It won't be long now ...

Matt Steinberg is oh so close to drinking a beer – then brewing some.

As of today, Matt was forecasting the inaugural brew for New Jersey Beer Company to hit the mash tun at the end of this weekend or the start of next week, with folks being able to drink the first beer brewed in Hudson County in over a decade by the fourth week of April. (The last brewer in Hudson County was craft brewer Hoboken Brewing, with the Mile Square brand.)

In the meantime, he says, New Jersey Beer Company is making a mad dash toward the installation finish line at his location along Tonnelle Avenue in North Bergen. "Actually tomorrow will be a pretty insane day as we try to finish everything off," he said via email Friday.

After that, he'll have that beer to take the edge off the long bumpy road that is starting a craft brewing enterprise, relax for a while, then get going on the very first batch of Hudson Pale Ale, one of three brews that will anchor NJ Beer in the marketplace.

On the heels of that will be more brewing (Garden State Stout and 1787 Abbey Single) and greeting the public at brewery tours. But the latter is down the road a little bit (keep an eye on his Web site, Facebook and Twitter). "As soon as the fermenters are filled, we'll focus on the aesthetics of the place, get the tasting room together," Matt says.

If you subscribe to the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild newsletter and saw that NJ Beer, the guild's newest member, was brewing, well, Matt confesses to doing a little bit of marketing ahead of production in the monthly missive. Nothing wrong with that. At all. Because, like The Beatles sang, it won't be long. Yeah.

And we think NJ beer regs are unreasonable ...

Check this out. Things could be worse than the arcane, ham-handed beer regulations found in New Jersey.

Uno's cask event

A quick look back at Pizzeria Uno's cask ale event from Saturday ...

If you went, then you know it was a treasure trove of hops: Sixpoint's Bengali IPA, Weyerbacher's Hops Infusion, River Horse's Hop Hazard and Hop-a-lot-amus Double IPA.

If you wanted to go big, there was Uno's Scotch Ale and Weyerbacher's Blithering Idiot Barleywine. Rounding out the bill was Uno's Gust N Gale Porter (made really velvety by the cask conditioning), Sixpoint Righteous Rye (this Brooklyn brew was worth seconds), and a nut brown ale from Climax that poured from a hand pump quite bright beneath a creamy head.

The flight of brews wasn't as bountiful as some of the past presentations (this was the fifth Uno cask ale event by our count). Assembling the lineup of ales through distributors and breweries was a little like hearding cats, with some brewers reluctant to fill anything but metal casks (not plastic). And those weren't always readily available.

So, there's a point of appreciation to be made off that circumstance: Uno brewer Mike Sella (that's Mike in the white shorts in the photo) still put together a respectable collection of cask-conditioned ales, and cask ale is a genuine treat.

Shout-outs: John the hired hand at High Point Brewing; friend of the blog and fellow writer John Holl; PubScout Kurt Epps; and special thanks to Mid-Atlantic Brewing News columnist Mark Haynie, who organized the trip up from South Jersey to Metuchen.

Brewing with Wheat ... and High Point

When you put wheat beer in the name of your brewing company, you most surely separate yourself from the rest of the pack. And when you earn a reputation for delivering great wheat beers, you become a natural stop in the exploration of those distinct and distinguished brews that use malted barley's cereal grain cousin.

Stan Hieronymus of Appellation Beer takes you on a global journey of discovery of those beers in Brewing with Wheat, and makes a stop in Butler, N.J., home of High Point Wheat Beer Company and the Ramstein brand.

Stan, whose other titles are Brew Like a Monk: Trappist, Abbey and Strong Belgian Ales and How to Brew Them, and The Beer Lover's Guide to the USA, interviewed High Point founder Greg Zaccardi about a year ago for a section in the book.

Now called High Point Brewing, a shortened name that makes room for the lagers and pale ales that have been added to the Ramstein banner, the brewery once lay claim to a one-and-only title in the US beer industry (excerpt):

When Zaccardi began selling the Ramstein brand beers in 1996, High Point was the first, and only, all-wheat brewery in the United States since before Prohibition, when weissbier breweries were tiny and made something that tasted more like wheat beers from Berlin. He since has begun brewing a variety of barley beers under contract, accounting for more than one-third of production. "We couldn't survive brewing wheat beer alone," he said.

