Flying Fish announces Exit strategy

Remember these numbers: 4, 9, 10, 13, 16, 17.

The Pick-6 Lotto, they're not. But they are winning numbers, nonetheless.

Two of them are Saturdays – Dec. 10 and Dec. 17. The other four are Exits from the Cellar.

A shortage of brewing capacity and plans to exit Cherry Hill for bigger digs in Somerdale, about 10 miles south, have iced any hopes of Flying Fish releasing this year's trio of brews under the Exit Series banner, as was the per-year plan when the brewery began releasing the specialty brews in 2009.

This year, it's been Exit 9, and Exit 9 alone, that saw release.

Alas.

But with everything that's been going on at Flying Fish, something had to give. So the brewery has come up with another Exit strategy.

Which means, Flying Fish is digging into its private stock of previously released Exits, namely Exit 4 American Trippel, Exit 9 Hoppy Scarlet Ale, Exit 13 Chocolate Stout and Exit 16 Wild Rice Double IPA, and making the 750 milliliter bottles available for purchase during Saturday tours of Dec. 10th and 17th.

As most everyone knows, Exit 4 is available in six-packs these days. But in the big bottle, with the ruby-red wrapping on the top, it's the original release.

Exits 1 (oyster stout), 6 (Wallonian rye) and 11 (hoppy wheat), sadly, are history.

Time for a second round?

Could New Jersey Breweries, the guidebook to the Garden State's craft brewing scene, be in line for a second edition?

Maybe so.

That idea is being floated to the publisher, Stackpole Books, says Mark Haynie, who with co-author Lew Bryson, wrote the 148-page region-by-region look at the pub and production brewers of the state.

With good reason.

A lot has changed on the state's beer landscape since the book landed on the shelves during the summer of 2008. Not only have the ranks of homegrown craft brewers swelled, but industry trends have shifted, with the notion of small-batch brewing taking on a new meaning, and growlers of take-home beer no longer existing as the province of brewpubs and breweries. Then there's the matter of the state's bar owners gravitating to and embracing craft beer in general, adding taps and putting on beers that were unimaginable a few years ago.

At the time New Jersey Breweries hit print, the Garden State had just under a dozen and a half craft breweries, with the newest one being Krogh's, the Sussex County brewpub that began teaming house-brewed beers to its restaurant offerings back in 1999. Now, the brewery count numbers closer to two dozen.

The change began as a trickle, then a gush.

In 2009, Iron Hill brewpub, the Delaware-based restaurant and brewery company started in 1996 by a trio of Jersey guys, ended a decade-long drought of new breweries opening in the state. It was a homecoming that saw Iron Hill launch its eighth location in Maple Shade. (Iron Hill is poised to open its ninth location in Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia. A second New Jersey location is also in the works.)

New Jersey Beer Company followed suit a year later as a production brewery based in North Bergen in Hudson County. This year alone, there have been three new production brewers – nano beer-maker Cape May Brewing became licensed in May, with Kane Brewing and Carton Brewing doing likewise over the summer. Meanwhile, Turtle Stone Brewing, an in-development production brewery in Vineland, is targeting a late 2011 or early 2012 opening.

Speaking of nanobreweries, the industry trend of tiny breweries serving local niche markets, took off big in the Garden State in 2011. Besides Cape May, Great Blue in Somerset County became licensed, while Flounder Brewing in Hillsborough and Tuckahoe Brewing continued to wend their way through the regulatory maze, and also looked to open soon.

But wait, there's more.

Flying Fish, the state's largest craft brewery and a Cherry Hill fixture for all of its 15 years, bought a new building in nearby Somerdale and made plans to triple its production capacity. In 2009, Flying Fish also began a well-received lineup of specialty beers. The Exit Series was referenced in New Jersey Breweries as part of the brewery's plans.

Elsewhere, Climax Brewing in Roselle Park, the state's first production craft brewer, began packaging in 12-ounce bottles in six-packs, retiring the signature half-gallon growler jugs that had long given its ales and lagers a presence in the state's bottled beer market.

Speaking of growlers, the jugs most often associated with brewpubs, started showing up as offerings from taverns and those packaged goods stores lucky enough to have licensing held over from the days of when they included a bar under their roofs.

Indeed, the Garden State is a different place for beer now, even from just three years ago.

About the videos:
Above, Mark Haynie talks with interviewer Tara Nurin, of the women's beer group Beer for Babes, about growth in the New Jersey craft brewing industry. Below from 2008, New Jersey Breweries co-author Lew Bryson talks about the book's release.

Cape May cuts ribbon on tasting room

Joined by local government dignitaries, nanobrewer Cape May Brewing on Thursday christened its tasting room at a special weekday open house.

But perhaps the bigger news for the tiny brewery is that once again it is looking to grow. Cape May Brewing is in talks with the Delaware River & Bay Authority to take over some space adjacent to the brewery, located in a building on the grounds of the DRBA-owned Cape May County Airport.

Ryan Krill, who started the brewery with his dad, Robert, and college friend Chris Henke, says the discussions are in the early stages. The brewery is also doing some preliminary work toward boosting capacity again, he says.

Cape May shed its start-up half-barrel brewing system a few months ago, moving to a 1.5-barrel setup.

"We're pricing stuff out and scaling things out right now and seeing what's going to be appropriate," Ryan says. "That's the whole goal, to be able to have more than four accounts. We want to sell beer, we want to have a lot of fun doing it. We're going to try to find a sweet spot and a good scale for us."

In addition to its tasting room, Cape May Brewing has three bar accounts (Cabanas, SeaSalt and Lucky Bones Backwater Grille, all in Cape May) for its brews – a flagship IPA, a sweet stout, a porter (made with locally produced honey) and a wheat beer. Upcoming is a dunkelweizen, as well as an 8% ABV imperial IPA with Centennial hops that was brewed this week for release around Christmas.

At Thursday afternoon's open house, dignitaries from Lower Township and the DRBA took part in a ribbon-cutting for the tasting room where Cape May Brewing has been welcoming visitors since July.

Ryan says the brewery plans to hire a couple of staffers to help out in the tasting room and with retail sales of glassware, hats and shirts from Saturday tours and tastings.

About the video:
Cape May Brewery's Ryan Krill talks with interviewer Tara Nurin of the women's beer group Beer for Babes at the Somers Point beer festival held Oct. 29.

