The legislation to modernize New Jersey's regulations for its craft beer industry has picked up another sponsor.
Assemblywoman Joan Quigley, a Democrat from Hudson County, is the latest lawmaker to get behind A3969, which with companion bill S2870, would give the state's craft brewers some business freedoms already enjoyed by Garden State wine-makers and craft brewers from surrounding states.
Quigley, who serves the state's 32nd legislative district, counts among her constituents production brewer New Jersey Beer Company, which is located in North Bergen.
With the process of making laws, there's strength in numbers – the more sponsors, the greater the chance bills will be posted for floor votes in each legislative chamber, and the better their prospects for passage. Quigley is the fourth assembly member to sign on, joining Craig Coughlin, Jon Bramnick and Patrick Diegnan Jr. The Senate version right now has two sponsors: Tom Kean Jr. and Donald Norcross.
To recap, the legislation would:
Remove the arbitrary two-brewpub limit per owner. For instance, say you already own the Ship Inn; you can open one more brewpub and that's it. No matter how savvy of a business person you are or how many jobs you pledge to create, or how much you vow to buy from local suppliers, you max out at two. How many other businesses can you think of that the state limits you to a mere two locations?
Allow small breweries to sell beer directly to consumers from their brewery locations. (Right now, breweries can sell two six-packs or two growlers, that's it.)
Allow small brewers to sell their product at 10 locations across the state directly to consumers. This relates to BYOB restaurants. Wineries already have this privilege, and it hasn't hurt bars or packaged goods stores (the former can always put the beer on tap or stock the bottles; the latter can probably price competitively.)
Allow small breweries and brew pubs to offer samples to consumers both at their breweries or off-site, such as at charity events and festivals.
Allow brewpubs to sell their beer at other bars and restaurants that they own but do not have a brewery on-site, yet have a retail consumption license.
Allow brewpubs to sell their beer off premise, through distributors, in the same manner as production breweries. Imagine going to Canal's and finding your favorite Bittings, Gaslight or Tun Tavern brew on the shelf, or laying hands on an Iron Hill brew at a store in North Jersey. If you need a clear example for this, think of Pennsylvania's Sly Fox, which has brewery-restaurants and also does production brewing. Think Sly Fox again, because a diversified revenue stream (as opposed to relying on just foot traffic into the establishment for your revenue, like Garden State brewpubs have to) makes for a healthy company. Which is why Sly Fox just announced plans to triple their production capacity (yeah, it means shutting the Royersford restaurant-brewery, but they'll be opening a bigger production brewery.)
Increase the amount of craft beer that both production breweries and brewpubs could produce annually.
It's beginning to look like a stretch run at Kane Brewing in Monmouth County.
Floor work is finished, and the brewhouse, fermenters, and bright tanks that arrived months ago have been set in place.
Founder Michael Kane expects electrical and plumbing work to be largely finished this week, setting the stage for necessary local inspections and final inspection by the state. The current forecast is for brewing by the end of June (barring any hitches with inspections).
Since late March, when he arrived in Ocean Township to take the job as head brewer at Kane, Clay Brackley has been conducting pilot brews (among other tasks), testing both malts (brands and varieties) and yeast strains, resolving some quality preferences that will be crucial to Kane's inaugural batches of beer (think American IPA) and beyond.
Clay, a Nevada native who homebrewed while he studied forestry in college, came to Kane via a somewhat circuitous path: Nevada (BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse chain), Alaska (head brewer at Sleeping Lady brewpub in Anchorage) and Pennsylvania (Victory Brewing).
Michael describes Clay's fit, aside from his obvious brewing experience, as something of a shared vision, an understanding of what Kane Brewing should be in New Jersey's craft beer market.
"We were trying to find someone who would fit in well with what we wanted to do ... someone who had the same interest in the style of beer we're going to be making and seemed to really enjoy brewing beer and was really into the craft beer scene and had the energy we're looking for," Michael says.
For his part, Clay says his time in Nevada taught him the nuts and bolts of large-scale beer-making, instilling in him what makes for best practices in a brewery. Alaska, rich in beer culture and ironically a place where you could get craft and import brands unavailable in Reno, was where he began hitting his stride as a brewer. (It also landed him in the winner's circle of the Great Alaska Beer & Barley Wine Festival.) Pennsylvania was a brief layover in his return to the lower 48, and Victory Brewing in Downingtown, Pa., imparted some important lessons from an automated brewery. But at the same time, Clay notes, it separated him from that certain intimacy with the product that a craft brewer experiences.
Clay, who just turned 30 last week, recently took some time to chat and talk about his brewing experiences and his path to New Jersey.
BSL: What got you into brewing? CB: I started to make beer in college to save money. I liked craft beer from the beginning. When I was younger, I remember tasting my dad's Coors Light or Budweiser and I thought it was terrible. I thought all beer was bad until I got a taste of some Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, some hoppier beers and some English beers.
I liked them, but it's really hard to afford $8.99 or $6.99, $7.99 a six-pack when you're in college and just scraping by. I found out you could spend like 22 bucks on ingredients and make five gallons of beer. Sure, it takes time and effort. I thought it was fun at the time and started doing it and got the brewing bug. It's like people who love to cook. You learn how to do something, you love to do it and you keep doing it.
BSL: And then, perhaps, on grander scales. CB: I never really thought I would ever be a professional brewer. When I was in college (University of Nevada, Reno) I went for forest and range management. I just thought this is a dream job, this is something that would never happen ... I never knew how I could get into it. I'd even talked to some of the brewpubs, and their brewers had been there for years, and they weren't going anywhere. So I was like, 'I can't work there, that guy's not quitting.'
BSL: But you did get in the door, at BJ's. Talk a little about that first paid gig at a commercial brewery. How did you land the job? CB: They had a little hiring thing when they first opening the BJs, it was mostly for restaurant people. I went to the restaurant hiring lady, I said, 'Look, I already have a job, I don't need a job ... I really love making beer, I want to learn more about making beer. I want to volunteer to work for the brewery, who do I talk to?' She got me in contact with (brewmaster) Dan Pederson.
