is an unsafe additive in their beverages and their beverages are being marketed contrary to federal regulations. The upshot: they risk seizure of their products and a halt to production.

But it gets doubly worse for the beer industry's Rhonda Kallman, founder of New Century (and a figure known for helping launch and establish Boston Beer and the Samuel Adams brand): the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is frowning harder on caffeine in alcoholic beverages than the US Food and Drug Administration is in its warning of last week. Her company apparently could end up getting knocked out of business. (Moonshot's Web site was inaccessible on Sunday.)

Here in New Jersey, there are bills in the state Legislature that would ban the sale of caffeinated alcoholic beverages, including beer (keep reading).

The two bills – an Assembly version and identical Senate version – were introduced by Assembly members Valerie Huttle and Ralph Caputo, and Senator Kevin O'Toole, toward the end of October. The Assembly version has been referred to that chamber's Consumer Affairs Committee.

The legislation casts a wide net and lumps in beer, while defining a caffeinated alcoholic beverage as "any prepackaged alcoholic beverage that has been supplemented by the manufacturer with caffeine or other stimulant that is metabolized by the body as caffeine."

What's not indisputably clear (think lawyers arguing fine points) in that wording is whether brewing with coffee, chocolate or other caffeine-bearing ingredients could amount to supplementing the beverage. Logic – and craft brewing practices, for that matter – would tell you no. So would the FDA.

But it's not specifically spelled out.

That's a reason the Colorado-based Brewers Association, the craft beer industry trade group, has asked federal regulators for some clarification (and rule-making), since states can pretty much make whatever rules that want to control alcoholic beverages manufactured and sold within their borders. While the FDA wags a finger, states can slam doors closed.

As we know, craft brewers sometimes use ingredients like coffee and chocolate – and their signature flavors – to shape the flavor profile of a beer, unlike Kallman's Moonshot. (Kallman conceived of the addition of caffeine as a boost.)

Jersey brewers are taking the view that any caffeine that winds up in a coffee porter or chocolate stout is an incidental byproduct of the brewing process, not a direct addition of caffeine to the beer.

And that's backed up by the FDA, which said its warning wasn't directed at those alcoholic beverages that only contain caffeine as a natural constituent of one or more of their ingredients, such as a coffee, but rather malt beverages to which caffeine has been added as a separate ingredient.

Still, for craft beer enthusiasts, it could be worth writing the sponsors of the New Jersey legislation (A3437, S2423), asking for delineation (assuming this measure picks up speed) and that the state not take bona fide ingredients away from Garden State brewers.

Valerie Huttle:
1 Engle St.
Suite 108
Englewood, NJ 07631
(201) 541-1118

545 Cedar Lane
Teaneck, NJ 07666
(201) 928-0100

Ralph Caputo
148-152 Franklin St.
Belleville, NJ 07109
(973) 450-0484

Kevin O'Toole
155 Route 46 West
Suite 108
Wayne, NJ 07470
(973) 237-1360

The buzz about caffeine in booze

US Senator Chuck Schumer, an opponent of caffeine in beverages containing ethyl alcohol, says on his Web site that federal regulators (the Food and Drug Administration) plan to declare caffeine an unsafe food additive to those beverages.

What's stuck in the New York Democrat's craw? Alcohol and caffeinated energy drinks like Four Loko and Joose. His Web post of today cites students getting into trouble (specifically, passing out and having to be hospitalized) after consuming Four Loko, and other concerns about alcohol abuse.

Schumer contends such beverages are jacked up with about half a pot of coffee and almost half a six-pack's worth of beer per serving (which is a big, fat can – 23 ounces), and are therefore unsafe. Meanwhile, Four Loko's maker says it will yank caffeine from the drink.

But that leads to this: The Brewers Association announced today that it will ask the federal Tax and Trade Bureau, the folks who have a say in approving beers that end up on the US market, to "conduct rulemaking on alcoholic energy drinks." (The BA's news release can be found here.)

Seeking to safeguard the use of coffee and chocolate in beer (think coffee porters and chocolate stouts etc.), the Brewers Association is petitioning the TTB to put the hammer down on synthetic and pure caffeine as an additive to alcoholic beverages (wonder if this could ground Moonshot, although that brew adds natural caffeine) while keeping coffee, chocolate, herbs, tea, spices and other caffeinated ingredients as options on the shelf for creative brewers.

The Brewers Association points out that many states are already walking point on this topic, and can easily do so because after Prohibition, they were granted wide latitude to regulate alcoholic beverages on their own. The result across the country is the familiar quilt of differing rules, and in this case, a developing patchwork of different rule-phrasing that pretty much adds up to saying the same thing.

The Colorado-based BA would rather see everyone on the same page and a consistent standard crafted that "would remove the products of concern from shelves without creating unintended damage to the hundreds of craft brewers."

Says Brewers Association President Charlie Papazian: "Responsible brewers have successfully used coffee, chocolate and tea to add interesting flavor and complexity to their beers for decades. In fact, the Aztecs brewed a corn, honey and chili-based beer that contained cocoa. Many craft brewers build on these traditions today using coffee, tea and chocolate. On the other hand, the addition of artificial caffeine not from a natural ingredient source has no heritage or tradition in brewing. We support a ban on the direct addition of caffeine."

How does it affect New Jersey brewers? Well, Jersey brewers have and still do brew with coffee and chocolate.

Consider this: Basil T's in Red Bank took home gold and bronze medals from the Great American Beer Festival for using coffee in a stout; Iron Hill in Maple Shade just this month released a coffee stout; and Flying Fish, which brought porter back to its flight of brews as a seasonal using espresso coffee, plans to release a Belgian chocolate stout in December as the next installment in its Exit Series.

