March of the beer fans

It’s been a week since the Philly Craft Beer Festival, and here’s our look back on it in moving images and sound.

A word of thanks to a lot people: Greg Zaccardi and everyone at High Point Brewing for some really key support; festival organizers Starfish Junction Productions and TotalBru for letting us shoot; Glenn Bernabeo of River Horse for taking the time to do an interview; Joe Sixpack himself, Don Russell, for likewise sitting for an interview (we’ve got some more footage of Don taking about the origins of his Philly Beer Guide book that we’ll be posting soon); and Gregg Bevan of VideoLink in Philly, who, by chance, noticed our work online, and gave us a shout-out and a compliment, and lent some technical advice and even a helping hand. It was greatly appreciated.

So now here we are, a week into March … Philly Beer Week has already notched one day done (the official Friday, March 7th, start), with nine more bottles of beer events left on the wall. (Pitty about the crappy weather on Friday; hope the turnouts for those first-day events didn’t suffer.)

And down the shore, beer enthusiasts will be trolling the aisles at the Atlantic City festival (tickets are still available) today and tomorrow, so get out your funky hats, T-shirts and beer goggles and enjoy the show that is uniquely Atlantic City.

Remember when talking beer, if you describe a brew as having hints of licorice, chocolate, nuttiness, citrus notes ... well you could very well be on the mark.

Or navel-gazing.

We prefer the less Socratic Homer J. Simpson way to discuss beer:

• "Here's to alcohol, the cause of — and solution to — all life's problems.
• "Homer no function beer well without."
• "Son, when you participate in sporting events, it's not whether you win or lose: it's how drunk you get."
• "Son, a woman is like a beer. They smell good, they look good, you'd step over your own mother just to get one! But you can't stop at one. You wanna drink another woman!"

Homer: Got any of that beer that has candy floating in it? You know, Skittlebrau?
Apu: Such a beer does not exist, sir. I think you must have dreamed it.
Homer: Oh. Well, then just give me a sixpack and a couple of bags of Skittles.

Of course we jest.

So after AC, we’re hitting tomorrow’s Brewer’s Plate in Philly. Beyond that, we may check out the Tippler’s Tour at Once Upon A Nation on the 12th in the Philly Beer Week lineup. Why not embrace those long-lost days when beer was a go-to potable beverage because water was, often enough, teeming with more microbes than a funked up petri dish?

Then it's on to the Real Ale Festival at Triumph Brewing in Old City on the 16th, the period at the end of the sentence that is Philly Beer Week.

Beer. Live it.

Here a beer, there a beer

And this weekend, everywhere a beer. It’s busy in just about every direction of the compass

Westward ho!
Philly Beer Week officially starts Friday evening. Don Russell whose new book, “Philly Beer Guide” was just released, leads a sampling of 22 locally produced craft beers at The Markeplace at East Falls in, of course, Philadelphia.

But wait there’s more: Flying Fish’s head brewer, Casey Hughes, is packing a firkin of ESB for a meet-and-greet at the Good Dog Bar.

Check the Philly Beer Week site for more events. And trust us, there’s plenty more for the next nine days.

Meanwhile on this side of the Delaware, you have a couple of options to sate your beer wanderlust: maibock and lottabock, er uh, lots of beer.

North by northwest
Friends of the blog High Point Brewing (Butler) debut their maibock (draft only) on Saturday with a ceremonial Austrian oak barrel tapping at 2 p.m. We were at their Oktoberfest barrel tapping, so we can tell you for certain it’s great beer served up with good fun. Bring a growler. Also look for High Point's winter wheat beer at Dawson Street Pub in Manayunk, Pa., on Monday (March 10th) for the doublebock bonanza, a Philly Beer Week event, and at the Long Island Spring Beer Fest March 29 at Nassau Coliseum. (From left: Tina, Greg and Capt. Mike)

Goin’ South
Want some action? Head to Atlantic City, the Celebration of the Suds for 2008. AC’s two-day beerfest has grown year to year, pulling in crowds from all around (last year, we ran into a lot of people who came down from New York). Flying Fish and River Horse this year join the Tun Tavern as Jersey-based brewers pouring at the festival. Speaking of River Horse, the Lambertville brewery debuted a Belgian Double White wheat beer (7% ABV, spiced with orange, corriander and lemon) at the Philly Craft Beer Festival last weekend. From what we saw, it was the pick of those in the crowd who stopped by River Horse's station.

There’s plenty of entertainment and, of course, beer. We didn’t see Hi Point Pub (an Absecon bar/eatery tucked just off Route 30) listed as one of the vendors, but if they are there, stop by their booth and sample their crab bisque. You’ll be glad you did.

And finally, video of the Philly Craft Beer Festival is being distilled, er uh, edited and should be up by Friday. Here’s a fast-grab teaser.



Cheers …

Cash, flow

We’ve kept some distance from weighing in on the hop shortage (bad harvest, less acreage in production) and that sharp spike in malt prices (farmers growing corn for ethanol).

No one likes wallowing in bad news. Maybe we were just hoping the whole thing would go away or sort itself out before too long.

Wishful thinking.

And then this item tumbled into the inbox last week, throwing us more of a scare than higher beer prices we’ve seen lately: Krogh’s brewpub in Sparta, in New Jersey’s northwest, announced that the hop shortage was forcing it to suspend sales of beer to go.

Ah crap. Now we're witnessing hop shortage affecting beer availability (albeit beyond the pub’s pints at the bar), not just higher prices.

But then, thankfully, this happened: No sooner than they iced growler and keg sales, Krogh’s did an about-face, saying they could oblige folks coming in with their half-gallon jugs.

“After a few changes to brewing schedules, and acquisition of an additional supply of these key ingredients, we are happy to announce we are once again able to accommodate "To Go" sales of beer …” Krogh’s said in the follow-up announcement.

Whew!

But half-barrels and sixtels are still unavailable, Krogh’s says in its emails, adding that the situation could last up to a year before things return to normal.

After that, we started checking around a little bit to see if any other Jersey brewers were looking at workarounds to manage availability.

Happily no, or at least among the clutch of brewpubs we surveyed. Just some higher prices (25 to 50 cents her per pint).