At the time I was making pretty decent money; I was actually in the restaurant industry as a sous chef. It was a good job because I didn't have to work a lot of hours. I made good money and it worked well with my class schedule. (Dan) was offering me a Monday through Friday, 40-hour job, which was actually a pay cut at the end of the month when I looked at it. I was like, 'This is going to be a struggle,' but I thought it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up.
About three years into it, I moved from just basically a grunt assistant not really knowing what was going on, to actually running the brewhouse, just like the brewmaster. They were so busy dealing with the paperwork and the corporate stuff – logistics of getting certain beers to certain markets and the taxes. I was just basically doing what they told me to do on the brewhouse.
BSL: What was their capacity? CB: We did around 27,000 barrels a year. They kept growing and growing. The facility was a 50-barrel brewhouse, 100-barrel fermenters. It was all draft-only, so there was quick turnaround.
BSL: What were some of the beers? CB:Piranha Pale Ale ... the Brewhouse Blonde was a kölsch. We did Jeremiah Red, which was a high-gravity Scottish/red ale. Tatonka Stout, which is an imperial stout, and then we did some seasonals; we did a hefeweizen ...
BSL: At what point did you get to Alaska? CB: I was working there (at BJ's), and I had the experience, but the pay scale didn't go up unless you went and became a brewmaster, and there was no opportunity within that company to advance ... I really got tired of scraping by. You can only survive on $9.50 an hour for so long before you're like, 'Why did I go to school?' And student loans were coming due. I was like, 'If I'm going to do this brewing thing, I gotta do it, I can't just stay here. I would have to quit and get another job.' ... So I started looking on ProBrewer.com and saw an opportunity up in Alaska for a head brewer. They offered me a lot better money, also the ability to have creative control, to make a bunch of beer and see what I could do on my own. I just went up there and took over.
BSL: This was a brewpub, right? CB: Sleeping Lady Brewing Company was the brewery, and the brewpub was called Snow Goose Restaurant (in Anchorage). It's kind of a remote area in Alaska. So they just took homebrewers that had experience. It's not like you can just tap into the local brewing community and find somebody from another state. They were kinda just picking with what they had; so basically they had homebrewers – smart dudes that made good beer – but they really weren't trained on how to operate the systems properly.
BSL: What challenges were you faced with working at a new place? CB: When I started, I didn't have any training from the previous brewer. I basically started and three days later I was brewing. I saw a lot of things that were kind of jury-rigged, kind of just put together without someone who'd seen it done by professionals before.
For instance, dry-hopping. Normally, at a large production brewery you would dry-hop in your conical fermenter because the cone allows a lot of the hops to drop out, and then you can transfer off of that. They had dry-hopped in a serving tank without a standpipe. They basically took large bags of hops and threw them in the bright tank. This was actually hooked up on their draft lines to send up to the restaurant. I looked at the draft line one day and it was empty – and there's supposed to be 3 or 4 barrels of beer in this tank. One of the big balls of hops had rolled in front of the bottom of the tank and clogged it. There was beer in there that couldn't get out. So I had to open it up, and there was all this beer I had to dump and all these bags of hops I had to throw out. That was just one instance. There were all kinds of things. That's what I did up in Alaska – I just applied the stuff I had learned at BJ's to this brewpub.
BSL: So you tightened up their practices, put them on a better footing as far as brewery management went? CB: Yeah, I got some decent paperwork going on, started doing (yeast) cell counts on all our beers, got a clean fermenting yeast, we were pitching with the right amount of oxygen, we were keeping everything clean. I don't even know how they sanitized their loop from the heat exchanger to the fermenters. When I got there, I had to rig up some stuff to make it happen until I bought hoses that allowed me to create this loop so you could recirculate hot liquor from the heat exchanger all the way back to the hot liquor tank, so the whole loop is 180 degrees and 100 percent sanitary.
BSL: The kinds of beers that you were making there, what were they? CB: We had 15 draft lines and seven of those were the standard beers. We had the Gold Rush Golden Ale, which was not even like a kölsch. I considered it like an American golden ale, but very light and dry. Then we had Urban Wilderness Pale Ale, Fish On IPA, Portage Porter, John Henry Oatmeal Stout, Forty-Niner Amber Ale and Old Gander Barleywine.
The other handles I could put on anything that I wanted to. The owner was really, really cool. He just let me brew whatever I wanted to. He was a banker, he made a lot of money, he wanted to have a brewery and he loved beer. His only requirement was anything that I put on, he could randomly show up at any time and he had better like it. Otherwise he was gonna come straight to my office. I made sure I wasn't going nuts, that I wasn't doing anything super-crazy. But I did a lot of fun stuff that was unique and different.
BSL: Such as? CB: I made a pumpkin beer with real pumpkins. I actually bought sugar pie pumpkins, had to get there at like 4 in the morning to roast ... We brewed an ale with real squash and pumpkin, not just canned pumpkin.
We started a barrel-aging program (with both bourbon and wine barrels) ... I started experimenting with sour beers, but we weren't a packaging brewery so I really wasn't going to put sour beers through my draft lines. So I made only a couple of experimental batches that we were eventually going to hand-bottle just to have, maybe put it in a firkin.
BSL: What was the beer festival scene like up in Alaska, in Anchorage. Can you share your experiences with that? CB: They don't have a lot of brew festivals in Anchorage. The biggest one of the year is the Great Alaska Beer & Barley Wine Festival. It's held in January, so it's freezing cold outside. It's a perfect time for barleywine, and it's been a thing they've been doing up in Alaska for a long time. Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Barleywine won in '97. A lot of guys have won in that barleywine competition. It's a very well-run competition, as well as a beer festival.
BSL: This is the 2008 competition you entered, right? Going into it, what did you think of your chances? CB: I knew I had a really good barleywine. I brewed two different barelywines; all of it I just threw down into the barrels.