Followers of High Point know those additional brews these days include a well-received maibock and Oktoberfest, Vienna lager and a imperial pilsner initially brewed for restaurants in New York City, not to mention a Belgian red for the Harvest restaurant chain that owns Trap Rock brewpub in nearby Berkeley Heights.

Another excerpt, courtesy of Stan:

Now that he has made a variety of styles under contract, such as a Belgian-style dubbel and a German-style Pilsener, Zaccardi remains convinced wheat beers present the greatest challenge for a brewer. "Brewing consistent wheat beer is the hardest thing to do," he said. "You have to control something that is uncontrollable, the yeast."

You can get a glimpse of what's in Brewing with Wheat here. The book's available through Beertown, Beerbooks and Amazon.

NJ Beer Co. update

If you follow Matt Steinberg's Twitter activity, you spotted this already.

If not, here's the link to shots of his New Jersey Beer Company brewery taking shape in North Bergen.

Good luck, Matt.

The ranks of New Jersey craft brewers grows again.

NJ brewers at AC beer fest

Atlantic City's beer fest, Celebration of the Suds, features loads of beer from all across the country, but draws just a handful of brewers from the Garden State.

This year saw River Horse, Boaks Beer, Cricket Hill (their first time) and Flying Fish.

Also this year, The Press of Atlantic City and the Tun Tavern teamed up for a dunkelweizen – At the Shore Dark Wheat – that was pretty popular among festival-goers.

By the by, the chap pictured in the colorfully loud shirt is friend of the blog Mark Haynie, the Jersey columnist for Mid-Atlantic Brewing News.

Casking call

Pizzeria Uno's cask event is this coming Saturday (March 27) at the brewpub along Route 1 in Metuchen. As of this writing, the lineup of brews is still taking shape.

But Uno brewer Mike Sella today offered a taste of the list for this pay-as-you-drink nod to real ale: Uno's Gust N Gale porter and Scotch ale are the host offerings, joined by a nut brown ale from Climax Brewing. (Climax, just up the Garden State Parkway in Roselle Park, has been part of the lineup since Uno began what has become a twice-a-year event back in 2008.)

You can also expect a couple of brews from Weyerbacher, as well as at least a half dozen other brands, if Uno's past cask events are any measure. The taps start flowing at noon.

Uno is located at 61 Route 1 in Metuchen, along the southbound side of the highway. The phone number is (732) 548-7979.


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Brewers Association board of directors

Jersey beer has a seat on the board of directors for the trade group that champions craft brewing in the U.S.

Mark Edelson, of Iron Hill brewpub, is serving as secretary/treasurer of the Colorado-based Brewers Association. Mark also chairs the organization's finance committee.

The Brewers Association announced its new board of directors last Friday.

Of course, Iron Hill is based in Delaware and expanded into Pennsylvania before opening a location (its eighth) in New Jersey last summer. But the company was founded by Edelson and two other Jerseyans, Kevin Finn and Kevin Davies.

So, yeah, Jersey beer can make a claim on this topic. Here's an interview with Mark from last year's Garden State Craft Brewers Festival. (Mark appears about halfway into the video.)

Jersey beers at the Brewers Plate

A quick photo pass through the 2010 Brewers Plate in Philadelphia on March 14. From top down: River Horse, Flying Fish, Triumph, Iron Hill, Boaks Beer, Climax Brewing and Cricket Hill. (As many of us know, Triumph and Iron Hill have locations on both sides of the Delaware.)

Craft brewing returning to Hudson County

The last piece of the puzzle was still sitting in Port Newark on Thursday, where federal regulators corralled it to give it not the once-, but twice-over, before releasing it to its final destination – a 5,000-square-foot building in North Bergen.

Once that bureaucratic hurdle gets jumped, Matt Steinberg says he can finally install his 10-barrel mash tun and kettle, four 20-barrel fermenters and same-size bright beer tank, get them inspected and get licensed as a brewer under the name New Jersey Beer Company.