And that's just an off-the-top accounting of such brews in the Garden State. There are certainly others.

Ultimately, it would be folly and unfair if the FDA painted in too broad of strokes and took bona fide ingredients, like coffee, out of brewers' hands because it was aiming at something else.

Man-up, Miller Lite, lose this ad campaign

On the heels of their preposterous triple-hopped campaign (can't even taste the hops, so why boast?), the vortex bottle that reminds you the beer, too, sucks just like a vortex, Miller Lite (tastes plain, less thrilling) imbues you to man-up and drink light beer.

It doesn't add up to man-up and pick up something that has no flavor. More like dumbing down.

And for the record, good beer isn't at all about machismo, and life's too short to short yourself on flavor.

Tun Tavern's Marine Corps birthday salute

If you've been inside the Tun Tavern for even half a second, then you know the Atlantic City brewpub's decor is US Marine Corps.

It's hard to miss the scarlet and gold Corps flag on the wall, life-size jarhead statue just off the bar and the World War II-era images on the doors to the head, among loads of other memorabilia.

But more to the point: If you know US military history, then you know the brewpub borrows its name from the Philadelphia tavern where the Marine Corps was founded in 1775, seven months after the skirmish that was the opening volley of the American Revolution.

Every Nov. 10th, Tun owner Monty Dahm, a former Marine, throws a birthday party for the Corps at his brewery-restaurant in the shadow of Atlantic City's convention center. (This year will be the brewpub's 13th tribute.) It's a generally well-attended affair, and attracts current and former Marines from far and wide.

(Incidentally, Nov. 10th is also famous as the date the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior in a storm in 1975. The doomed freighter is honored with a Cleveland-brewed porter that bears its name.)

Brewer Tim Kelly usually has something on cask for the night, in addition to the Tun's flagship brews, like Devil Dog Pale Ale and Leatherneck Stout.

Semper Fi.

Luca Brasi sips with the fishes

The buzz could be caffeine, but probably not.

It' s more like the buzz is all about the coffee stout that will go on tap at Iron Hill on Tuesday (Nov. 9).

As the first champs of Iron Hill Maple Shade's Iron Brewer homebrew competition, Jim Carruthers and Scott Davi brewed the stout, named Luca Brasi (à la Godfather Don Corleone's enforcer), about a month ago at the brewpub under the supervision of IH head brewer Chris LaPierre.

The stout was just given a jolt of whole dark roast coffee beans in the serving tank on Wednesday, and some cold press dark roast coffee gets added on Friday.

In the video, Chris explains the origins of the Iron Brewer contest (2010 was the first year for the Maple Shade location), which is a byproduct of that big, big beer IH makes, the Situation.

It's a pretty good situation to find yourself in, so look for it to come back around next year; the competition, too.

Remember, remember the 5th of November

A look at Guy Fawkes Night at the Ship Inn in Milford, New Jersey's British-themed brewpub.

This video was shot at the Ship's Nov. 5, 2008, observance of the annual holiday that finds Britons celebrating the failed plot to blow up Parliament with three dozen kegs of gunpowder, take down King James I and spark a revolt.

This project sat on the shelf for a couple years, in hopes of finding a New Jersey university professor or some other individual versed in the Gunpowder Plot and England's tug of war between its Catholic subjects and Protestant crown.

Alas, these days it's become a little difficult to find someone who studies European history, and British history in particular.

This year, the Ship Inn marks the Guy Fawkes event tonight, Nov. 3rd. The brewpub is still taking reservations for the dinner, which costs $40 and includes a free pint of beer. If you're not into the dinner, you can still enjoy a pint or two at the bar.

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.

Jersey beers in Europe

Jersey brewers get a European audience.

Climax, Cricket Hill and High Point sent beer to the three-day Mondial de la Biere, held this past weekend in Strasbourg, France.

The Jersey brews were part of the event's American beer tent, which included a sampling of craft beers from across the US (Troegs, Weyerbacher, Allagash, Sierra Nevada, Left Hand, Smuttynose, Boston Beer and Blue Point, to name a few).

Roselle Park-based Climax sent its Hoffmann Oktoberfest and its IPA, while Cricket Hill ponied up its Colonel Blides ale as part of its flight of brews.

"We sent over the Colonel because that's a really an English-style beer. We figured Europe, English style ... it works out even though the French and English don't get along. We sent over the East Coast Lager; we sent over the American Ale," says Cricket Hill founder Rick Reed. (Mondial's Web site lists the CH beers as the Fairfield brewery's summer ale, IPA and fall seasonal.)

It was a repeat appearance for High Point, which sent its Ramstein Classic dunkelweizen to the event. Last year, Butler-based High Point sent its Classic and Blonde wheat beers.

Found on Facebook

A pumpkin done up as River Horse Brewing's Hipp-0-Lantern.

Oktoberfest glances

Scenes from the Oktoberfest dinner at Artisan's brewpub in Toms River and the brewery-backlot soiree put on each fall at River Horse Brewing in Lambertville. (Footage was shot on Flip camera, which doesn't seem to do too well in low light.)

That's Kurt Hoffmann, father of Artisan brewer Dave Hoffmann, cutting a rug, and River Horse brewer Chris Rakow playing guitar.

One bit of news out of River Horse: plans call for the fall seasonal Hipp-O-Lantern Imperial Pumpkin Ale, out this first year as a Brewer's Reserve, to be back next year under its own dedicated packaging. River Horse has launched at least a couple of beers this way, its Double Wit and Hop-a-lot-amus Double IPA come to mind.