This chocolate's hot

Iron Hill writes another chapter in its ongoing sponsorship of competitive homebrewing, tapping a chipotle pepper-cocoa-cinnamon porter Monday night created by Camden County homebrewer Michael Bittner, who claimed the 2011 Iron Brewer title.

It's the second year for the contest at IH's Maple Shade location, continuing a tradition that started at the brewpub's West Chester, Pa., site a half dozen or so years ago and takes its name partly from the Iron Chef television show.

Claiming his top prize of making beer on a commercial scale, Michael, an Audubon resident and member of the Barley Legal Homebrewers club of South Jersey, brewed the 9-barrel batch of Aztec Ale Nov. 5th under the supervision of head brewer Chris LaPierre, who scaled up Michael's 5-gallon recipe.

(Last year's Iron Brewer beer was a coffee stout called Luca Brasi, brewed by Barley Legal members Jim Carruthers and Scott Davi, winners of the inaugural Maple Shade competition.)

Aztec Ale has a chocolaty aroma and taste, with a finish of gentle pepper heat; there's a bounce of vanilla in there, too. The cinnamon was prominent on the palates for some folks, but less so for others.

Both pro brewer and homebrewer were happy with the outcome.

"It's just what I remember it being, reminds me of the original recipe ... the smell, the taste is very similar," Michael said after the tapping.

Aztec Ale, Chris says, stands as one of the more exotic brews to be entered in the Iron Brewer contest.

"This would be one of them. It definitely had a lot of ingredients that I don't often use in the brewery," he says. "There was also a beet beer last time that came pretty close to winning. That was really interesting."

Aztec Ale also marks the third fusion of chocolate, cinnamon and hot peppers by a Jersey brewpub this year. Basil T's in Red Bank and the Tun Tavern in Atlantic City both brewed with those ingredients back in January as a collaboration called Chocolate Fire, done under the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild's Jersey's Finest banner.

Like the other 10 or so contestants who vied for the Iron Brewer title this year, Michael made his beer with wort collected from the second runnings of IH's The Situation, a robust ABV beer (almost 10%) that weaves in and out of a few styles (think barleywine meets double IPA).

The contest, in fact, started as a way to make use of the healthy amount of malt sugar that would otherwise go down the drain after the needed volume of wort for The Situation is collected in the kettle.

Chris says The Situation likely will be scheduled for brewing again in February. "So that's probably when we'll do the next Iron Brewer wort pickup," he says.

Right now Michael is basking in the limelight of Aztec Ale, and planning to clone Dogfish Head's Indian Brown Ale, not to mention looking forward to defending his Iron Brewer title after the next wort give away.

"I'm not going to say what I'm going to brew, and it may change before then, but I've got some ideas," he says.

Is it there yet? Just a little further

Some R&D and interacting with the public ...

When Flounder Brewing finally opens its doors, followers of New Jersey's growing ranks of craft beer makers can expect the Somerset County nanobrewery to do some batch testing of recipes on its new equipment, and letting the public sample some of those beers at brewery open houses.

After that initial phase, you can expect a more formal launch/opening of the Hillsborough brewery, with an invitation extended to town officials to take part. (Think sometime in the spring for this one.)

"I still have new equipment that I have yet to use because I don't have the utilities. I have new water to contend with because I haven't brewed in that space yet," says Jeremy "Flounder" Lees, one of the brewery's founders. "It's going to be a couple of months of batch-testing and letting people come into the tasting room and try those batches and things like that, letting people start to interact with the brewery and try the beer before we're really actively going out to liquor stores."

Earlier this month, Flounder Brewing checked in with federal regulators at the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau about the company's brewers notice, the paperwork the planned 1-barrel brewery needs signed off on to become a commercial brewery. The mid-month discussion with the TTB went well, Jeremy says, with just some minor details that federal regulators wanted addressed.

Right now, utility work (gas and water) is being done at the Hillsborough brewery, and Jeremy remains optimistic state regulators can wrap up Flounder's brewery application, then inspect the facility and grant a license by year's end.

"It seems like if all goes through with the federal stuff, according to what I just talked to them about on the phone, we should definitely have that federal license in this year," Jeremy says. "The state, we just have to submit a whole bunch of secondary information. Hopefully that's going to be what they need, and then they're going to have to do a site visit. I have no idea when that will be."

As much as federal and state regulators seem like a predominant focus for getting into business, there's still a third master that also must be satisfied: Turning the warehouse space Flounder leased into a manufacturing enterprise means going through the local officials for a bevy of things, including construction permits and building-use classifications. Dealing with some of that has been like groping along in the dark.

"Everything I had to submit to the township all made sense in the end," Jeremy says. "The problem was, it was really hard trying, for the most part, to navigate your own way through all these hoops and everything, going in and trying to ask questions about what has to be on the construction permit folder when you've never done it before.

"Fortunately, Hillsborough has a very good business advocate that works in the township. He helped get a lot of things cleared up for me as we were moving, and my landlords, too, because they want to see the brewery finally open there."

Working with the town has had its advantages, namely helping to create a buzz about a new brewery coming.

"Everybody I've bumped into, from fire inspectors to construction people to just in general people in the township are all excited. They're all looking forward to trying the beer. We have a lot of people with us on Facebook that are right from Hillsborough," Jeremy says.

NJ Beer Co. eyes return to bottle market

A planned to return to the bottled beer market for New Jersey Beer Company.

The Hudson County production brewery is in the process of acquiring a new six-head filler that will enable it to once again bottle its Hudson Pale, 1787 Abbey Single and Garden State Stout, the triad of brews that NJ Beer entered the market with about 18 months ago.

John McCarthy, CEO of the North Bergen-based brewery, says NJ Beer expects to order the Meheen bottler before the end of this month and have it up and running at the beginning of next year.

"It's been a long time coming. We're really looking forward to it," John said by phone Thursday, the eve of the brewery's re-opening of its refurbished tasting room.

Shortly after launching in 2010, NJ Beer expanded its packaging beyond kegs and had its flagship brews in six-packs on store shelves. The product diversification in the marketplace was short-lived: NJ Beer was forced back to draft-only business when the filler from Applied Bottling of British Columbia irreparably failed after little over a month's use.