Steinberg hopes that's all done by next week. When it is, NJ Beer will bring craft brewing back to Hudson County for the first time since Hoboken Brewing and its Mile Square brand went bust in the late 1990s. NJ Beer will also become the Garden State's sixth craft beer production brewery.

An IT consultant by profession and homebrewer for a half dozen years, Steinberg, 32, began making the transition to commercial brewer a year and a half ago, putting together financing and scoping out possible sites in Jersey City and Bayonne before committing New Jersey Beer Company to a location along Tonnelle Avenue in North Bergen, where he makes his home.

He still works full-time at his IT gig, so he hired Matt Westfall from New England Brewing (Woodbridge, Conn.) to help craft the trio of beers under which NJ Beer will begin making its name – Hudson Pale Ale, Garden State Stout and 1787 Abbey Single Ale, a first-gear Belgian style to beckon session drinkers.

The beers will hit the market in both draft and sixpacks. Plans down the road call for brewing some of the heartier, imperial beers. (Steinberg joined the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild, so look for NJ Beer at the guild's festival in June aboard the USS New Jersey in Camden.)

"The great thing about craft brewing is you can pull in styles from around the world, brewing techniques and hop varieties. The fun part is you can do whatever you want," says Steinberg, whose own palate trends toward big stouts, Belgian brews and other extreme beers.

The company name owes much to a desire for simplicity – beer brewed in New Jersey. But Steinberg says there's also plenty to celebrate about the Garden State, and on NJ Beer's Web site, you'll find references to Brick City (Newark) and Silk City (Paterson), homages to Jersey days gone by.

George Washington's at-the-bow Delaware River crossing pose forms the background of NJ Beer's abbey ale label, and the 1787 in the brew's name is the year New Jersey claimed statehood.

The state's pre-Prohibition history isn't lost on Steinberg, either, and he'll remind you that New Jersey was once a player in the beer industry. And the fact that Hudson County shared some of that title, a title that says New Jersey beer.

Trivia: Some people cite Hoboken as the home of the first brewery in North America, in 1641. But others give credit to Manhattan when New York City was known as New Amsterdam.

On the horizon

Like green shoots breaking through the soil of spring, beer events are popping up all over.

So here's a quick hit of calendar items to consider:

High Point Brewing holds its first open house of the year on Saturday (2-4 p.m.) at the brewery in Butler, and the makers of the Ramstein brand say on their Web site it's the debut of the 2010 edition of their maibock. Bring your growlers. We haven't heard back on our inquiry with owner Greg Zaccardi yet, so we can't say if there will be any Icestorm eisbock available. Also, the maibock was one of the Ramstein beers that Greg has been making plans to put in bomber bottles. When we catch up with Greg, we'll repost.

One other thing to consider, unlike Ramstein open houses of the past, the brewery plans to cycle attendees through in two shifts. The events have become so popular that a little crowd management has become necessary to ensure everyone gets a taste, a tour and the chance to have a growler filled.

The Brewer's Plate is Sunday at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. Now in it's sixth year, this is very much a worth-your-time event, with beers from select breweries within a 150-mile radius of Philly paired with food from the city's great restaurants. Tickets are still available as of this writing. The premium ticket is a little pricey, $115, but the event benefits Fair Food, a nonprofit that promotes community sustainable/fair trade farming.

Climax Brewing, Cricket Hill, Flying Fish and River Horse are New Jersey mainstays at this affair, while Brian Boak is making his second appearance with his Boaks Beer brand of Belgian brews and imperial stouts, which a lot of folks remember are brewed under contract at High Point.

But the Jersey connection runs a little deeper: Tri-state brewpub Iron Hill will be there, and those who have followed Iron Hill know it was started by three Jersey guys who struck a mash first in Delaware, then Pennsylvania, and last year enjoyed a homecoming to the Garden State. Then there's Tom Baker's Earth Bread + Brewery, the phoenix that rose in Philly's Mount Airy section from the ashes of Tom closing Heavyweight Brewing in Monmouth County four years ago. Tom's reputation as an artisan brewer is still intact.