The Ship Inn (Milford) is still putting its Brit style ales to go in their signature boxes (kinda like wine in a box) and doing growlers. (Their pint price went up from $3.95 to $4.25, by the way.)

Meanwhile at J.J. Bitting (Woodbridge), Mike Cerami says the higher price at his brewpub (from $4 to $4.50) is only the second hike in 11 years. Mike credits his brewer, August Lightfoot, with aggressively working to make sure the pub’s hop supply was safe and sound so it could keep offering the range of beers patrons have come to expect. (J.J.’s has its O’Halloran’s Irish Red, a 4.7% ABV session ale, on for St. Paddy’s Day; also look for their Barley Legal barleywine and an IPA.)

Tim Kelly at the Tun Tavern in Atlantic City says pints went up to $4.50. Our advice, join the VIP club there and save a buck per pint. (Last we check, all you had to do was sign up.)

Something else we found: Despite the double whammy with hops and malt, the bigger beer styles, like IPAs and strong ales, weren’t being sacrificed because of the extra malt or hops they require. Case in point: Harvest Moon has a Belgian strong ale (8-8.5% ABV) coming on tap (if it’s not already), and another big Belgian beer in the works. Brewer Matt McCord says patrons have been supportive in the face of higher prices.

Matt adds that it helps to get the word out about what’s driving the increase. And others say the tale of hops and small-batch breweries, where locking in prices three years out isn't affordable (like the giant brewer A-B can do), goes something like this:

Small-batch brewers (who often work on thin margins to begin with) last year had to make a snap decision and commit to hops at sharply higher prices. How much? Suppliers couldn't immediately say, but not committing meant the risk of not having hops. (An example of sticker shock: It’s costing Flying Fish in Cherry Hill a skyrocketing 80 grand just for the Styrian Goldings it uses in its seasonal Farmhouse Summer Ale.)

Then there's malt costs. Sowing barley has taken a back seat to corn and soybeans. Brewers need malted barley, the government thinks corn figures into the next fuel source (yet, sugar cane yields better results as far as ethanol goes) ... The commodity shift has picked craft brewers' pockets.

Wheat beer brewer High Point Brewing says their barley went from $20 to $35 per 55-pound bag; owner Greg Zacardi Butler says the brewery uses 15 to 20 of those bags per 15 barrels of beer. (Prices for the noble hops he uses jumped from $5 a pound to $20 to $25. Greg says High Point luckily overordered hops for 2007, so they got plenty at the lower price point. Still, the higher prices bring pressure.)

So yeah, we’re paying more for beer, a buck or so more per sixpack at the liquor store, and that quarter to half-dollar more for pints at the brewpubs. But don’t shove everything into the woe unto us column just yet.

Pint prices we surveyed hadn’t hit 5 bucks yet – you could pay as much as 6 bucks for a pint of Sam Adams at traditional bars – and folks at Triumph Brewing’s Philly location told us back in December they hoped to hold the line on pint prices if at all possible.

Also, consider this: Craft beer prices hadn’t really risen much for some time. And while no one likes paying more, your money is going for a better product: fresh, more flavorful beers.

So save any bitching for gas prices.

Getting their fill, Part 2

Flying Fish's new bottler is now up and humming.

We swung by the brewery in Cherry Hill last week and shot some footage as a run of Hopfish was getting the glass treatment.

A few years back, we shot the brewing, kegging and bottling processes at FF, but the tapes sat as an unfinished project (work schedules, other commitments and an external hard drive crash put a chill on turning the footage into something).

So when we heard the new bottler would be installed last month, it seemed like a good opportunity to dust off our 2004 footage of the old bottler (installed in 1996) and work up a short piece with shots of the new machine. That's a run of Grand Cru in the old footage, by the way.

All that was left was to come up with a presentation idea. And that came while watching a Simpson's episode in which the animators simulated an old movie. The result is "Beer Under Glass." Runtime: 3:49

Cheers.

PS: Thanks once again to FF.

Got you covered

While paging through some of the beer sites we normally check, we happened up this image.

It's the cover art of the New Jersey beer compendium Lew Bryson and Mark Haynie are making progress toward putting into your hands.

(We gave it the Apple iWeb-reflection Photoshop technique, which, yes, we're a fan of. And to think, just a mere seven or eight years ago adding scan lines over images was all the rage.)

As we noted earlier this week, and as Lew says on his blog, publication is still targeted this August.

Eat Drink Man Woman

These are some promotional clips we were asked to create for The Brewer’s Plate.

We’re very much flattered and honored that a topnotch, benefit event like this invited us to contribute something. We went last year and loved the food, the craft beers and what the event stands for (it’s a fundraiser for White Dog Community Enterprise’s Fair Food program), so when asked to help out, we happily said yes. A note of thanks to Benjamin – Ralph Archbold – Franklin, who contributed his time, and the Independence Visitor Center for allowing us to videotape there. Check out Breakfast with Ben some time. It plays to all ages.

Even if we weren’t involved, albeit in our small way, we’d still make this our don’t-miss event of the March 7th-16th Philly Beer Week.

And since March is overflowing with beer offerings (the Philly Craft Beer Festival is March 1st, while the Atlantic City beer fest is March 8th and 9th ), you might find yourself pressed for time, or cash to part with. So if you need to narrow your options to one, the BP again gets our vote. (Tickets are $50 for general admission – $60, after Feb. 15; and $100 for the premium, VIP admission.)

It’s bigger this year, 21 breweries paired with 21 restaurants in small stations, up from the 18 of each last year that attendees toured, sampling brews that complimented the food dishes. And it’s now at the Independence Visitor Center, at 6th and Market streets, having moved from the Reading Terminal Market.

Jersey beers on tap
A theme that runs through The Brewer’s Plate is locally grown and produced/locally served. The participating restaurants represent the cream of the Philadelphia region, and the brews come from a 150-mile radius of Philly, which means Jersey has a presence at the event: Climax Brewing, Cricket Hill, Flying Fish, River Horse and Triumph.