"The thing was breaking from day one ... We had parts falling off, breaking off. We literally broke almost every damn piece just in the normal operation. The manufacturer put some wrong parts in, which ultimately ruined the fill head," brewery founder Matt Steinberg said in an interview last spring, just before NJ Beer marked its first anniversary. "It got to the point where we were getting maybe one out of every six or eight bottles that would actually have 12 ounces of beer and a cap on it ... we couldn't properly fill bottles with that thing."

Now, NJ Beer is enjoying a rebound, having tenaciously endured the dark moments like the crippled-bottler episode and flooding last August from Hurricane Irene, which spared brewing equipment but ruined malt inventory. (The storm amounted to about a $1,000 sting to the brewery.)

"We've had some serious ups and downs. The bottler going down was devastating blow, losing all of our bottle accounts. It was a huge hit, emotionally and financially," John says. "We had to make some hard decisions and some sacrifices, but we weathered it, got some new investment."

The brewery is again poised to release its cold weather seasonal, Weehawken Wee Heavy, an 8.3% ABV brew that found favor among hordes of Jersey craft beer enthusiasts last year. "We're excited to get it out again. It should be out on draft at the end of the month," John says.

Along with the big Scottish ale will come its lighter sibling, the renamed 60 Shilling Mild (3.5% ABV), now called Sasha's 60 Shilling Mild, a salute to the brewery's now-deceased mascot Rottweiler, Sasha. (Head brewer Brendan O'Neil is a former dog trainer, and Sasha was his top dog.)

Both brews will be available for sampling, poured beside the Hudson Pale Ale, 1787 Abbey Single and Garden State Stout, when NJ Beer reopens its refurbished tasting room Friday (11/18, 4-8 p.m.). The end-of-tour room has been open intermittently of late, John says, but Friday's event will be something akin to a grand re-opening.

Meanwhile, NJ Beer is scouting a new, larger location, since the Tonnelle Avenue site in North Bergen where the brand was launched is becoming a little claustrophobic. Nearby Jersey City may hold some prospects, John says, but as far as a new location goes, the only thing that is settled is that NJ Beer intends to remain in Hudson County.

"Everything right now is looking really, really positive for New Jersey Beer Company," he says. "We feel stronger."

Charity begins at foam

A beer and food pairing to put on your calendar, but leave your appetite and bring your sense of good will.

Barley Legal Homebrewers, the 200-member strong South Jersey/Philadelphia-area homebrew club, will hold a Thanksgiving food drive this Saturday (11/19) at the Pour House bar in Westmont, trading 4-ounce samples of their brew creations for food donations.

The three-hour event runs (2-5 p.m.) was organized by club officers Evan Fritz and Devin Garlit, who say the soured economy is putting the squeeze on more and more people these days.

That has left area food pantries struggling to keep up with the greater demand for the help they provide.

Club members themselves have been buying turkeys and other foods for side dishes and collecting contributions of the same from the public, storing the food at Brew Your Own Bottle homebrew supply shop in Westmont.

"We're collecting full Thanksgiving dinners, from the turkey down to the stuffing, vegetables and rolls," Evan says. "There are a couple of families people in the club know are struggling, so we'll help them first. The rest will go to food pantries. Some of the food pantries say they're in bad shape this year."

A taste of serendipity for Carton Brewing

Carton Brewing, the Garden State's newest craft brewery, plans to turn out another batch of the session-strength golden ale that the draft-only production brewery teamed with a double IPA when it entered New Jersey's craft beer market back in August.

Launch (4.6% ABV) was a brew Carton made to break the seal their 15-barrel brewhouse in Atlantic Highlands in mid-July, a 30-barrel batch produced over a two-day trial run to put the newly installed Newlands Systems brewing set-up through the paces and ensure everything functioned properly.

The ale was intended to be a one-off brew and a placeholder beer on taps until Carton's flagship brew Boat, a hoppy session beer, was ready. Serendipitously, Launch found favor among craft beer bars that are inclined to steer patrons more accustomed to drinking pedestrian macro light brews toward better beer.

"The first beer we ever made is winning over the Miller Lite crowd. We haven't been able to stop making that beer," founder/co-owner Augie Carton (pictured above) said Saturday during an open house/brewery tour. "It's definitely become its own thing, and we will make it again, even though we thought we'd only ever make it that one time.

"There are those bars in New Jersey that are craft and want to cure people of Miller Lite, and they find they are having enormous success with Launch, where I thought they would have an enormous amount of success with Boat."

Boat was the catalyst for Augie and his cousin, Chris Carton, to start the brewery with their homebrewer friend Jesse Ferguson, (who is now the brewer for Carton Brewing). They wanted a beer that was as full-flavored as a double IPA from start to finish, yet session strength to be enjoyed over a few pints without ending up incoherent and on the floor.

"Boat is playing more to the craft beer crowd as a quaffable IPA," Augie says. "We thought it would play better to the wings community. What we've found is, it's killing in places of IPA drinkers who were having the same troubles we were having ... places like Cloverleaf (in Caldwell), which is a robust beer drinkers bar. They've got a collection of IPA-drinking regulars. Those guys wanted a beer they could have multiples of."

Three months in the New Jersey beer scene, Carton's lineup also features the double IPA 077XX, which with Launch, kicked off the brand, and a table beer BDG, a riff on biere de garde (the beer is actually more of a brown ale), or you can think of it this way: brunch, dinner, grub.

"It's doing well, better than expected, and for people who don't like hops – the rest of our beers tend toward hops so much – that's working for the brown ale/malt crowd," Augie says. "And now we're working on our milk stout because we're Carton, and you can't not have a carton of milk."

The stout, dosed with a mid-kettle addition of Bullion hops, is now in a second generation of pilot brewing, with another test batch or two to be done before a final version will be brewed in time to hit the market in late December or the start of next year. The goal now is to dial back some of the customary sweetness found in milk stouts.

"We don't really like sweet beers. The problem is, milk stout is inherently a sweet beer. I think the guys like Keegan (Mother's Milk) really nail it. It's just not too sweet," Augie says. "We're big into the session beer idea, and I don't find any beer as sessionable as a good low-alcohol stout. So that's what we want our milk stout to be.

"It's going to come in around 4 (percent ABV), and what we're doing is taking a super-roasty, just a ridiculously acrid over-roasted, malt bill and mashing it up against the sweetness of milk, and try to find the complexity to get you through a fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th pint."