As soon as I got started and I had time to brew, I brewed barleywine and started it on my Jack Daniel's barrels. I had the barrels, and I knew it was going to take a long time for this beer to be ready. So I had some stuff to play with. And we didn't just take everything out of every barrel and put it in the tank. I took a couple select barrels, we blended those together, and some of the rest of the beer we continued to let rest. And that was our blend. That was our Old Gander Barleywine. It was a little bit unique because of the fact that it had multiple recipes, also differences from the different barrels – the same recipe in two different barrels might be very different. Some more vanilla, some toastier, some a lot more bourbon. We picked them all so it wasn't like over-the-top whiskey taste; one of them was actually a little hoppier, whereas the other one was sweeter. Blending all those beers together I think made a real big difference, and we came out with the first medal that brewery ever won. We got second place overall and we got best of show, or Best in Alaska.
BSL: What were some of the beers you beat? CB: There was Deschuttes Jubelale ... there was Bigfoot Barleywine, Dogfish Head's Olde School Barleywine, all the Alaska barleywines from Midnight Sun's Arctic Devil to Alaskan Brewing Company's barleywine ... It's a huge, huge, huge haul. Pretty much everyone that has a barleywine gets entered in the competition. There's maybe 50 barleywines that get entered.
BSL: Talk a little about your decision to return to the lower 48 after being in Alaska. CB: It was fun, and I really liked it up there but the seasonal aspect was getting too much for me. I wanted to be in a place that I was going to want to live for the rest of my life ... I stuck it out, I liked Alaska, but I didn't think it was a place I wanted to spend the rest of my life. So I just kinda looked for a better opportunity, and tried out with Victory for a little bit ...
BSL: And you landed with a start-up beer-maker, Kane Brewing, where you're, once again, the hand that shapes the flavor. CB: The creative control, I didn't think I would miss it, but I did miss it.
Come Sunday, Krogh's will play host to a first-anniversary soiree for the Final Gravity podcast, a homebrewing and craft beer discussion that the Sussex County brewpub sponsors.
The event runs from about noon to 5 p.m., with Final Gravity's host Jayn Cummings anchoring the live, 90-minute podcast from the Tudor-style establishment's taproom; a homebrewing demonstration will be conducted outside on Krogh's patio by members of NJHOPZ, the homebrew club affiliated with Final Gravity.
There will also be a brewer from Krogh's on hand, and an invitation has been extened to one of the crew from River Horse Brewing in Lambertville to come up to Sparta and talk about beer.
Drawing some influence from the Brewing Network out of California, Final Gravity got rolling after Jay decided to put back into service the idled recording studio in the basement of his Belvidere home in Warren County.
"We thought it was kind of a no-brainer. We love talking about beer, so why not share our passion with other homebrewers?" he says.
The show is sometimes irreverent, sometimes bawdy, but always about beer: tasty craft brews that come into the region and homebrews that are of the crews' creation.
Now in its 12th year as a brewpub, Krogh's, as a bar, dates back to the late 1930s. As part of the New Jersey craft beer scene, the brewpub annually turns over its brewhouse to the winner of the State Fair homebrew competition, scaling up the victor's recipe for brewing on the pub's 5-barrel DME system and putting the finished beer on tap.
Jay says Krogh's owner Bob Fuchs is a big supporter of homebrewing.
"Bob is a great guy to work with," Jason says. "He's totally enthused about homebrewing and the ideas we've come up with and presented to him ... he's very enthusiastic about craft beer in general."
The state's Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control, the agency that now regulates both commercial and amateur brewers by way of licensing and permits, can only tell you that it granted permission to 386 homebrewers in 2010.
But the American Homebrewers Association, the Colorado-based organization that promotes homebrewing and watches those brewers' backs as far as trends and regulations go, says its paid membership from New Jersey likely tops the number of homebrewing permits issued last year by the state.
In fact, those 386 permits from last year are the most New Jersey has issued in the past six years, with the lion's share of them going to patrons of brew-on-premise establishments. You have to go back to 2007, when 359 homebrewer permits were granted, to find a similar peak within that time period.
Why are there more homebrewers than the state can account for? Probably because most people who jump into homebrewing in the Garden State don't know they're supposed to get a permit in the first place. Homebrew supply shops aren't obligated to play cop and enforce the permit rule, and many shop owners say that if they did, they'd lose more customers to Internet sales.
So it's a good thing that there's a bill in the Legislature, A4012, that proposes dumping the 20-year-old permit requirement, plus its restrictions against making or serving homebrewed beer anywhere except the address put down on the permit application, not to mention the provision that allows the ABC to carry out spot checks on permit-holders to ensure compliance.
There's also the matter of the permit's cost – 15 bucks. "The money that they charged to get that, administratively, I can't imagine that it was cost-effective," says JoEllen Ford, owner of The Brewer's Apprentice, a brew-on-premise and homebrew supply shop in Freehold. "What were they hoping to accomplish? I don't understand what the objective was to begin with, what were they trying to stop or prevent."
To many, the introduction last month of A4012 was indeed welcome news. However, the AHA notes a caveat about just tossing the permit regulation. The way the bill sponsored by Middlesex County Assemblyman Craig Coughlin is written, the AHA says, it appears to just rely on the federal legalization for homebrewing. That is to say, you can legally brew up to 200 gallons per adult per household per year.
The federal standard may seem safe, but the AHA says it doesn't leave on New Jersey's books some stipualtion that homebrewing is a legal practice and that the product of homebrewers' efforts will not be taxed. The AHA recommends that states expressly say homebrewing is legal and not subject to taxation. (Coughlin did not respond to several messages left with his office seeking comment on his bill. His district, by the way, is ground zero to the WHALES homebrew club of Woodbridge.)
Homebrewing, once the province of Prohibition-era drinkers thirsty for a beer, was legalized by the federal government in 1978. New Jersey followed suit 13 years later. Exactly why the state decided that Garden State homebrewers would also need a permit each year to strike a mash in their garage has sort of been lost to the mists of time.