Cricket Hill and River Horse are newcomers to the BP and are serving American Ale and Tripel Horse Belgian style ale, respectively. Look for Flying Fish’s Farmhouse Summer Ale, a porter from Climax and a rye bock from Triumph (which as we know enjoys locations in Princeton, Philly and New Hope, Pa). Pint trek: Eric Nutt from Triumph tells us the Philly location is pouring a rauchbock now. Where there's smoke, there's good beer.

Aside from our home state brews, we’re looking forward to offerings from Troegs, Victory, Sly Fox, Iron Hill, Nodding Head and Yards. But truly, you can’t miss with any of the breweries that will be there.

Real food, real beer, real advice
Also on hand will be Brooklyn Brewery’s brewmaster and noted food and beer expert, Garrett Oliver (author of The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food), and Marnie Old, who, as one of the country’s leading wine educators and Philadelphia’s highest profile sommelier, is more widely known for grapes than hops. But she also knows beer, and last fall the Brewer's Association named her one of its three annual Beer Journalism Awards winners. Marnie was recognized for her article Beer Takes the High Road in the June 2007 issue of Santé.

She and Garrett will be leading tutorials on how to match beer and food. Classic pairings, we say.

Like the Brewer’s Plate and the Philly-area beer scene.

Can we get an amen?

Check out the recent sermon on the mash tun by Cricket Hill brewmaster Rick Reed.

When we called Rick last week to find out what his crew was taking to the Brewer’s Plate food and beer pairing in Philadelphia March 9 (Rick’s taking his American Ale), he steered us to this clip. (Runtime – 6:33; wish we had shot it, but alas, no we didn’t.)

First things first, it’s funny. Rick’s a humorous guy. He once told us that choosing between Bud and Coors Light was like deciding which Menendez brother you liked best.

Secondly, there is a point to the Lewis Black-like tirade Rick delivers during that Friday evening tour at CH’s digs in Fairfield (in Essex County). Watch the clip, he’s straight up in his commentary. (And yeah, labels that turn blue when the beer is cold? If you need that gimmick, well you probably also need that velvet rope at the bank to find the teller windows. Might we suggest Coors create a label that goes ding! like a microwave when the beer is cold.)

Picking up where Rick leaves off
Back during the NFL playoffs (remember them?), Daily Show sidekick Rob Riggle was shilling for Budweiser (A-B has a brewery in Newark, as we all know).

Rob’s funny in his blowsy and deadpan comic delivery on Jon Stewart’s show (his stuff from Iraq was hilarious). So, to be clear, we’re not shooting the messenger, just the message, which we found to be misleading and dumbed down.

In the spots, Rob, with chum-like bearing, walks us through what’s so haute about Budweiser, that it’s a difficult beer to make with a multistep process (how is it more difficult to brew than, say, Cricket Hill’s East Coast Lager? And brewing is a multistep process to begin with); that dark beers are cloudy (ever hear of wit beer? Did you know chill haze is perfectly fine in, say, British ales?); that cloudy beers are flawed (again, wheat beer anyone … kellerbier ... again, chill haze … ); and suggesting that all import beers are dark (wrong, and just not worth more preaching to the choir here; but for pete’s sake, even sour is a valid beer taste/style … and funny that the Bud spots bring up imports and dark beers to illustrate inferior when A-B has imports and amber beers in its portfolio) …

Disclosure: We never drank/never liked Bud during those old dark days of yesterbeer; we drank Stroh’s, and eventually Heineken, before moving on to flavor country, thanks to the craft beer movement. So yeah, it’s easy for us to shred Bud and not get winded.

So why throw a Lewis Black spaz over the Bud spots?
Well, you’d think the whole Bud/Coors/Miller vs. craft beer debate was worn out by now and not worth reprising. That is, until a misinformation campaign promoting a mass-produced, bland (cheap) beer pops up.

If we wanted to be really shrill, we’d say that drinking Bud is like being stuck watching "American Idol" when you want “The Wire” or “Deadwood.” Or like being forced to listen to Van Halen when Sonny Landreth has the guitar chops you need. Or that Bud is to beer what Olive Garden is to Italian cuisine.

But we won’t go that far. Because, like sour, hazy, roasted, hoppy or dark, bland is a beer style.

Just not ours. And hopefully not yours, either.

Milestones, Part 2

We’re not much on crowing about ourselves, but Beer-Stained Letter marked its first anniversary last week, Jan. 31st to be exact.

To give ourselves a perfunctory pat on the back, we headed to Firewaters in Atlantic City, not so much to toast the past year and usher in the next, but to dig into a couple pints of Baltic Thunder and chat with Victory Brewing sales rep Pete Danford, who was on hand for the draft release of the imperial porter at the bar in the Tropicana casino.

Baltic Thunder has grabbed some blogosphere limelight, owing to its artisanal Heavy Weight Perkuno’s Hammer ancestry (a bit of the beer’s history can be found here), and has now made its way to Jersey taps. Look for the dark clouds to form over P.J. Whelihan's in Haddonfield this month and High Street Grill in Mount Holly on Leap Day. It’s also in bomber bottles at package goods stores with good beer sensibilities.

Want three words to summarize Baltic Thunder? Try rich, velvety and inviting. But a heads up, Thunder has a clap, too, at 8.5% ABV. So, you can toss in a fourth word, too: hearty.

While at Firewaters, we ran into Mark Haynie, a founding member of the NJ Association of Beerwriters (more on that in a minute). Mark came to the BT pouring armed with a cellared bottle of Perkuno’s Hammer, offering a handy taste reference for those at the bar sipping Thunder. Many thanks, Mark. Hope to cross paths again soon, owe you a pint.

Comparatively speaking, Perkuno’s alcohol flavors are more up front than Baltic Thunder’s. And since we were watching “High Fidelity” when we wrote this, and patting ourselves on the back for having Jimmy Cliff on our iPod (watch the movie, you’ll know what we’re talking about), we'll say we can’t decide if PH is the Bob Dylan version of “All Along The Watchtower,” while BT is the seminal Jimi Hendrix cover. Whatever, both make the charts.

Yearling
Speaking of Mark Haynie, he’s working on the New Jersey Breweries book with Lew Bryson. Mark says their efforts are being edited now, and Lew told us last month that it’ll probably be August (or sometime thereafter) when the book becomes available.