You'll find the full list of Brewer's Plate restaurants and breweries here.

The Atlantic City beer fest is March 20-21 at the Convention Center. In the past, we've been a little down on this festival. In fairness, we'll back away from some of things we don't like about Celebration of the Suds and be positive: Atlantic City is probably one of the best locations for a beer festival in New Jersey. AC is destination, and if you want to book a room, there's plenty of hotel space, not to mention enough glitz to occupy your time before or after your festival session.

The downside (we're not going to skip that completely) is, this is a monstrously big festival, and with that there's been long lines to get in and to hit the restroom; there's also been a little bit of rowdiness (sorry to rain on parade, but it's true). There's plenty of beer, a lot of which can be found at packaged stores with good beer managers. That said, this festival is a good fit for those who are just coming to craft beer, folks who are a few steps beyond that juncture, or people who love the buzz of a big crowds in a gambling mecca.

Look for Boaks, Cricket Hill, Flying Fish and River Horse to be poured, as well as Hometown Beverage, whose light lagers are contract brewed by the Lion Brewery in Wilkes-Barr, Pa. The Tun Tavern brewpub, located across the street from the festival site, is also on the bill. The Tun will be pouring the dunkelweizen made as a tie-in At The Shore and The Press of Atlantic City.

If you're looking to hit the Tun for dinner after the festival on Saturday, make reservations. It's still a recessionary climate these days, and you might get a table without calling beforehand. But over the years, the Tun generally hasn't accommodated walk-ins for looking for dinner. Not to be a buzzkill, but if you go there for just drinks or whatever, please do everyone – yourself included – a big favor by not showing up drunk. If the Tun is too crowded (and it gets crowded post-festival), try Firewaters at the Tropicana casino. You'll find a wide variety of craft beer on draft and in the bottle there.

On March 27, Pizzeria Uno in Metuchen holds its fourth cask ale festival at the brewpub on Route 1. Brewer Mike Sella has done a great job assembling a rack of casks from breweries around the region for this pay-as-you-go event in Uno's comfy pub atmosphere. Cask ale is a real delight, and this festival, which begins at noon, has generally lasted as long as the beer flows, meaning it could run a second day.

Lastly, even though it's a long way off, the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild holds its 14th annual festival on June 26. Once again, it's aboard the USS New Jersey battleship museum, moored at the Delaware River waterfront in Camden. More on that festival later.

Gains in craft beer for 2009

There's more growth in US craft brewing despite the recessionary hangover the country has been experiencing. And in New Jersey, craft brewers have been working like mad to keep up with demand.

For 2009, River Horse Brewing (Lambertville) was up about 40 percent and has been looking to boost production capacity; High Point Brewing (Butler) was up 30 percent; Cricket Hill (Fairfield) came in with a 22 percent increase; Dave Hoffmann at Climax Brewing (Roselle Park) had to put some idled fermenters back online to keep up with a 30 percent jump in demand.

Flying Fish (Cherry Hill), the state's largest craft brewer, saw a 6 percent increase in organic growth. (The business world defines organic growth as a growth rate achieved by increased production and enhanced sales. FF's figure may appear smaller than the others, but the brewery's output is at least twice the size of the next largest New Jersey craft brewer, which has typically been River Horse.)

A number of Garden State brewpubs have been busy, too, filling growlers as fast as people can bring them in.

According to the industry trade group Brewers Association, craft beer sales edged up from $6.3 billion in 2008 to $7 billion last year (10.3 percent), and the Colorado-based organization tabbed the increase in craft brewers' production at almost 614,000 barrels year-to-year. (Volume went from 8.5 million barrels in '08 to 9.1 million last year, a 7.2 percent increase).

This is all happening in the face of overall beer sales falling, namely for the macro brewers. And the stats say a lot for craft beer, whose share of the market in the US beer industry is just 4.3 percent of sales and just under 7 percent for volume. Across the entire US beer industry, sales were down nearly 5 million barrels (210.4 million in 2008 to 205.4 million last year.)