But Joe Bair, owner of Princeton Homebrew (along Route 29 in Trenton), says the permit ended up being included in the state's codification of backyard beer-making because of some tradeoffs between homebrewing proponents, notably the late Ed Busch, a former member of the AHA governing committee, and the Legislature.
At the time, there was considerable opposition from restaurant and bar groups concerning craft brewing and homebrewing.
"He (Busch) had to sign off on all this ridiculous stuff," Joe says. "In order for him to get the thing passed, he had to eat that. At the time, he was a member of the AHA governors, and one by one, all the states were making homebrew legal. He didn't want to delay it anymore, he wanted results, so he compromised on that.
"He had to do whatever it took, and the result is he passed the law. That's not to say it's the law he wanted to get passed," Joe says.
Philly Beer Week kicks off tonight with an opening-tap shindig at the Independence Visitors Center.
For folks in South Jersey, and even for beer fans north of I-195, PBW is a big attraction. Be that as it may, let's still think there's no place like home.
Yes, it's at the Camden waterfront, aboard the USS New Jersey battleship museum again, and, yes, that has been a thorn for some North Jersey beer drinkers. (We've always supported the idea of having two festivals – spring/summer and fall, one in South Jersey, the other in North Jersey).
But there is something in the air this year that makes showing support for the home-state brewers all the more important: legislation in Trenton to level the playing field for New Jersey brewers and modernize the rules under which they make and sell beer.
Senate bill S2870, and its Assembly counterpart, A3969, would put the state's 15-year-old craft beer industry on par with that of Delaware, New York and Pennsylvania, not to mention pretty much the rest of the country.
Imagine being able to buy your favorite beer from your favorite brewpub at a Canal's, Liquor Outlet or Total Wine. Imagine a BYOB restaurant selling you a six-pack of your favorite locally made beer, instead of you having to bring it in tow.
That's some of what the legislation would allow. (The Assembly version, by the way, has picked up two new sponsors: Jon M. Bramnick, a Republican from Westfield, and Patrick J. Diegnan Jr., a Democrat from South Plainfield.)
So let this video of last year's Garden State Craft Brewers festival, together with this year's upcoming festival, be a rallying point and a reminder that change is in the air.
New Jersey homebrewers found the winners circle for a second-straight year in the American Homebrewers Association's video contest, but a crew from Oregon took the prize for capturing what National Homebrew Day is all about.
On Thursday, the AHA announced this year's winners of the annual contest staged in conjunction with Big Brew, held every first Saturday in May.
Portland, Oregon's FH Steinbart won the Spirit of Big Brew Award, while the Barley Legal Homebrewers club, teamed with Beer-Stained Letter, won for the video that drew the most views during the 10-day judging period.
This year, apparently, the AHA has done away with the second-place finish that it had awarded over the past three contest years.
Rounding out the field for 2011: Philadelphia's ALEiens picked up an honorable mention, as did California's Humboldt Homebrewers, who, for a while, gave the Barley Legal brewers a strong run for their money in the most-watched category.
Last year, the WHALES homebrew crew from Woodbridge won the most-watched award, while Barley Legal and BSL came in second place. (BSL won the Spirit of Big Brew Award in 2008, the first year of the contest.) The Society of Oshkosh Brewers won the 2010 Spirit of Big Brew Award.
Congrats to FH Steinbart, ALEiens, Humboldt Hombrewers, and of course, to the Barley Legal clan.
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."
Oh what rapture it would be to spend this Saturday in Southern California.
Specifically San Marcos, where the folks at The Lost Abbey, makers of some big, tasty Belgian-style beers, plan to throw a swinging End of Days party, complete with space for saints, sinners, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse and avenging angels.
"It's the end of Craft Beer Week and the world as we know it at the same time," says Sage Osterfeld, one of those Lost Abbey folks. "Can you think of a better way to go, after you've just had a great beer?"
If you haven't heard – if you've been spending more time re-pinting than repenting – for quite some time a Christian radio evangelist has been preaching that May 21, 2011, is Judgment Day – the Rapture, Jesus' return and the run-up to the annihilation of the Earth that's supposed to happen five months later. (Better get your winter seasonals brewed now.)
"It's been Judgment Day here for five years," says Osterfeld.
Known for taking an ale-infused satirical turn on religion (Devotion, Inferno Ale), Lost Abbey, part of Port Brewing, just marked its fifth anniversary, and incidentally, is looking to expand into the New Jersey market, beyond Belgian brew-loving Philadelphia, this fall.
Unless, of course, the Earth is destroyed.
On Saturday, the brewery will make its Belgian quad, Judgment Day, the centerpiece of a daylong party in the brewery's tasting room, serving the 10.5% ABV ale and other beers that use it as a base. The brewery is reserving one side of its 50-foot bar for saints, the other for sinners. A costume competition invites you to attend dressed as your favorite character from Revelations.
"We've gotten a lot of calls about it," Osterfeld says, referring to the intersection of Judgment Day (the beer) and Judgment Day (the end-of-the-world proselytizing). "The local news in San Diego did a story about it."
Those calls started back in January. At first, the Lost Abbey folks were a little leery about making light of the End of Days pronouncement by Harold Camping, leader of the Family Radio Worldwide ministry. The apprehension was less about the appearance of sacrilege and more about the possibility of doomsday cults, a legitimate concern since the group that followed the Comet Hale-Bopp into the afterlife with a mass suicide in 1997 was located only 15 miles from San Marcos.
But in this case, things are quite different.
In hordes of interviews, Camping says he zeroed in on May 21, 2011, as the date for Judgment Day through close examination of the Bible. He calculated (seems more like extruded) the moment based on the date of Jesus' crucifixion (April 1, 33 A.D.), the 1,978 years hence, the number of days in a solar year (365.2422) and the 51 days from the start of April to May 21st. The product of all that mathematical contortion was then matched to some numerology representing atonement, completeness and heaven. The result: May 21, 2011.
Camping's revelation has drawn plenty of believers, including some who have trumpeted the end-is-coming message via billboards (like ones in Morris County in North Jersey and Cumberland County in South Jersey) that also, coincidentally, promote the ministry's radio show and website. (Wonder if Camping will do a big finale show like Oprah?)