Speaking of this blog and books about New Jersey-brewed beer, writing a guide to the Garden State’s breweries, brewpubs and homebrewers market was the reason BSL jumped into the über crowded field of beer blogging.

But early on, it became obvious that gathering string for a book would take us a minimum of two years, three was more like it, to make up for five-year a gap in our tracking of the region’s beer scene. That’s about half the life of Jersey’s craft beer movement (we blame the hiatus on a mind-numbing five-plus years of working at the AP in Trenton and the subsequent demanding, all-over-the-place schedule; thankfully we said farewell to that insanity).

Nonetheless, when Lew announced in August 2007 that he was undertaking NJ Breweries, well it only made sense to stand clear and let someone with the time in, contacts and publisher do their thing. (Lew has written books on Pennsylvania breweries; likewise for Maryland, Virginia, Delaware and New York, and is/was a Keystone State member/founder of NJ Association of Beerwriters.)

We’re looking forward to the finished work on Jersey. And if you support the endeavor, buy a copy not from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders but at a book-signing; you’ll be supporting the author directly that way.

On camera
Meanwhile for BSL, stepping away from the book ambitions freed us up to pursue more video projects with New Jersey beer & brewers, which rather emerged as a passion and focus for us. (If you’ve appeared in the handful of vids we’ve done thus far, or have agreed to participate in an upcoming one, then we owe a huge debt of thanks.) Our favorite video over the past year was Oktoberfest (even though it’s a little off the top in the approach to the topic); our best work was the Brewers Guild festival on the battleship USS New Jersey. Our most successful videos have been on Rich Wagner’s Colonial brewing demonstration and an animation on Cricket Hill’s dart-throwing challenge, assembled from stills shot at the Philly Craft Beer Festival a year ago.

And as we noted last month, we have a few video projects under production now, plus more on the way. The camera never blinks.

Lastly, the focus of this blog has been more chamber of commerce-like to the Garden State’s microbrewing industry, championing those efforts, and not trying to gaze upon them with critiques and evaluation. For a state of nearly 9 million people, you’d think New Jersey would have a higher profile in the industry. Alas, no. Jersey’s micros and brewpubs are somewhat spread out, scattered, and we remain a state where the blandness of Bud, Coors and Miller still claims legions of drinkers, and observations like "at least they have Sam Adams (or Guinness) on tap" make you pine for the successes of Pennsylvania (and have you wishing you were in craft beer-friendly Philadelphia more often). Sigh.

So cheers and thanks to everyone who clicked on our site over the past year or took a phone call from us. Check out our new logo, but more importantly have a beer and salute the choice that craft beer provides.

Milestones

Atlantic City’s Tun Tavern celebrates a decade this year, chalking up some longevity as a topflight spot for fresh beer (and good food) at the Jersey shore.

The Tun marked the milestone with a brewmaster’s 10th anniversary dinner last week that paired its brews with some great food (the wild boar bacon wrapped langostinos were excellent; ditto for the crab and asparagus crêpes). The brewpub has also released a commemorative, whiskey barrel-aged grand cru. (It’s 20 bucks for VIP club members, 25 for non.)

In a place where casinos boast fine dining to go with the tumbling dice, there’s a bit of a blindspot on the beer side in the day-to-day of Atlantic City.

Sure, the classics are available. But with Guinness so commonplace now, places like the Irish Pub and The Trinity (just off the boardwalk at St. James Place and in the Quarter at Tropicana; and in the Pier off Caesar’s, respectively) seem so 1990s and shopworn.

That’s why if you’re a beer fan, the Tun and Firewaters bar (at the Tropicana) are the islands on the island, so to speak.

Speaking of Firewaters, they’re the only establishment in the shore area that has Victory Brewing’s newly released Baltic Thunder on tap, and will feature the imperial porter at a party from 7-10 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 31st. (Hors d’oeuvres of pepperoni and cheese will also be available.)

But back to the Tun for a moment.

If you’re a regular, you may have noticed some of the tweaks to the beer menu that brewer Tim Kelly has slipped in during the eight or nine months he’s been the Tun’s brewmaster. The brown ale is now a Belgian-style brown that’s worth the trek. Meanwhile, the Leatherneck stout tastes silkier, smoother, and has come down in alcohol content to that of nice session beer. (Tim’s also pouring a coffee and cream stout. It’s not quite Mackeson’s XXX, but it’s worth trying a pint.)

Coming soon is Tim’s doublebock. It’s still lagering right now, and if you made it to the anniversary dinner you got a preview of that malty brew. It’s still a little young, but by March it ought to be on target.

Spring is coming.

Two sides of one river

We’ve been spending a lot of time on the other side of the Delaware lately, Philadelphia in particular.

That’s where some commitments have taken us, and in the process, allowed us to enjoy the great beer (and food) that Philly taps to back up its boast of being the cradle of the American beer experience.

(Note to Philly Beer Week organizers – Our suggested catch phrase: “America’s best beer drinking city… And yes, it is the beer talking.”)

Philly and beer are among some of the projects we’re working on, namely some promo clips for White Dog Café and its fund-raiser, The Brewer’s Plate (March 9 at the Independence Visitors Center), an event we heartily endorse.

But for our purposes here, we have some video features coming, namely a look at Tria Fermentation School and In Pursuit of Ale, the women’s beer group formed by Beer Lass Suzanne Woods of Sly Fox Brewing.

Suzanne, a spritely soul with a cool whiskey voice (and we think we saw mention of Tom Waits on her blog site, so award points there), unified craft beer enthusiasm under a banner that was probably a bit overlooked, reminding folks – who may have forgotten for a moment about Carol Stoudt of Stoudt’s Brewing; Rosemarie Certo of Dock Street; and Gretchen Schmidhausler of Basil T’s in Red Bank – that women do the beer thing with the same gusto as the guys. Too cool. (Bye the bye, our favorite Sly Fox beers are Phoenix Pale Ale and Pikeland Pils. For now, anyway. And for the uninitiated on this side of the river, Sly Fox is the craft beer in cans. Lots of styles, too. We're hoping their Dunkel lager turns up near us.)