Meanwhile, nationally the ranks of craft brewers also grew, from 1,485 to 1,542 from 2008 to 2009.

Last year, brewpub Iron Hill opened in Maple Shade to mark the first new brewer in the Garden State in 10 years. This year, brewpub Port 44 in Newark is expected to get up and running, while production brewers NJ Beer Co. in Hudson County and Turtle Stone Brewery in Cumberland County are working toward that goal.

NJ Beer, located in North Bergen, said on its Twitter and Facebook pages that its brewing system arrived, although it remains in Port Newark, and next week is likely to be a busy one with installation.

You, too, can brew

Friend of the blog John Holl steered us to this piece he wrote recently for his former task masters at The New York Times.

You can sit on the couch and have a commercial tell you all about (bland) triple-hopped Miller Lite (as if most beers don't get hops for bittering, flavor and aroma) or you can put on your work boots and find out for yourself, take at trip beyond the taste and aromas of the finished product.

Scott Cronick of The Press of Atlantic City gave that idea a shot, spending a day at the Tun Tavern in Atlantic City last month to help brewer Tim Kelly create a dunkelweizen that will be served at the Atlantic City beer fest March 2o-21 and, of course, at the Tun, under a tap logo that commemorates the occasion.

Scott has Oskar Blues Dale's Pale Ale on tap in his kegerator at home in Somers Point. So he's by no means a stranger to craft beer. And his interest in the brewing process comes mostly from a tie-in The Press has with the Tun for its weekend features supplement, At The Shore, which Scott edits.

Still, taking a turn at the mash tun and kettle as a brewer's apprentice did open Scott's eyes to a few things about beer that go beyond bubbles rising in a pint glass to buoy a head of foam.

Namely, there's the enzyme action that happens when hot water meets malted barely (and in this case wheat, too) to convert the grain's stored starch into malt sugar and collectively the wort; the rolling boil of that wort and protein changes that take place; not to mention the boil time necessary to let hops do their thing.

These are all things pro brewers know, and homebrewers, too, have memorized and can chew the fat endlessly over at Big Brew in May. But to the beer enthusiast whose compass doesn't point to beer geek, the experience is a little bit like pulling back the curtain on the wizard to discover some chemistry is responsible for his magic.

"I never realized how much of a science it was," Scott said. "It was eye-opening from a work perspective ... and how everything is so precise."

It's also like cooking and serving a big dinner: Someone has to clean up afterward. Like Scott did, digging out the spent grain from the mash tun. Anyone who has done that can tell you it's a bit of a workout.

But there's no shortcut to quality. And the same goes for brewing quality small-batch beer.

On Monday, Scott said Tim informed him the beer they brewed nearly two weeks ago is coming along nicely, with some aroma notes of banana and bubblegum that you may typically find with such a wheat beer.

All that's left is for the beer to condition a little more and it will be ready for the pint glass.

In the meantime, as part of the Press-Tun tie-in, you'll see mention of the brew in At The Shore. If it's a hit, other Tun seasonal brews and At The Shore tie-ins may follow in the dunkelweizen's footsteps.

Czech pils pilot brew by Climax

A bit of déjà vu for Climax Brewing owner and brewmaster Dave Hoffmann. An eight-barrel batch of Czech pilsner lagering at his Roselle Park brewery was made with hopped malt extract.

"I'm making beer out of extract," Dave said, laughing and standing just off his brewhouse, amid 50-pound bags of malted barley he would normally brew with to produce his beers under the Climax and Hoffmann brands. "I'm going backward in time, going back to my beginning homebrew days."

But it's not nostalgia for The Brewmeister, the Cranford homebrew supply shop he owned before starting Climax Brewing 14 years ago, that has Dave skipping the mash. A couple of months ago, a Czech company hired Dave to produce a pilot brew for test marketing at bars in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. (One of the locations could be Barcade in Brooklyn, where Dave's doppelbock, helles and a cask version of his IPA are on tap.)

The company supplied the hopped, double-decoction-produced extract for the brew. "It's really good malt. It's not like the brewing malt extract you buy here," Dave said. (He added some Saaz hops at the end of the boil for a slight hop signature.)