But the bold pronouncement that Saturday is the Big One also has an ample share of doubters and critics. Ample, as in probably most of us.
So, who's to say some satirical, irreverent, or even gallows, humor isn't in order? After all, the doomsday prognosticator made a similar calculated forecast for 1994 (wonder if Camping forgot to carry the 1?) and yet, we're all still here.
For now, at least.
But in case you still need some reassurance about things, Osterfeld offers this comment: "I don't think anyone actually thinks the world is coming to an end."
NOTE: The image above comes from Lost Abbey's website. And, yeah this site is nearly always about New Jersey beers, but this story was too good to leave behind.
Carton Brewing is moving along with renovations to their building at the Monmouth County bayshore. The crew there expects delivery of the brewhouse, fermenters and bright and hot liquor tanks from Newlands Systems in Canada in a little over a week.
"Looks like there's some flooding in Manitoba. The train our tanks are on is stuck. We're not getting it this weekend, looks like it will be the following weekend," brewer Jesse Ferguson explained on Wednesday.
"But they're in there pouring conrete tomorrow. They busted out that front door already, where we're going to put in that roll-up (door). So, things are moving."
Last Saturday, with newly installed floor drains and other plumbing in the background, Jesse, with founders Augie and Chris Carton, discussed the interior work going on at the soon-to-be brewery in Atlantic Highlands.
They also offered some samples of pilot brews produced on a homebrew rig: a hoppy kölsch at 5% ABV and an almost 8% West Coast-slanted IPA.
The IPA, the first test take on that style, was hopped exclusively with Falconers Flight, the Hop Union mash-up of Citra, Simcoe and Sorachi Ace. The Citra-hopped kölsch, much farther along in development than the IPA, is being called Boat and was finished with Nugget and Cascade.
"It's a kölsch yeast in an American pale that we've hopped within an inch of its life," Augie says. "This one is a little higher (in alcohol) than we want; we want it to be closer to 4%."
There's a touch of wheat in it to give it some body, plus some flaked barley. "I'm doing everything I can to get the mouth feel up because it's low gravity, and it's finishing low," Jesse says. "We had a problem where it was coming off too dry and the hops were just off-the-map accentuated. The wheat and the flaked barley are there to try to counteract that."
Among the next steps is possibly another tweak to the grain bill and to produce six more test batches of Boat using various hop varities, since they're having some trouble with the availability of Citra, their preferred hop for the beer, and may need to select an alternative. Four of those Boat R&D batches have been brewed, Jesse said Wednesday.
With Boat, Augie says, the goal is to make a beer whose flavor doesn't collapse, while its alcohol content overwhelm.
"Image you're fishing, imagine you're playing softball, imagine you're commuting on the ferry (from Manhattan), you want to have three or four beers, but you don't want to be crippled. But you also want it to be tasty," he says. "We want it to be a friendly, sessionable beer for guys who like the beers we like – Nugget Nectar, Dogfish 60, Double Simcoe from Weyerbacher. We love all those crazy beers, (but) they're all just so boozy."
The Carton business model is to make brews below 5% ABV or at 7.5% and over. "It's either going to be sub-5 and sessionable and fun to drink, or it's going to be contemplative, thinking, big bottle 8%," Augie says.
A guy with a food blogger background and penchant for exploring flavors, Augie acknowledges the time-is-money critical nature of getting the brewery built. But he confesses to finding pleasures in the R&D side.
"Jesse and I bought ourselves a (MoreBeer) Tippy ... It's our pilot system; we got that just to have our mad scientist days with. It's coming in about another six weeks," he says.
The pilot brewing rig's arrival could be about the time their actual 15-barrel brewhouse is ready. "We'd like it to be late June," Augie says, referring to the brewery buildout. "But I think it's going to be July."
ABOUT THE PHOTO: It's a mug of one of the incarnations of Boat, provided by Jesse.
The talking points are up and the action alert has been made.
The Garden State Craft Brewers Guild is asking New Jersey beer enthusiasts to reach out to their representatives in Trenton to support Senate bill 2870 and Assembly bill A3969.
The companion legislation would bring the rules under which the state's craft breweries operate more in line with marketplace conditions in the mid-Atlantic region and elsewhere nationally.
The guild posted the upshot of the legislation on its website on Tuesday, along with a blueprint for contacting state lawmakers to express support for the bills.
Meanwhile, the Senate version picked up a new sponsor, Sen. Donald Norcross, a Democrat from Camden County. Norcross joins Sen. Tom Kean Jr., the Union County Republican who introduced the measure at the beginning of the month. The Assembly version is sponsored by Craig Coughlin, a Democrat from Middlesex County.
Coughlin, by the way, also has homebrewers' interests in mind. He just introduced an unrelated bill, A4012, which would throw out the state's requirement that homebrewers get a permit to make their beer. (Text of that measure hasn't gone up on the Legislature's website yet.)
But back to the commercial brewing legislation.
Here's what the guild says is the aim of S2870 and A3969, which were referred to law and public safety committees in their respective chambers:
Remove the arbitrary cap (2 brew pubs) on the amount of brewpubs a company can open in the state. (Taking away this cap means brewpub businesses wishing to expand and create jobs in the state could without any unnecessary restrictions.)
Allow small breweries to sell beer directly to consumers from their brewery locations. (New Jersey wineries already have this privilege. Additionally, this element mirrors A3520, which was introduced back in November.)
Allow small brewers to sell their product at 10 locations across the state directly to consumers. (New Jersey wineries have this privilege already, bringing their product directly to consumers without any harmful impact on other wine or alcohol interests. Think BYOB restaurants with this one.)
Allow small breweries and brewpubs to offer samples to consumers both at their brewery or offsite at such things as charity events and festivals.
Allow brewpubs to sell their beer at other bars and restaurants that they own but do not brew beer onsite, yet have a retail consumption license.
Allow brewpubs to sell their beer off-premise in the same manner as small breweries through the wholesale distribution chain. (This would allow consumers to buy their favorite brewpub beer at other locations in the state.)