We caught up with up IPA at their Christmas party last month at Johnny Brenda’s in Northern Liberties. A shout-out goes to Kirsten Henri of Philadelphia Weekly for conducting the interviews. Look for the video in mid- or late February.

The Tria session we shot is from November, when some fine cheeses were matched to some great beers. And this being in Philadelphia, you can guess that Belgium was well represented in both categories.

We’ve said this before, and we’ll say it again. Tria is a fun time, a place where beer lovers (wine lovers, too) can talk beer with a sample in hand. The video is targeted for early February.

Back on this side of the river, we’re working on two other video features.

River Horse Brewing in Lambertville has been producing beer under new owners for several months now.
River Horse has a decade-plus of brewing under its belt, and we expect the new hands guiding it will make the next 10 worth beer drinkers’ while.

They’re part of the lineup for the Brewer’s Plate, one of five Jersey beers that are expected to be served there. Look for the video to be done some time around that event.

This next one is a longer project we’re working on. It’s quite a bit of fun and spans both sides of the Delaware.

For years, advertising artist Gregg Hinlicky of Toms River has painted portraits of brewers. His mural work also adorns the walls of the original Basil T's in Red Bank and the Basil T's in Toms River (which most Jersey brewpub followers will probably remember are separately owned). Gregg’s now working on a portrait of the Trogner brothers, Chris and John, of Troegs Brewing in Harrisburg, Pa.

Gregg has already been featured in Ale Street News brewspaper (a couple of times, years back as we understand it), but there are a couple of things to point out: One, this is Web 2.0. What was put into print years ago can be, and sometimes should be, brought back around for an online audience. Two, a good story ought to be told now and then.

Gregg is a great painter who regularly chronicles what he sees, using oils in basic colors, not a panoply of hues some art supply house mixed and tubed for sale (Gregg says he can, and does, make the color gradations himself, thank you), applying the colors heavy (impasto, as it’s called) to symbolize the hands-on hard work brewers do.

His portraits include Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery, Gretchen of Basil T’s, Carol Stoudt, and Dave Hoffmann of Climax Brewing in Roselle Park. (Gregg also created the labels for Climax.) Soon the team that brings you Troegs’ great beers will be on canvas. Look for the video in April or May.

(If you haven’t tried their Dead Reckoning Porter, grab some while it's still on the shelves. It's getting late for that seasonal, but it’s a great beer, one that's been in our glass a lot lately. Or reach for Long Trail Ale, an exceptional brown ale, and Troegenator, a solid double bock that wins awards and a permanent spot in our fridge.)

All about New Jersey beer? Yeah, that's still the mantra. However, sometimes you can't help but look through the bent-back tulips, to see where the other beers live.

Getting their fill

“It’s honking huge…”

That would be the description folks at Flying Fish Brewing offered about their new bottling line, which the Cherry Hill brewer expects to put through some test paces come Monday, a week after its arrival and installation.

We popped in last Tuesday for a peek at the new machinery and its 24-spout carousel, double the size of its predecessor. (We were at the Fish for the inaugural run of the original filler – November 1996 sticks in our mind – but a balky motor on the conveyor stymied getting beer into bottles that day.)

The new filler offers a needed speed boost (from 48 bottles per minute to 100 bottles) for the Fish, which saw output top 10,000 barrels last year. (Match that to the output from 1997: 800 to 900 bbls.) Getting some extra floor space is still in the brewery's long-term game plan.

Top speed is 150 bottles per minute, but hitting that mark requires some automation the Fish is not quite ready for.

Bye the bye, the old filler was sold to Russian River Brewing.

Philly Beer Week

We took a spin over the Ben Franklin bridge yesterday afternoon to Nodding Head Brewery and sat in on an organizational meeting for the first Philly Beer Week celebration.

Putting in the face time were lots of names in the Philly region’s craft beer scene (i.e. Carol Stoudt of her eponymously named brewing company; Tom Kehoe of the remade Yards Brewing, plus Flying Fish’s head brewer Casey Hughes popped in from Cherry Hill; more on the Fish in a minute).

We went to check out the storytelling prospects from a video standpoint, then beat a hasty retreat from Sansom Street (after downing three great Nodding Head beers: Bill Payer Ale, 700 Level blond ale, and All Night Ale, which is dosed with some espresso) to finish shooting B-roll of city landmarks for a promo project for White Dog Café’s Brewer’s Plate event.

But all of that’s not the point … The point is, Philly Beer Week, March 7-16, is just a couple months off, and things are taking surer shape. Check the web site, for the events. One thing we have our eye on is the planned real ale festival. Cask conditioned ales, poured from the hand pump … hard to beat. If you’ve ever been to the Great British Beer Festival, well, real ale is what it’s all about.

Philly Beer Week is as much a boast as it is an extended bash. It’s Philly claiming bragging rights as “America’s Best Beer-Drinking City,” a place where the bars and restaurants’ tap handles offer a cornucopia of styles and flavors. (Sadly, that’s something difficult to say about our home state, New Jersey.) So for nine days, the city’s laying it on the line with what is intended to be an annual event, with a mind toward proving the boast isn’t just the beer talking.

Busy, busy, busy
One thing to note about Philly Beer Week is that it comes amid a hopping beer schedule (no pun intended). The Philly Craft Beer Festival is March 1 at the Naval Yard. The Brewer’s Plate is March 9 at the Independence Visitors Center, and the Atlantic City beer festival is March 8-9. (All three are on our schedule, and we're still wondering how to do both the Real Ale Festival in Philly and the AC festival on the same day.) So little time, so many beers.

Klatch Porter
We’d like to think it was our recommendation last year to espresso yourself that prompted Flying Fish to turn out a 2008 rendition of its Imperial Espresso Porter (8% ABV), the brew that appeared last year as a salute to the brewery’s decade-plus of longevity. But we’d be fooling ourselves. Folks at the Fish knew this well-received beer (dosed with some Colombian roast) was too good to not make an encore. It’s out now, and in our fridge, in our glass as we type. It's a seasonal, so get it while you can.

Labor of Love
Like, the animated graphic above? We cranked it out today, using Apple’s Final Cut Studio suite. Cheers.

Just for kicks: XPA mission to space

It's been busy lately, so BSL posts have been few since this past fall. Later this week we'll catch up with some things that are happening.