Meanwhile, Augie says the fledgling brewery is already discovering the byproduct of their beers being well-received in the marketplace: the matter of keeping pace with demand. Carton Brewing is already talking about adding more capacity, unless their production schedule can be tweaked without compromising quality of the beer.

"We're in 40 places in New Jersey. We hit that right around eight weeks; we've been open 10 or eleven," he says. "We kind of had to stop. If people come to us and ask for our beer, we'll sell it to them, but we're not really pushing to get into new places because the last thing we want to do is let down those (initial) places."

To keep pace, though, new tank space could come online by next year's boating season.

"I think we're going to order it at the beginning of 2012. I think we're going to need it come summer," Augie says. "We've got an account right down the street that's selling six sixtels a week of Boat. By our business plan, they were only supposed to be selling one sixtel a week of Boat. They're selling six sixtels a week of Boat in November; it's going to be a dozen in June, so by June, we have to be able to make more Boat.

"Part of that is figuring out the true capacity of this brewery," he says.

A look at Flying Fish's future home

Records, brake pads, and in a few months' time, beer.

Flying Fish's recently acquired building in Somerdale has led a few different lives in New Jersey's manufacturing world, but its new lease on life – a state-of-the-art beer producer – promises to give New Jersey its first-ever automated craft brewery and the first automated brewery in South Jersey in decades.

"A lot of our investment is on the packaging, and having more automation," Flying Fish founder Gene Muller said Wednesday after a walk-through of the building. "Our bottling line can do three times the speed than we do now, because we're hand packing it. We're just growing into our equipment."

It was last April when word got out that Flying Fish, long in need of a bigger facility and thwarted on previous attempts to find that larger space, had finally landed a suitable site that would fit the brewery's current and future needs.

Last week, Flying Fish officially announced what everyone had long accepted as fact: 1940 Olney Avenue in Cherry Hill, the only physical location the brewery founded on the World Wide Web in 1995 has ever known, would fade into glory by mid-spring of 2012, a farewell to the place that grew to producing 14,000 barrels of beer a year and hosted countless tours and twice-a-year Internet open houses that were halted a few years ago when space became an issue.

Right now, the new Somerdale home, tucked behind a Walmart just off Route 30, looks like an old, sprawling industrial complex that hasn't seen a tenant quite in a while.

"It needs a lot of work, but it's a nice, big open space," Gene says. "We've got enough land – five acres. We can't build on any of that because most of it is wetlands. But it will give us a chance to do maybe some parkland, rain gardens, things like that ... If we can get some favorable legislation, then we can either do events or festivals. It would be a great spot for that."

Flying Fish has just begun to scratch the surface on turning the place into brewery.

They've cut drain trenches into the concrete floor of the portion where the brewhouse, fermenters and packaging will be set up, with more of that work to follow in the coming days.

Head brewer Casey Hughes (pictured above), no stranger to using AutoCAD, has been designing the brewery floor plan, with the help of sales director Andy Newell's wife.

(With just a little over a month and a half left in 2011, it looks like Flying Fish will produce only one brew this year in its Exit Series – Exit 9, the 9% ABV red ale that came out back in March. The next Exit beer is all worked out, as far as style and ingredients go, but the time crunch devoted to continuing to produce core brands and the Somerdale move may mean brewing the beer before year's end will have to be sacrificed. Fear not, Casey says the jump in brewing capacity thanks to the new home means some more past Exits can be brewed again.)

In a couple weeks' time, Casey is due to jet to northern Italy for training on the new kegging system, and then head to north Bavaria for training on the new German-manufactured automated 50-barrel brewhouse that will feed new 150-barrel fermenters, tripling Flying Fish's production capacity and making New Jersey's largest craft brewer look something like Troegs Brewing's new place in Hershey, Pa., only about half the size.

Somerdale, NJ, 08083
At just under 1.5 square miles, Somerdale is a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of town, one of those small towns in the flow of cars along Route 30 through Camden County. (Not quite 10 miles south of Cherry Hill, Somerdale is accessible off the New Jersey Turnpike from Exit 3.)

Somerdale officials have welcomed Flying Fish, happy the brewery is breathing new life into a 40something-year-old industrial site that has sat empty for the past couple of years, not to mention endured long stretches of sitting idle between uses. When it was occupied, the building housed a handful of manufacturing companies, such as a brake pads, and most recently millwork.

But the site is probably best remembered as the Superior Record Pressing plant, a use that would resonate with folks who remember when 12-inch vinyl LPs and 7-inch 45s were fixtures in the music industry.

Superior was part of Motown Records' vertical integration. The Somerdale site, bought by Motown founder/producer Berry Gordy in the early 1970s, was the forerunner to a sister record plant Motown had in Phoenix, Ariz. (Do an Internet search and you'll find the plant name pops up in recording industry news stories from the mid- to late-1970s in Billboard magazine.)

"It was originally just a warehouse for Motown Records in this region," Gene says. "Motown got so big that they actually started pressing the records here. Then he (Gordy) put a second floor onto the building, kind of a private office area, a kitchen and all of that. They were here for about a decade."

Once the new location is up and running, Flying Fish Version 2.0 will mark the return of automated brewing to South Jersey, something missing since Eastern Brewing, in Hammonton in Atlantic County, closed in the 1980s.

"That was a huge building. If you take the Atlantic City train, you can still see some of the old brewery buildings – they've been converted into offices and stuff. But that would be the last big one," Gene says. "Camden Brewing shut down in the mid-'50s, and I guess Trenton, Champale (Malt Liquor), that was down in the '70s, maybe early '80s."

Editor's note: The record image is a Photoshop creation, a mash-up of a Flying Fish keg collar and Web-grab of a 45 rpm record.

Turtle Stone scores some key financing

A fresh round of financing for Turtle Stone Brewing.

Turtle Stone on Monday got the green light from city officials in Vineland, the planned brewery's host town, for a $50,000 low-interest economic development loan.

Founder Ben Battiata says the cash will help pay for the production brewery's kegging equipment. "That's the last bit of equipment we have to get together," he says.

The kind of financing just approved for Turtle Stone is essentially collected state sales taxes being put back to work in the local economies that generated them.

Loans originated under the city's Urban Enterprise Zone program (part of a likewise-named New Jersey program to boost hard-pressed local economies) are partly funded by the sales taxes, and when those loans are repaid, the pool of available cash for future loans grows.

Turtle Stone applied for the funds around the beginning of last summer and was approved for a round of financing bankrolled by loans that were or are being repaid.