Increase the amount of craft beer both New Jersey’s small breweries and brewpubs could produce annually.
The current regulations were enacted in the early 1990s, a time when craft brewing in New Jersey seemed faddish, more likely to remain a niche interest and not grow into a part of the state's manufacturing base.
For the state's breweries, the rules now feel like size medium T-shirt on a XL body – they don't fit.
And for any New Jerseyan who's been to Sly Fox in Phoenixville, Pa., for instance, had lunch and a draft beer, then came home, stopped at a package goods store to pick up a six-pack of Royal Weisse, the existing rules can be confusing.
"This legislation removes some of the roadblocks that craft brewers in the state currently have to take their success to the next level," says Mark Edelson, one of the owners of Iron Hill brewpub in Maple Shade. "The current legislation has been in place for about 20 years and was negotiated at a time when states were just starting to craft legislation to launch our industry.
"This helped incubate our industry in New Jersey, but as our industry has grown, we are seeking two things: a more level playing field with some of the privileges currently enjoyed by New Jersey wineries (and) a more level playing field with small breweries in neighboring states."
But this is about more than beer. There's a spinoff benefit for the state by encouraging growth, and it's not all about excise taxes, either. It's jobs, Mark says, and not just brewery jobs, but also ones like pipe fitters, truck drivers and engineers.
"The economic impact is clear. This will allow us to promote and expand our sales, which leads to more revenue for the state and more jobs in the state," he says.
It's American Craft Beer Week, and that's a good moment to take stock of what's emerged on the Garden State beer landscape over the past year.
For starters, 2011 finds in business two new breweries, Great Blue Brewing (Franklin Township, Somerset County) and Port 44 Brew Pub (Newark) that weren't here a year ago this time. A new contract-made brand, East Coast Beer Company (Point Pleasant), also landed on the store shelves with a pilsner (Beach Haus) and is ramping up plans for another label.
Two production breweries are in development in Monmouth County – Kane Brewing (Ocean Township) and Carton Brewing (Atlantic Highlands), while nanobrewing has gained a foothold in the state. One such brewery is already licensed (Great Blue), while another (Cape May Brewing) is on pace to get the green light soon from state regulators, and further still, a handful of nanos are on the drawing boards (Flounder Brewing, Pinelands Brewing and Jersey Shore Brewing Experience, to name three.)
The hits keep coming.
The state's oldest production craft brewer, Climax in Roselle Park, bought a bottling line to put its ales and lagers in six-packs for the first time in its 15-year history. To the south, the state's largest craft brewer, Flying Fish, has designs on a new building in Somerdale (about five miles from its current home base of Cherry Hill) that will triple the brewery's size.
But Flying Fish isn't alone with the serious need to expand. In fact, right now, nearly all Garden State brewers can't make beer fast enough for demand, and for many, limited capacity is the reason.
Meanwhile, in Trenton, lawmakers are being asked to update the rules for microbrewing to catch New Jersey's industry up with neighboring states, if not the rest of the country.
"The current legislation has been in place for about 20 years and was negotiated at a time when states were just starting to craft legislation to launch our industry," says Mark Edelson, one of the owners of the Iron Hill brewpub in Maple Shade.
Looking east, the phrase down the shore now translates as being able to find good beer selections on tap on the sandy side of the state, something that, excluding oases like Firewaters in Atlantic City or brewpubs Tun Tavern, Basil T's and Artisans, has lagged behind North Jersey and the Delaware side of the state.
"I'm usually a little shocked about this area because of its proximity to New York City and people's exposure to cuisine, culture and travel," says Mark Danzeisen, owner of the well-stocked Twin Light Taphouse in Highlands, which just celebrated its first anniversary May 1 and will turn over its taps to Long Island's Bluepoint Brewing this Wednesday for a American Craft Beer Week soiree.
"Beer has always been something – I won't say shunned – but it's never been fully explored or delved into like the rest of the state. People are opening their eyes now."
Danzeisen, 30, comes from a place where the beer pedigree is solid. He opened Twin Light, on Monmouth County's bayshore, because the beers he was used to drinking were, for the most part, still back home. Although back home – Philly – wasn't a world away, it did seem so through the prism of a flavor-starved pint glass.
"I grew up down in Philadelphia and worked in beer bars down there. In college, my local bar was Monk's, Bridgid's, North Third, Standard Tap," he says.
All of New Jersey is picking up its game, he finds.
Thank a vibrant craft brewing industry, changing palates and a food movement that embraces beer. Roll into that the gravitational pull of beer-craving Pennsylvania and New York state. Or anywhere else that takes a wider view of food and drink.
"You go to Europe, you go to other places, and food and alcohol is first before other business is taken care of ... Or the home is based around the kitchen. We've lost that because of our time investment into work and other things," he says. "We're seeing this culture swing back toward food and appreciation of food, a return to grandmom's recipes and mom's old recipes. Beer is being pulled into that; there's that seeking out of flavors."
But, as much as it seems like our own backyard is suddenly a fun place to play, this week is also a reason to remember and support the home team – the Jersey brewers who have been plying these waters for 16 years, the folks who chose to go into business back in the 1990s because they wanted to bring to New Jersey what they were enjoying from their own beer travels or homebrewing experiences.
And it's a moment for the new entrepreneurs, who see a brighter beer future in the Garden State and a chance to bring to market the brews they envision.
Because, yes, it is a good time to hang out in our own backyard.
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.
Garden State craft brewers pick up another sponsor for legislation to ease regulations regarding their industry.
Bill A3969 was introduced in the Assembly on Friday by Craig J. Coughlin, a Democrat from Middlesex County, giving the measure bipartisan support.
Assemblyman Coughlin's 19th legislative district includes J.J. Bitting brewpub in Woodbridge, one of Middlesex County's three brewery-restaurants.
The Assembly bill is identical to the version introduced in the state Senate on Tuesday by Tom Kean Jr., a Republican from Union County. Sen. Kean's 21st District includes Trap Rock brewpub in Berkeley Heights and production brewery Climax Brewing in Roselle Park.