In the meantime, this is a clip that we concocted a couple years back whilst trying to divine the how-to's of Apple's Motion program.

Alas, we were unable to bring the finishing touches to it at the time (for whatever reason). Now if we can only remember how we did it.

Bye the bye, the bottle is Flying Fish Extra Pale Ale (XPA as it's known in a few circles). Thanks to the kind folks at the Fish for letting us dot the webscape with their copyrights.

Hammer of the grogs

This is short notice (but not really since Lew Bryson’s blog “Seen Through A Glass” has had it listed for a couple weeks now):

Baltic Thunder, Victory Brewing’s new rich, gale-force porter that is heir to the throne of Perkuno’s Hammer, gets a draft unveiling this Saturday (that’s Jan. 5th) at The Drafting Room in Exton, Pa. A kind, female voice at the bar today confirmed the event is still on and says serving starts at noon. (See Lew’s site for the on-tap details.)

The story thus far
Named after the mythological Baltic god of thunder, Perkuno’s Hammer was the imperial porter created (with some key and label-credited assistance from Lew) by Tom Baker of Heavy Weight Brewing, the diamond in the rough brewery based in Ocean Township, Monmouth County (just south of Red Bank, where the original Basil T’s puts pints on the bar and Tom has guest brewed).

Robust, high gravity beers were the province of Heavy Weight, which sold its beer in four-packs (Smaller Package – Bigger Beer, as their saying went). Tom developed a following as an artisanal brewer before deciding to close HW (in August 2006, thereabouts), and take his mash rake and cross the Delaware to Philly (Mount Airy section), where yet even more blog words say he recently signed a lease for a new brewpub, where he can dust off his recipes under the banner “Earth, Bread & Brewery.”

The V sign
Beforehand, though, all the forlorn beer faces staring at the possibility that Perkuno’s Hammer would strike no more were buoyed by the news that Victory (of Downingtown, Pa., whose great beers we drank practically all December long, in between Jersey brews) had reached an agreement under which it would brew PH under the label Baltic Thunder, with some alterations here and there to the recipe, if we’re not mistaken.

A sneak peak
Tom was able to dole out a taste of the heir to PH as the finale to a talk he gave on the maltiness of beer last fall at Tria Fermentation School in Philly. If you were one of the 30 or so lucky folks there that evening, you can attest to the richness of PH’s progeny. (If you’ve never been to a Tria session, and you like to not just drink beer, but talk beer and gain a better understanding of the chorus of flavors that entice and wow you, then sign up for a Tria session. It’s fun and informative, and comes with great pretzels from Sansom Street, excellent cheeses and warm hosts and great speakers.)

Storm clouds are gathering. Listen to the thunder. It’s hammer time again.

What they (Victory brewers) say:
Truly a worldly beer. Baltic Thunder represents the Baltic Porter style admirably. Exhibiting the enticing, toffee roast of the British porter that originated the style in the 18th century, and the soothing, subtle fruit nuance of contemporary brews that flourish from Helsinki to Vilnius today, this dark lager honors the Baltic god of thunder. Created by an inspired collaboration of brewers and tempered with a touch of turmoil, Baltic Thunder rolls on to bring you enchanting light as the darkness fades.

Hops: European whole flower. Malts: imported German 2 row and roasted malts. ABV: 8.5%

The way you knew it:
A dark and mysterious, subtle, Baltic porter, a style difficult to find outside of the Baltics. PH's grain bill consisted of ample amounts of Munich malt with some chocolate and other specialty malts and Roman beans, fermented with a Bavarian lager yeast. Lew Bryson called it a collision of doublebock and imperial stout. 8% ABV

Smashing pumpkins (and biases)

October’s done, now November reigns, but orange is still the color of the season.

As in pumpkin. In your beer. But only for a while.

Scanning the Garden State beer landscape, we found pumpkin beer flowing from at least four brewpub taps: Basil T’s of Toms River, Harvest Moon, Triumph and the Tun Tavern. We’ve downed pints at three of the four and have the lone holdout in our sights.

Three of ’em are ales, one’s a great pumpkin, and one – the Tun’s – went lager.

And with that said, we have a small confession at this point: Pumpkin beer isn’t our thing.

We'll drink it, and we appreciate it – even defend it when someone questions its credibility as a beer (read: Bud and Coors Light drinkers fussing over fruit in beer). But coming on the heels of Oktoberfest beers (an easy favorite), and looking ahead to big winter beers, pumpkin has always been a blink: a pint, a thank you and goodbye. (We also don’t go for pumpkin pie; it's just us …)

But this fall, we decided to tack a different course and take a new look at our orange-and-amber seasonal friend; it’s beer, and brewers go to some trouble to put this style on the bar (read: pumpkins in the mash and the accompanying spices require a good brewery cleaning afterward).

Pumpkin zest
We warmed up by going outside (figuratively) the Jersey pumpkin patch, taking home a six of Post Road, Brooklyn Brewery’s one from the vine. That was good enough to get rolling, but it’s bottled, not fresh from the tap.

Next stop Atlantic City, the Tun Tavern. Brewer Tim Kelly enlisted the pub’s kitchen help to cut and roast 20 basketball-size pumpkins for this 6.4% ABV lager, a scaled-up recipe from his homebrewer files that goes light-handed on the spices – no allspice, just nutmeg, clove and ginger, with the latter the most prominent of the three. (Hops are Nugget, Perle and Fuggle; yeast – Bohemian lager; the beer cooled its heels for three weeks; Tim confesses a little longer would have been preferred, but it wasn't in the cards.)

This is pumpkin beer. You could smell pints of pumpkin from the far end of the bar, or at least on the day after the shuttered Sands casino came tumbling down in a demolition lollapalooza (Oct. 18th) we could (maybe it's the power of suggestion). That’s pretty much how Tim planned it, pumpkin loud and clear, spice mixed into the background.

Roll on, pumpkin
Meanwhile, an hour north of AC, Basil T’s in Toms River pours a slightly muted pumpkin ale (80 pounds of pumpkin in the mash, Willamette hops, allspice, cinnamon and ginger). Brewer Dave Hoffmann’s session ale (5.5% ABV) starts beery and finishes with a pumpkin flavor. It’s an easy two-pinter. Or three.