The ever-enduring metaphor for bad beer

Hey, we don't condone toilet humor, but when you discover the wellspring of piss-water beer, er uh bad beer, it's a public service to point it out.

Flying Fish talks move to Exit 3

Once upon a time, like in 1995-96, Flying Fish described its emergence on the craft (back then micro) brewing scene as going from minnow to fish.

Now, the soon-to-be-departing-Cherry Hill brewery, and its 14,000-barrel output, is growing from a tuna into marlin, so to speak. A bigger Fish, indeed.

Via the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild newsletter today and its own website, FF offered some details of its planned move to Somerdale (that's Exit 3 in beer series lingo), where it will make beer on a state-of-the-art 50 barrel German-manufactured brewhouse and draw its juice (or some of it) via rooftop solar panels. (Still in Camden County, Somerdale is just a bottle cap's throw from Cherry Hill.)

A decade and a half after launching with an ESB (one that would in six months' time earn compliments from famed beer hunter Michael Jackson), an extra pale ale (a light beer without being nondescript light), a tasty porter still remembered by a few folks (alas it's gone, morphed into an imperial seasonal with the addition of coffee), and quickly weaving an abbey dubbel into the lineup, Flying Fish is tripling its capacity and promising some changes to its flight of beers. (In our recollection, FF has never brewed a lager. And since you can find head brewer Casey Hughes from time to time enjoying a Sly Fox Pikeland Pilsner at Good Dog in Philadelphia, maybe a pils is in the Fish's future.)

Interesting, too, is the fact that FF's expansion comes amid a surge in New Jersey craft brewing, with the addition of seven new licensees since mid-2009, and only a couple of casualties in that bunch (Newark's Port 44 Brew Pub, which closed last summer after only a year on the scene, and Great Blue Brewing, a nano that sort of started and stopped amid some technical troubles, but hasn't thrown in the towel).

It's a good time to be following brewed-in-Jersey.

Jersey beer trivia: Flying Fish is the only brewery in the state (maybe even the country) to have a cartoon drawn for it by a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist. Two-time Pulitzer winner Steve Breen, who worked at the Asbury Park Press in the 1990s, sketched a Cheshire-like cat perched between a pint of Fish and fish in a bowl, devilishly eyeing the brew Fish, not the finned fish.

Make it big

Some Jersey-brewed big beers to talk about: a first-ever barleywine by Tun Tavern brewer Tim Kelly; the upcoming release of Cricket Hill's pro-am brew; a reprise of Climax Brewing's imperial stout; and a new dimension in take-home beer from Trap Rock.

Thirst for first
Brewers come and go, but sometimes the beers they make end up staying, brewed by the next hands to take over. And sometimes a few of the predecessor's beers stay in mind. Such is the case at the Tun, where memories of Ted Briggs' barleywine have survived for some folks more than four years after Ted left Atlantic City. (Ted's now the brewer at Lander Brewing in Wyoming.)

Amid that scenario, Tim Kelly, who took over for Ted in May 2007, decided to brew a barleywine. Coming in at 11% ABV, it's one of the biggest beers Tim has made professionally, edging out a Belgian tripel made last spring off a pro-am contest sponsored at the Tun, a wee heavy Tim did in 2010 and a Belgian brown he has done for the holidays in years past.

"Rumors keep perpetuating that I did this awesome barleywine and I hadn't done it in a while; they must be confusing me with the former brewer ... So to appease everyone, and also to challenge myself a little, I decided to develop a barleywine," Tim says. "It's dry-hopped with Cascade, aged on French oak; it's been conditioning for a couple months now. It will come out after the pumpkin lager, so this will probably be after Thanksgiving. I'll probably end up bottling about 100 bottles for retail sale, sit on them and let them age and sell them next year."

The pumpkin lager (a 7% brew) is almost gone, and when it does kick, that will open up a tap for a maple black walnut brown ale that Tim brewed a few weeks ago.

Stout royalty
Speaking of pro-ams, next month will see a teaser release of Cricket Hill's imperial stout, brewed from homebrewer Bill Kovach's recipe that bested 32 other brews in the contest Cricket Hill sponsored a year ago.

Brewery co-owner John Watts says the 10.5% ABV stout is set for official release in bombers in January, but fans of the Fairfield brewery will get an early shot at it in a prerelease event to coincide with a mid-December Friday open house.

Folks long familiar with Cricket Hill know the brewery staked out a place on the Garden State beer-scape with a flight of session beers and has been moving deeper into reserve-series big beers, notably among them an 8.5% barleywine done in 2010 that also got some bourbon barrel treatment.

Some of the barrel-aged stock got stashed away for special occasions, John says, so Cricket Hill fans should keep an eye out for them. "I can tell you, a year of aging on that, it's spectacular," he says.

Stout royalty, redux
In nearby Roselle Park, next month brewer Dave Hoffmann plans to turn out bomber bottles of his Hoffmann Doppelbock, a traditional toasty, caramel-like heritage brew (Dave's of German lineage), formerly only available from Climax Brewing as draft and in 64-ounce growlers.

"I've been making it for a long time, for like 10 years now. It's one of my favorite styles. I make it every year for the holidays," Dave says.

Climax Brewing began turning out six-packs last summer thanks to a newly acquired bottler. The bomber-bottled bock marks Climax Brewing working yet another label from its beer lineup into the brewery's new packaging model.

Early next year, look for another Climax brew to come out in 22-ouncers: an imperial stout that will make a reprise after a decade-plus hiatus. To be named Tuxedo Imperial Stout, the brew salutes the black cat, Tuxedo, that has mouse-policed Climax's brewery for 13 years.

"She did her job for all these years, so we take care of her now. She's getting older, so before she dies I want to make a beer for her," Dave says. "It'll probably be 8 or 9% alcohol, big and burly, a little hoppy in the finish ... it's the recipe I made 10 or 12 years ago. I made it twice already, but it was a long time ago, but this time it will be in bottles."

Rock in a bottle
Speaking of bottles, brewer Charlie Schroeder at Trap Rock has racked off about 30 1-liter bottles of the Berkeley Heights brewpub's Jet Fuel Double IPA, a step toward getting Trap Rock's bigger beers into more user-friendly take-home sizes (high-alcohol brews in growlers, especially ones like barleywines, aren't always the best idea, easy to finish in one drinking session).