The text of the bills remains to be posted on the Legislature's website. But the brief description of the legislation says it "increases production limitations and revises privileges of limited and restricted breweries." (In New Jersey, limited brewery licenses are held by production breweries; restricted brewery licenses are held by brewpubs.)
The measures introduced this week were shaped by the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild.
But there are other craft brewing bills pending in the Legislature. S2040 and A3063 (identical to each other) propose to create a farm brewery/winery brewery license, while A3520 would allow craft brewers to directly retail to people who stop by their breweries.
Behind every beer you'll find people – those who made it, those who drink it.
Quite often, you'll find a song, too. That's because music and beer are sensory pleasures – sound and taste – and share a potent power to unite people.
But that's just for starters (and when's the last time you went to a beer festival that didn't have a soundtrack?).
The parallels between music and beer roll on, like a jam band in a great groove, connecting with an audience that's dancing in the aisles.
Think styles – jazz, rock, R&B, blues, hip-hop, country, alt country, folk, bluegrass, classical, opera, big band ... bock, pils, dunkel, stout, pale ales, black ales, singles, doubles, triples, quads, reds, session ales, strong ales, old ales, wheat beers.
Think business approaches – big breweries and big record labels vs. small craft brewers and indie labels. Think shared experiences – Woodstock and the Great American Beer Festival. Think indigenous brews (kvass) and indigenous tunes (parang).
You get the picture.
With all that going on, it's no surprise to find pro brewers who are musicians away from the mash tun, and pro musicians who are brewers off stage.
Kyle Hollingsworth, keyboard player with The String Cheese Incident and his own Kyle Hollingsworth Band, is the music world's biggest ambassador to craft beer, brewing and homebrewing. String Cheese has nearly a dozen albums to its credit, while Kyle has a couple of solo albums under his belt, and now a nationally distributed craft pale ale, Hoopla, to his name. Not to mention a freshly made homebrew bubbling away in the basement of his Colorado home.
Both brews figure into Kyle's summer tour plans.
New Jersey's craft beer industry has two brewer-musicians: Bryan Baxter, a solo artist whose day job is turning out hefe and dunkel weizens and imperial pilsner for High Point Brewing in Butler and its Ramstein brand; and Chris Rakow, who's the guitarist for jam band Ludlow Station when he's not brewing tanks of Tripel Horse, Hop Hazard or Hop-A-Lot-Amus Double IPA for River Horse Brewing in Lambertville.
Bryan, 27, who just took Best in Show judging (for the Double Platinum Blonde hefe) at the Tap New York festival last weekend, sees loads of similarities between brewing and making music. (That's Bryan on the left in the photo.)
"Look at it side by side, the major beer (companies) are like the record companies. If you really want to get your record out there you have to go through the big guys," says Bryan, who homebrewed before landing a job with High Point and finished the first half of the Seibel brewing course. "Small craft beers are like the indie labels. The cool bands are the ones under ground; it's the same thing with craft beer."
Bryan's first disc, Simple Is Beautiful (available on iTunes), came out last summer; it's 10 compositions in the singer-songwriter/folk genre. On the album, Bryan sang and played acoustic guitar, banjo, lap steel guitar, mandolin and harmonica, and was backed by friends on keyboards and drums. (As a musician, he cites as influences Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Avett Brothers and Ryan Adams.)
"I've been in bands all my life. I never put out a full-length album because the bands would break up before we could do it," Bryan says.
His best chance at making an album was by going solo. "I got sick and tired of losing songs because the band broke up. I'm never gonna break up with myself," he says.
When he was gigging around (he's taking a break for a while), you could find him at the Court Tavern in New Brunswick, or at some basement shows in Brooklyn. Bryan has also played at Maxwell's in Hoboken, trodding a stage that has seen its share of big names (David Byrne, John Cale, The Pogues, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth, to name a few).
Chris Rakow has been playing guitar for 16 of his 28 years; he homebrewed during his college days at Rutgers University, and has been running the brewing operations at River Horse for a year and a half. (An American Brewers Guild alum, he also put in some time working for Harpoon at its Vermont brewery).
With Ludlow Station, Chris continues to play with two friends from his middle school years, a time when he "learned every single Led Zepplin tune." The band released an album of eight original tunes last year, titling it simply Ludlow Station.
Brewing and music keep Chris busy.
"On our schedule coming up, we've got a gig every other week up until like July ... Old Bay in New Brunswick, it's a good beer bar, good music; Triumph in New Hope; there's this place, BBQ's, in Annandale; and Pearly Baker's, a nice beer bar in Easton, Pennsylvania," Chris says.
As for Ludlow Station's style, Chris notes, "We cover some Dead tunes, but I wouldn't say we're too much like the Dead. It's much more like jazz, funk, blues rock. Our instrumentals are more intricate because there's no singing. When we have a singer, we have a couple of originals, and when he's there we play some covers, like some Dead covers, Stevie Wonder covers."
Chris' influences are more expansive, however.
"I like John Scolfield a lot, his later stuff, his jazz stuff he played way back is good," Chris says. "I like mostly key players; I like Medeski, Martin and Wood a whole lot. They're kinda like my biggest influence. They're a jazz trio; they're just keyboard, bass and drum."
Speaking of keyboards, you'd probably have to scour the planet to find a musician other than Kyle Hollingsworth who has pondered brewing beer while performing.
"The music I play is very improvisational," Kyle begins, "start the set, get the boil started, then do first hop drop, run and do a jam for 45 minutes, do the second addition and then quickly play a five-minute song and do the third addition," he says.
Kyle laughs when he mentions the idea, but there's no question beer is a huge part of his life, brewing it and hosting festivals (Kyle's Brew Fest, done last year with breweries Great Divide and Deschutes, to name a couple).
"I've definitely spent a lot more energy on crafting my musicianship, and less spent on my beer. But it's always been there, and it's something I enjoy when I come home after a tour," he says.