Go west …
By the time we got to Triumph (in New Hope, Pa., but pumpkin’s on tap at their Princeton location, too) our old way of dealing with pumpkin was gnawing at the edges of our new commitment. In a word, we caved. We ordered something else first. But you would, too, at the sight of a real-ale ESB served at cellar temperature – unfiltered, low-carbonation, and beckoning with hops and malt flavor – on the menu. So the first few steps through Triumph’s pumpkin patch were a little off track. We came around eventually to the flavor and aroma in question – pumpkin and spice. But old biases and habits don’t easily disappear. The ESB was just irresistible.

Great pumpkin
Harvest Moon probably has the most interesting of the pumpkin ales. Brewer Matt McCord has already gone through a batch brewed to his primary pumpkin ale recipe and is now pouring an imperial version on George Street in New Brunswick.

This one’s a sipper (and the one next in our sights, the next one on our list to try), 9% ABV, and served in 12-ounce snifters. Matt mashed with 130 pounds of pumpkin (including 100 pounds of fresh pumpkin) and spiced things with nutmeg, cinnamon and allspice. (Northern Brewer and UK Fuggle hops in the kettle.) But here’s an interesting twist: Matt tossed some whole vanilla beans into the serving tank to give things a graham cracker crust kind of finish.

So this month think pie. In your beer. We are. Finally.

Defiant brewing determination

Promptly going out and buying 55 pounds of pilsner malt ... Consider that the homebrewer equivalent of getting back on the horse that bucked you.

Fresh from his trip to the Samuel Adams LongShot homebrewer contest, “ESB” Dave Pobutkiewicz is saddling up again. He has a score to settle.

Dave’s maibock, or helles bock ( pick a label), took him from Pompton Lakes, NJ, to Denver and the final round of LongShot judging at the 2007 Great American Beer Festival. But that’s where things sort of stop. Notice we said "stop," not "end."

The judges opted to not include Dave’s brew in next year’s LongShot sixpack (which Boston Beer will brew and send to package stores near you beginning next February). That distinction goes to a double IPA by Mike McDole of California, a weizenbock from Rodney Kibzey from Illinois, and a grape ale from Boston Beer employee Lili Hess. (A Samuel Adams staff homebrew competition is part of the LongShot contest, if you recall. )

But back to Dave.

Ask him what he’ll enter in 2008, and he’ll say that he’d rather not say, revealing only that every beer style category is fair game.

He’s an experienced homebrewer with plenty of honed recipes that have won over an array of contest judges (in state and regional competitions) and colleagues in his club, the Defiant Homebrewers, whose members, by the way, have done well in past versions of the LongShot contest, but still find that top prize – the sixpack – elusive.

Dave thinks he can remedy that. He is, after all, a Defiant Homebrewer. And that 55 pounds of malt is a good start.

NOTE: Special thanks to Russ Pobutkiewicz for the photos of Dave with Boston Beer's Jim Koch (top) and Dave during an interview (above).

Beer drinkers for Colbert

We heard the call last night, so we’re popping open a bottle of our best beer in the fridge and announcing our support for Stephen Colbert for president.

Why? It just makes sense.

Politics these days are filled with silly crap, i.e. Hillary’s manic laugh; Barack’s flag lapel pin; Mitt Romney’s name; Giuliani dragging his past (there’s a joke in there, think about it); Fred Thompson, period (honestly, this guy shouldn’t get elected to anything higher than school board or act in anything other than role playing in group encounter, he’s just that stiff and bad on camera and at the podium; who cares what he has to say? 99 percent of Washington doesn’t care what we say) …

Nation, if we can borrow Steve’s line for a minute, these people have nothing on Colbert. He stands for truthiness, just us and the American way.

But that’s not the reason we’re backing Colbert.

It’s because when he elected to announce on Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" that he was considering to weigh the possibilities of whether or not to be in or out of the race vs. sitting on the sidelines or getting in the game, he did it with a beer in hand. (He subsequently announced he had "heard the call" on his show, The Colbert Report.)

OK, so it was a prop, along with the hay bale, to show how regular-guy he is. (Sorta like Lonesome Rhodes, but then that was a dark side of Andy Griffith 50 years ago and we're starting to veer off course; great Kazan film by the way, though). We don’t know what kind of beer it was (only a neck label was on the bottle, or stage light glare; we couldn't make it out), but that doesn’t matter. He chose to do his talking with a beer. (We think Samuel Adams should be his running mate.)

Plus Coldbeer, er uh, Colbert, last week lampooned the Miller-Coors announcement of combining brewing operations. Tastes great, less Rockies (that’s our joke, by the way).

So we endorse Stephen. You can’t turn your back on a guy with a beer and something entertaining to say.

Central time, Part 2 & No fest like O fest, Part 3

Overheard at the Central Jersey Beer Fest in Woodbridge last month: “Pretty good festival. Wish there was more brewers here.”

Not once, but a number of times we heard this. Full disclosure: We asked, so yeah, that’s why we heard about there being only four Jersey craft brewers – three brewpubs, one production brewery – pouring at Parker Press Park on Sept. 29.

But those words should be taken to heart by Jersey’s craft beer industry. The folks who went drink your beer and appreciate what you create. And that is – aside from the obvious, beer, – choice. Craft brewers create options for people who like beer. Porters, stouts, ESBs, IPAs, Oktoberfests, Vienna lagers, amber ales …

Some notes
This was the inaugural Central Jersey Beer Fest, the proceeds of which will help pay for a Veterans Day parade in Woodbridge.

So on a first try, getting only four brewers – three really when you consider that the hometown brewpub, J.J. Bitting Brewing Company, was the organizer – isn’t bad. If you checked the schedules of other craft brewers in the state, you would have seen they had other commitments for the same day. Others just opted not to go. Maybe it’s festival fatigue, or a desire to first see how the festival went and then sign on for next year.

And speaking of next year, we hope this festival does grow. It’s centrally located with great access to public transportation (train station); the town has embraced it and offered up a spacious park with plenty of shade trees; and it fills the fall calendar slot.