Jet Fuel (yes, the brew's name speaks to the New York Jets and their followers in the Trap Rock locale) clocks in at 9.5% ABV, stuffed full of Nugget, Challenger, East Kent, Willamette and Bramling Cross hops.

Trap Rock added a third 7-barrel fermenter last month (it now has 3 of them, plus three 15-barrel tanks) to boost capacity, keep pace with growing demand and enable more runs of the bigger, specialty beers.

The long-range plan, Charlie says, also includes having have more of the big brews available in the take-home bottles and to set some of them aside as reserve brews for inclusion on the beer menu.

The new tank has necessitated some rearranging in the brewery space, plus some additional installation, before the bigger beers will be completely integrated into the brewpub's work flow.

NJ lieutenant gov pays a call on Flying Fish

Another sign that Trenton is coming around to craft beer's industry potential.

New Jersey Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno toured Flying Fish's digs on Monday.

FF's tweet off the day says Guadagno, the No. 2 in the Chris Christie administration, talked about craft brewing growth in the Garden State, and founder Gene Muller, via email, called the meeting productive.

Christie's not exactly popular in union and public employee circles, thanks to some budget austerity since taking office last year.

But his administration has been craft-beer friendly. If you recall back in May, Christie signed a proclamation for American Craft Beer Week in New Jersey, coinciding with the national observance.

And now, the lieutenant governor drops in on Flying Fish. The visit puts FF and its growth (plus the planned move a few miles away to Somerdale) in the spotlight, but the state's craft brewing industry should be able to enjoy a bounce off this moment, too.

Craft brewing is a $7 billion-a-year industry nationally, and having the governor's office warm up to Garden State beer-makers could help improve the odds for overhauling the state's brewing industry regulations and put New Jersey on par with New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware, where the rules are more brewer-friendly.

That, obviously, would make New Jersey brewers more competitive.

And who knows, maybe Trenton will fall in love with craft brewing and show it like New York State did to Brooklyn Brewery in 2009.

Keeping tabs on the rising count

Some numbers to peruse ...

The Brewers Association, the trade association representing the majority of U.S. brewing companies, maintains a searchable database of breweries across the country and in the U.S. territories of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

The lists for the states and territories also include breweries in development, a number that comes to 739 (up from 618 the Brewers Association reported back in March, by our count).

The 739 figure is a soft number – more proposed breweries can end up in the database or come off, plus there may be some planned breweries that the Brewers Association is unaware of, while some in the database may no longer be viable, as is the case for a project still listed for Landing, N.J.

Simply put, however, the database addition is certainly a reflection of the growing number of folks looking to get into the craft beer business, hoping to join the more than 1,750 breweries now churning out beer in the U.S.

Here are some breakdowns gleaned from the database:

California, a big state with a large, beer-friendly population, leads with the way with 98 in breweries development, followed by Texas (49) and Colorado (48).

The Garden State clocks in with 17 – nearly as many projects in development as there are craft brewers operating in New Jersey (19).

Odds are, most of the Jersey projects are production breweries of some sort, whether nano or larger.

Brewpubs prove to be a tough path, given municipal – not state – control over bar licensing, a condition that sharply drives up the start-up costs. (Despite that, there currently is a brewpub project in development, Laetare in Monmouth County.)

Nonetheless, 2011 has been one of the busiest for startups in the state since its early days of craft brewing in the mid-1990s. (Still, though, the Brewers Association ranks New Jersey 42nd in breweries per capita, with one brewery for every 439,595 people. The Garden State has about the same number of breweries as Vermont, which has the best per capita ratio. New Jersey's dense population, of course, busts the curve for us.)

The current growth phase over the past two years comes on the heels of a 10-year drought in adding new beer-makers. Changing demographics – the age 21-to-30 crowd is heavily into full-bodied beers of all styles – and bars' stampede to add craft taps are giving a lot of homebrewers and others who entertained the idea to start a brewery the confidence that they can make a go of it.

"New Jersey is not so much making up for a lost decade, as simply picking up where they left off," says industry watcher Lew Bryson, who co-authored New Jersey Breweries (2008) with Mark Haynie.

"Beer bars have been doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and now that some of the more conservative-minded beer sellers have been convinced that this 'microbrew thing' has legs, there's opportunity for a small brewer," Lew says. "Is it a startup bubble? Some of them aren't going to make it, sure, but that's going to happen in any surge like this, in any industry. Three steps forward, one step back. Demand keeps rising; you need more capacity to fill it, and you need more new beers to drive it."

Jersey snapshot
State regulators, so far in 2011, have licensed four production breweries – two nanos (Great Blue and Cape May Brewing) and two beer-makers with brewhouses at 15 barrels or greater (Carton and Kane Brewing).

Three more are sprinting to toward the finish line – Flounder, Tuckahoe and Turtle Stone – and expect to get the green light to begin making beer by the end of the year.

Much farther behind them are ones like Blackthorn Brewing, a planned father-daughter enterprise, and Black River Brewing, a planned Pennsylvania project with ties to New Jersey.

Chip Town and his daughter, Jacqui, of Jackson in Ocean County, are still siting a location for Blackthorn Brewing but envision their brewery of malty English and Irish ales ending up in their home county or southern Monmouth County.

Part of the banking world for 30 years, Chip, 55, has been making beer at home for the past 15 years; Jacqui, 25, a recent graduate of The College of New Jersey with degrees in marketing and chemistry, has been homebrewing seriously for three years.

(Jacqui came up with the brewery name, a nod to Ireland and the iconic walking sticks; Chip's mother's family is from County Roscommon, in the northwest of Ireland. The Towns also maintain a blog about their project.)

On the drawing boards for a couple of years now, Chip says plans call for Blackthorn to have a 20-barrel brewhouse to feed 40-barrel fermenters and hit the market in bottles and draft. The Towns are in the process of completing their business plan and will then pursue private investors.

"Once I have capital in my fist, I'll be out looking for warehouse space, hiring a brewer and start ordering stainless," Chip says. He doesn't expect problems with finding a location. "I've been working with a commercial real estate broker (who says) there's a lot of quality food-grade commercial space available out there because of the economy."

Blackthorn has been able to tap industry insiders for advice, something Chip is grateful for, noting Jersey brewers and their counterparts across the country have readily answered questions he's had.