"Part of my crusade over the last couple of years is I've been touring the country with my band and String Cheese, and I've been doing meet-and-greets and lots of other stuff at select breweries on the way ... from like down in San Diego, it was Stone. Then I went up to San Francisco, then I went up to Deschutes in Oregon, then down to Dogfish," Kyle says. "The vision was, for me, to connect the dots between music and beer."
Kyle's been a homebrewer for 24 of his 42 years, drawn to the craft by the chance to experiment and create something sensory, much like music. While on the road this summer, he'll be doing homebrewing seminars at festivals (like Summer Camp), bringing in tow an India pale ale he brewed just 10 or so days ago.
"I'm going to be like a 'brewru' ... we'll kinda explain the process and do some tastings, and hopefully get some people into brewing," Kyle, a professed hophead, says by phone from his home in Boulder.
That IPA he just made is the opposite of Hoopla, the brew he did with Boulder Beer that gets distributed nationally this month. "It's totally dry-hopped to the max. It's looking and tasting real good," he says, referring to the IPA.
"Over the last two years I've done a lot of different beers – mainly pilot type systems – in a lot of bigger breweries in the country. There's a great place called Avery here in Boulder; a local place called Mountain Sun (which did his Hoppingsworth IPA in 2009), there's a place called Upslope; Odell, I've done a pilot batch ...
"But this is the first time I've done a national, canned or bottled beer. So I'm very excited about that," he says.
With Hoopla, Kyle was thinking of Tennessee's Bonnaroo music festival.
"I went to Boulder Beer and sat down with their brewers and said, 'I want to make a beer that's a festival drinking beer.' Specifically, String Cheese is playing Bonnaroo this year, so I was thinking, 'What would you want to drink at Bonnaroo when it's 85 degrees, or 110 degrees, and 100 percent humidity?' I'm a huge hophead, so I wanted it to have some hops in it, but I wasn't quite ready to do the hop bomb at Bonnaroo," he says.
"So my vibe was to make it a pale that was a little hoppier than people expect – we were calling it a pale ale, but in my mind it's more of an IPA that's of a lower bitterness; it's not quite over the top. So it's an easy-drinking 5.7 (ABV), lightly hopped pale. The whole idea was to have something you can grab in your hand and go see 12 hours of music with, and keep drinking them, instead of one really strong beer for an hour."
And thus was born, Kyle jokes, a new style: FPA, Festival Pale Ale.
But in a pure sense, for Kyle, brewing and performing on stage are moments of creation, born in the alignment of intuition, impulse and passion that demand you make a decision.
Do you play a solo the way fans are used to hearing it, or follow the energy of the moment, the ongoing jam and the crowd's vibe, and take a chance by spicing that solo with something new? With brewing, do you follow your tried-and-true recipe and make the great brew you know, or take that recipe and play it a another way, adding some new ingredients that the moment at hand suggests?
"For me, it's all about taking a chance, all about taking that risk. That's the connection I'm seeing personally," Kyle says.
A new front has opened in the campaign to make New Jersey a friendlier place for the craft brewing industry.
Bill S2870, which "increases production limitations and revises privileges of limited and restricted breweries," was introduced in Trenton on Tuesday by state Sen. Tom Kean Jr. of Union County.
The Garden State Craft Brewers Guild, which has been working on the legislation for the past year, is now lining up sponsorship in the Assembly and expects a version to be introduced in that chamber by week's end.
Just exactly what the legislation seeks isn't immediately clear. The bill was just published, but the text hasn't been posted yet on the Legislature's website.
However, as it worked with a lobbyist to shape the bill, the guild's wish list has touched on raising the maximum amount of beer that could be brewed annually for both brewpubs and production breweries.
Additionally, the guild has wanted to let brewpub owners hold more than two licenses, let them brew for the taps at other establishments (i.e. restaurant-bars) that they may own, and in a bid to become more competitive with neighboring states, allow brewpubs to hold production brewery licenses for their locations, so they may sell beer off premises through distributors.
For production brewers, the guild has wanted to let them individually set up a clutch of salesrooms across the state for sampling and retailing to the public.
Remember, those items represent what has been a working wish list. Stay tuned for what the bill actually does propose.
Fans of Sly Fox Brewing look forward to the first Sunday in May and the annual Bock Fest's running of the goats in the parking lot of the brewery-restaurant.
This year, the 12th running of the ruminants, South Jersey's Barley Legal Homebrewers club ponied up an entry, hoping to land naming rights to the brewery's 2011 maibock. (The maibock is named after the victor.)
Alas, Toilet – the moniker the club's entry ran under – finished second in his heat, not good enough to make the finals.
That race turned out to be quite the David-and-Goliath tale: a three-legged goat named Peggy vanquished two-time champ Dax, winning the hearts of the crowd and naming rights to the bock. (That's Peggy's preliminary race pictured below.)
As for Toilet, it was a long ride home, but there's always next year. Maybe some Toilet Bock, too.
From the NJ brewers themselves: Think Jersey, drink Jersey
AHA Big Brew YouTube contest
BSL has won this three times, with "Brewers Make Wort, Yeast Makes Beer" (2008, 1st place); "The Whole Thing, Worts and All" (2010, 2nd place, featuring Barley Legal Homebrewers); and "NJ Worthsmiths" (2011, Most Watched Video, also featuring Barley Legal Homebrewers).
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Jim Koch of Boston Beer Company says you should take pride in your beer. That also goes for the state where your beer is made Jersey fresh. So click on the link.
I'm a freelance editor, writer, video producer, photographer, graphic artist and, obviously, a beer fan (homebrewer, too) ... I've even lent a hand at a commercial brewery in NJ (where else?!!??) and created some ads for a brewery that were published in Ale Street News and All About Beer.
My first taste of beer was a few sips of Falstaff at age 5 in 1965 (yes, I was drinking underage – in a simpler period of time, too). I continued to develop a taste for beer, but alas, poor Yorick, I left Shakespeare (and Falstaff) behind (but I did write about beer for my college composition 101 class, got an A on it, too).