If we had our way, we’d turn it into a real Oktoberfest event with beer tents and the state’s craft brewers ceremoniously tapping actual wooden barrels of fest beers brewed for the occasion.

Sound like big production? Maybe, but High Point Brewing already does this, at least three times each fall. Barrel tappings, that is.

And while we’re making suggestions for a bigger event, we’d also suggest networking with the state’s German-American clubs. Feels kind of odd, to us anyway, to just co-op their cultural event and not genuinely have them represented.

Tech note:
The video is up (runtime is just over 7 minutes), but we're not happy with the resolution we're getting with YouTube. We're also a little frustrated with blip.tv at the moment, since the resolution is better on that site, but the only html that's available for embedding in the right dimensions ends up playing all the Beer-Stained Letter videos we've posted on blip, when we merely want the latest one to play.

This is an ongoing headache, the crapshoot of getting quality image resolution, and results from cross video formats (QuickTime to Flash). So we're checking some advice sites to find reliable settings for the source video that gets uploaded to YT, blip, et al. We hope to get our hands on the Flash software next year (costs about 700 bucks, and shouldn't be confused with the free download Flash player). By the by, the video was also submitted to Current.tv, but we don't know what's up with them. They haven't posted it, and looks like their site, after a redesign, morphed into something with a heavy emphasis on social networking.

In the meantime, our recommendation is watch the vid in iTunes (search for the blog title under podcasts) or at the blip.tv site.

Gemütlichkeit
And speaking of German-American clubs, we got to enjoy an evening at the Oktoberfest held by Deutscher Club of Clark on Saturday.

Two oak barrels of Paulaner Oktoberfest beer were flown in from Munich for this dinner. That’s a really big deal, since only five of these barrels get parceled out to the Northeast this time of year. Deutscher Club got a brace of them. Did we mention it tasted great? It was also unfiltered. Golden, too. (For more about Oktoberfest beer, check out Lew Bryson's piece in Condé Nast Portfolio.)

But Oktoberfest isn’t just about the beer. It’s about keeping good company, too, the conviviality. So a special note of thanks for the warm hospitality that we, as guests unfamiliar to the club’s regulars, received. Prosit!

Good luck, ESB Dave

This time tomorrow, Dave Pobutkiewicz will be at the biggest beer party the USA can throw.

And while he’s at the Great American Beer Festival, he just may sweeten his time in the Rockies with a victory in the Samuel Adams LongShot national homebrewers contest.

As one of four finalists, Dave's flying to Denver courtesy of Boston Beer Company. If you recall, we caught up with him back in June when he learned the maibock he brewed at his Pompton Lakes home made the cut from out of more than 1,700 entries.

That alone is enough to give you the confidence to become a professional brewer. But we think Dave’s got one more win in him with that golden beer. And we caught up with him again today to say so and wish him luck.

Some folks might be nervous being so close to glory. But Dave says he's pretty calm about things. His younger brother, Russ, who’s also a homebrewer, is tagging on with him and packing a digital camera to record the trip for posterity.

Let’s hope that Dave's picture winds up on the side panel of next year’s LongShot sixpack.

Central time

Skipping Long Beach Island’s Chowderfest this year? But your dance card still has an opening for this Saturday? Then here’s a cozy beer event you’ll probably want to be part of.

And since it’s the inaugural version of the Central Jersey Beer Fest, you’ll pick up bragging rights for getting in on the ground floor.

And who knows if it grows big, maybe one day you’ll be able to nostalgically reflect that you remember when the Central Jersey festival in Woodbridge drew just a handful of Garden State brewers.

The Ws
When: 1-5 p.m.
Where: Parker Press Park in Woodbridge.
Wallet: Admission is 20 bucks, or 10 if you’re a designated driving adult.
What you get: A souvenir taster glass (made from REAL glass, no plastic; cheers to that) and an opportunity to sample some great beer to a backdrop of live music while you browse the wares of local vendors. The event also benefits charity (veterans groups), so check with your accountant, you may be able to write off the admission charge.
Weather: As of this writing, the forecast for Saturday is a sunny 75 degrees. (The rain date is Oct. 6, just in case.)
Why: Because beer is culture, community and fun, and this festival could turn into the fall counterpart to the annual gathering held by the Garden State Craft Brewer’s Guild in June aboard the USS New Jersey battleship museum in Camden.

Unlike that summer festival, Saturday’s event comes not from the guild, but courtesy of the efforts Woodbridge’s own J.J. Bitting Brewing Company, which got a great assist from its hometown, and John McCormac.

If you’re still holding an old (and presumably losing) lottery ticket, say from a couple years back, you’ll notice John’s name on the reverse side as New Jersey state treasurer. He left that Trenton job and is now mayor of Woodbridge, and he made Parker Press Park available for the festival; Woodbridge has embraced the event as one of its Main Street happenings. John says the festival allows for an added theme to the Main Street events, which also include a farmers market. Plus, he points out, J.J. Bittings is a solid local business.

Note: The festival isn't exactly a municipally sponsored function. But the site help Woodbridge is providing merits mentioning, since finding a festival location – rented at a reasonable rate or used free of charge like the USS New Jersey – isn’t easy. So if you go on Saturday, take a moment to raise your taster glass to Woodbridge. (Trivia: John's a formidable contender when it comes to 1960s TV Batman trivia. He's also a bigtime Yankees fan, whose colors he flew in his ground-floor office in Trenton those years ago when we crossed paths.)

The lineup
J.J. Bitting: Beers the home team brewpub will be pouring include Avenel Amber, J.J.’s popular raspberry wheat, Victoria’s Golden Ale and an Oktoberfest dubbed Bad Boy.
Pizzeria Uno: Woodbridge’s neighbor from Metuchen plans to serve up its IPA, Gust ’n’ Gale Porter and hefeweizen.
Climax Brewing: Look for an Oktoberfest and possibly a cream ale that the Roselle Park brewery revived earlier this year.
Tun Tavern: Folks at the Tun in Atlantic City helped spread word about the Central Jersey festival and are looking into the prospects of organizing a similar event in the land of diving horses and tumbling dice. Until then, look for the Tun’s Leatherneck Stout and Vienna lager to be the brews it will take to Woodbridge.