"I've spoken to people in Texas, New York, Colorado ... Gene Muller (from Flying Fish) has been a huge help to me. He's let me pick his brain," Chip says. "Jesse Ferguson at Carton has been helpful; they've just gone through everything we're going through."

The Towns expect Blackthorn beer to find a niche in the local market. "Seeing what Mike Kane and Augie and Chris Carton are making – they're doing the West Coast styles – no one seems to be focusing on the maltier profile," Chip says.

Jersey vs. Pennsylvania, a business decision
Dave Grosch lives in Flemington in Hunterdon County, where he owns D&K Specialty Coffee, a wholesale coffee distribution company that supplies restaurants. He's also into brewing beer at home, quite active in the hobby over the past seven years. Dave, 45, even got to lend a hand at River Horse Brewing on a day the Lambertville brewery was making a batch of its flagship lager.

He's done well in homebrew competitions across the Delaware River, last year earning the title Homebrewer of the Year in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Friends suggested Dave go commercial. A fellow homebrewer in his club circles, Bryan Clayton, 30, of Lansdale, Pa., had designs on going pro, too. (Bryan is a project manager for a clinical research company.)

The two teamed up for Black River Brewing, a production brewery project they want to equip with a 20-barrel brewhouse and locate in Bucks County, Pa. They're eyeing the greater Philadelphia market, hoping to enter it with a Vienna lager, saison, IPA, and porter in bottles and draft.

Dave says they're working on a business plan and are about to begin raising cash for the project; then they'll pin down a location.

They chose Bryan's home state because the business climate is friendlier to craft brewing than New Jersey is. Among their concerns is New Jersey's restrictions on retail sales from the brewery, long a complaint among some Garden State craft brewers.

In Pennsylvania, Black River would be able to sell from the brewery tasting room everything from pints to kegs, so long as it adheres to seating requirements and sells some quantity of food. That's not possible in New Jersey, where production brewers' retail allowance is currently restricted to two six-packs or two growlers for consumption off premises.

"The main advantage is, you can be like a bar, but you're not trying to be the corner bar," Dave says.

Such sales, he says, would be vital revenue stream in addition to distribution to bars on either side of the Delaware, and in Pennsylvania state stores and packaged goods stores in New Jersey.

The brewery's name, incidentally, is a nod to the Lamington River in New Jersey and the Black River in Ireland, where Bryan has family roots.

Still a nano, just a bigger nano

A capacity boost at Cape May Brewing Company.

The nanobrewer located in Lower Township in Cape May County has stepped up its brewing batch size to 1.5 barrels and has added five 2-barrel fermenters that will allow the brewery to phase out the nine 35-gallon fermenters it began operations with back in late spring.

The quick jump to a tripled brewing capacity is part of Cape May's business plan, says co-founder Ryan Krill.

The original brewing setup – designed Chris Henke, the company's brewer, and fashioned from repurposed half-barrel kegs – was directed more at getting the nanobrewery licensed and up and running in the craft beer market than it was to brew and maintain a flow of beer inventory.

"The new setup is stainless steel tanks Chris got from a stainless distributor and got welded with fittings. It's more efficient," says co-founder Ryan Krill, who took some time on Friday to talk about the brewery's jump from brewing 12- to 13-gallon batches to 46 gallons.

Other changes include the addition of a second cold box and regularly scheduled brewery tours. The tours began in July as announced-date events but are now set for each Saturday (noon to 4 p.m.). The tours have proved popular, Ryan says, drawing crowd sizes of 100 people during the allotted hours.

Also, the brewery has also joined the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild, one of three newly licensed craft breweries in the state to do so. (Kane Brewing and Carton Brewing, both in Monmouth County, are the other two.)

Cape May is still supplying a single bar account (the oceanfront Cabanas in Cape May), but Ryan says the tiny beer company that he started with his dad, Robert, and college friend Chris has seen a gradual increase in production.

The brewery produced 16 barrels from July to September, in the form of their flagship Cape May IPA, a one-off dark IPA (a beer that was done on a lark, so it's highly improbable to ever see it return), a porter, stout and wheat beer.

Heading into the Thanksgiving holiday you can expect a cranberry wheat beer, Ryan says.

Elsewhere
Speaking of Carton Brewing, the Atlantic Highlands production brewery that came online in August will begin conducting brewery tours this weekend, Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. (Judging from their website, this week they pilot-brewed a milk stout – Carton of Milk Stout – a brew that was always in the company game plan.)

Additionally, Carton is teaming with Kane Brewing, the Ocean Township production brewery that opened last July, for a benefit beer dinner on Oct. 14th.

Chocolate & Beer, Beer & Chocolate

Chocolate stout, chocolate porter ...

When it comes to putting chocolate in beer, those two styles are ready candidates.

Which is why Iron Hill brewer Chris LaPierre, looking for something a little different, opted out of those styles and turned a brown ale into a chocolate brown ale loaded with 22 pounds of dark Belgian chocolate for an October beer release at the Maple Shade brewpub.

The beer and a truffle, made with wort from Iron Hill's mash tun by chocolatier Mike Collins of Reily's Candy in Medford, were the centerpiece of an event this past Wednesday night that also saw a selection of Reily chocolates* paired with IH beers.

The video gives you the backstory to how this fusion came about. But the quick version goes something like this: Chris grew up in Medford and knew of Reily's, a 40-year fixture in the Burlington County town. Mike, who's been with Reily's for almost half of the shop's existence, is a Iron Hill mug club member and discovered IH beers at the company's West Chester, Pa., location.

Combining their crafts seemed like a natural idea, and the result is Reily's Chocolate Ale and the Iron Hill truffle.

*The pairings at the October 5th event:

• 70% Cacao with Gogi berries & Abbey Dubbel
• Tierra Missou Truffle & Bourbon Wee Heavy
• Jalapeno Chocolate & Ironbound Ale
• Vanilla Caramel & Oktoberfest
• Bourbon-Soaked Cherry Cordial & Cherry Vanilla Porter
• Iron Hill Chocolate with Caramelized Wort & Reilly’s Chocolate Ale

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

Apple founder Steve Jobs died yesterday, and if you own an iPad, iPhone or an iPod, you can't escape how profound the guy's vision shaped your life.

Jobs knew what you wanted before you did. And that's how Apple made really cool stuff, game-changing stuff.

In a trickle-down fashion, Jobs shaped craft beer enthusiasts' lives, too. Just look at all the beer apps for the smart phones that are out there now, then remember that the iPhone revolutionized mobile phones and turned us all into a gadget-wielding bunch.

On a much more local level, the stuff that sprang from Jobs' mind has had a hand in New Jersey craft beer, from its leading edge to its current growth phase.

Flying Fish set up shop in Cherry Hill 15 years ago with Macs as its business computer platform (and on the Web a year ahead of that).

Before Carton Brewing began sending beer out the door this summer in Atlantic Highlands, you would find Augie Carton enthusiastically using an iPad to show off versions of the brewery's marketing materials and tap handle prototypes.

And finally, not to be self-serving, this blog site has always spun from Apple gear: Every word, image and video has made it to the Web thanks to a Mac or Apple software.

So if you're enjoying a beer today, take a moment to toast a visionary.

Hold up your end of the bargain

River Horse Brewing holds its annual Oktoberfest from 1-6 p.m. on Saturday at the brewery on Lambert Lane in Lambertville.

The brew lineup for this pay-as-you-go event is Lager, Special Ale, Tripel Horse, Hop A Lot Amus, Hop Hazard, Hipp O Lantern and their new Brewer's Reserve, a dunkelweizen; the featured musical entertainment is Ludlow Station, the jam band head brewer Chris Rakow plays guitar in. (Check 'em out here, playing at last April's ShadFest.)

Unlike past years, the 2011 edition is a one-day-only affair (rain date is Sunday; past editions of the fest were spread over the weekend), and the brewery is calling on its legions of fans to lend a hand to a couple of local food pantries that are struggling to keep up with demand for their help in the flat economy.

So if you're going, pack along some of these items, and consider it holding up your end of the bargain in return for the great gig that River Horse puts on ...

• Canned soups, tuna, salmon, chicken, vegetables
• Canned or dried beans
• Rice and whole grains
• Pasta
• Tomato sauce
• 100% fruit juices
• Condiments - ketchup, mustard, salad dressings, etc.
• Baking mixes
• Cereal- hot and cold
• Baby food
• Sugar-free items (juice mixes, Jello, pudding, etc.)
• Dog and cat food

Cheers.

Turtle Stone projects December licensing

Craft beer's return to New Jersey's southwestern reaches looks to be entering a homestretch, as the planned Vineland-based brewery Turtle Stone Brewing expects to get its brewhouse set up this fall and potentially licensed to start making beer toward the end of the year.

If successful with that pace, Turtle Stone will become the third production brewer licensed in the Garden State this year (the others are Kane Brewing and Carton Brewing, both in Monmouth County); 2011, as a growth year, is on track to see the most craft brewers – seven – get the green light from regulators since 1996, when craft brewing was still getting established in New Jersey.

Turtle Stone founder Ben Battiata (that's Ben above on the right, talking to Mark Haynie of Mid-Atlantic Brewing News) took some time last week to talk about the progress with his brewery, the first in Cumberland County since Blue Collar Brewing ceased operations in Vineland seven years ago.

BSL: You had your 15-barrel brewhouse and fermenters in storage for a while. Where are they now?
BB: Right now they're in our brewery facility. The next step is getting our floor done and we'll be able to get the equipment set up ... I've got to do some electrical and plumbing work, set up my cold room, set up my tanks. Then we'll be set to go.

BSL: The regulators with the state, they're telling you early December?
BB: They've reassured us – as long as our equipment is set up to their satisfaction when they come out and do their inspections – we'll be approved by December.

BSL: You're so close you can taste it?
BB: I'm getting very anxious. It's really close.

BSL: You also redid the company logo ...
BB: We did. We ran a contest online through a graphic arts website. I think there was 120 different designs to choose from and we did select a design. It actually turned out nice. I like it a lot and we got a lot of good feedback on it.

BSL: Has anything changed with the beers that you want to enter the market with?
BB: Not really. We still want to go with the jasmine green tea blond (ale), and we still want to do the American stout. They're probably going to be the two first beers we put out there. I'd like to work in a winter seasonal beer; that's in the works right now. One of the first seasonals, or specialty beers, we're going to do is – Vineland is considered the dandelion capital of the world – so we're going to make a saison using dandelions and lemongrass. It's going to be like a nice spring seasonal beer.

BSL: You're a big supporter of locally produced commodities. What are your thoughts on that, and who out there in the wider world that is your neighborhood of South Jersey can assist you with that?
BB: Being located in South Jersey, we have quite a bit of farmers just in the town we're in alone. I know a lot of beekeepers. Our honey jasmine green tea beer is going to use local honey. If I could get any other locally grown products to put into that I will. It's difficult to get as much barley that we need locally, so I don't know if that's going to be the case. With the dandelion beer, I have some growers right now who are going to grow the dandelions for me for that particular beer.

BSL: Besides the honey and dandelions, what are some other possible commodities?
BB: What I plan on doing for our fall beer, rather than a pumpkin ale, as an alternative, we plan to use local sweet potatoes, maple syrup and some additional spices. It's actually based on a sweet potato casserole recipe that I make every year. So I'm making a liquid version of that.

BSL: You're raising money, via a website, for packaging equipment. The $30,000 goal isn't a deal breaker, is it?
BB: No, no. The Kickerstarter thing is a campaign we decided to do. It's based on more creative-minded ideas. We actually had to apply and get approved – our idea actually had to get approved by this particular company. It's money to assist towards probably our bottling system. Initially we're going to start with kegging. But the money itself is going help to purchase our packaging equipment, which we've yet to purchase.

BSL: Have you looked into getting financial assistance through that program backed by Boston Beer?
BB: We did actually look into it. Our county is too far south. They do actually approve certain areas of New Jersey (where) they will process these loans. For us, we're too far south.

BSL: These days, no one gets into the craft brewing game without doing some serious back-channel work – outreach to places like bars, the places that can push the product. How have you networked?
BB: Our area is a little deprived of craft beer (bars). We're going to push the local idea. That's actually good enough for a lot of these bars that don't really carry craft beers. They want to carry something that people have some connection to, whether it's the town that they live in that the beer's coming from, or the neighboring town. That's something that I think is going to help us a lot. Everybody is welcoming to the idea. We've gotten such good reception.

As long as we've been planning this – which has been over five years at least – a lot of people have been anticipating, have been waiting, so there's also that aspect. I think once we're out in the market, they're going to be jumping for it.