Dave showed off the still young beer during a mid-February visit to his brewery. "When I made it, the wort tasted like an extract beer. Now that it's fermented out, it tastes like a good Czech pilsner," Dave said. "It's a little darker in color than what you might think a Czech pilsner would look like because it's extract. But it's a decent-tasting beer."

On Wednesday, Dave said the beer had rounded out more, tasting like Krusovice. "It's a bit caramel-ish up front and golden, slightly amber."

The beer is targeted for release just before St. Patrick's Day. Plans call for surveying bar patrons about the beer, providing them questionnaires on coasters to be completed and returned.

A look at Newark's Port 44

Newark is in line to soon get its first craft brewery, an alehouse brewpub under construction within a five-minute walk from the New Jersey Devils' home ice at Prudential Center Arena and NJ Transit's trains at Penn Station.

Port 44 Brew Pub will celebrate Newark's heritage as a onetime beer industry giant whose glory shriveled to a lone producer, mega brewer Budweiser.

Greg Gilhooly, who owns the Venetian facade building at 44 Commerce Street that houses Port 44, says old photos and memorabilia will pay homage to the likes Newark's heyday names of Krueger, Pabst, Feigenspan and Ballantine, and set the ambiance for Port 44's planned eight taps at street-level and second-floor bars.

"We're so excited to bring beer back to Newark. Most of the people we talk to that come in have a relative that worked in the brewery business," says Gilhooly.

And that's just people passing by who are curious about the renovations to turn the former site of Europa restaurant into a brewpub. Just wait until there's beer pouring.

"If there's 10 people at the bar, I can rest assured five of them – at least half of them – will have a grandfather or uncle who worked in the (city's) brewing business," Gilhooly says.

Gilhooly, 50, a longtime Newark cop, hopes to buy into the brewpub side of the business when he retires this summer from the police force that's been a part of his family for four generations. John Feeley, a retired deputy fire chief in nearby Orange, is the actual owner of the brewery and restaurant.

The pair hopes hockey and concerts at the Rock – the Prudential Center Arena – will bring in crowds before and after shows and games. But Port 44 is also smack in Newark's office district, with the gleaming Gateway Center, home to powerhouse law firms and lobbyists, within walking distance. The people who populate those offices are likely to have a taste for craft brews, Gilhooly says. The same goes for students from Rutgers and Seton Hall law schools.

So when will Port 44 fling open its doors? Gilhooly says they hope to be pouring beer by the end of the month, mostly likely a brand on a guest tap, since it would be too soon for house-brewed beers to be ready. If luck is on the side of two Irish guys hoping to be part of the better beer scene, those guest taps will flow for St. Patrick's Day festivities. That, however, is a wait-and-see scenario.

Meanwhile, renovation work continues at Port 44. Gilhooly says license applications are all filed, but a date for state and federal regulators to check out the establishment remains to be set. When Port 44 opens with its American bistro menu, it will be the second Garden State brewpub to open in as many years (Iron Hill opened last year in Maple Shade) and will take its place as the state's 12th brewpub.

Last month, as interior work continued throughout the building, brewmaster Chris Sheehan, on loan from Manhattan's Chelsea Brewery, was overseeing the installation of the second-floor brewhouse, four 15-barrel fermenters and five 15-barrel serving tanks. (Sheehan has the option to stay with Port 44 or return to Chelsea. He's pictured in the bottom of the image at left; Gilhooly is in the gray shirt.)

Given the limitations of the building, Sheehan says the beers brewed on site will be exclusively ales, including a light ale, an amber or red, an IPA, and stouts. The latter, especially robust ones, is a style on which Sheehan has staked his 18-year brewing career.

"We'll be serving some kick-ass stouts," says Sheehan, who got his start in the brewing business at Triple Rock Brewery & Alehouse in Berkeley, California, and also worked at San Francisco's 20 Tank Brewery.

The same goes for hoppy beers. Sheehan says the beers will be made with whole flower hops and a hopback to boost that signature flavor. "We'll definitely not be lacking hop character in these beers," he says.

Plans call for a single house yeast to ferment the beers. But special strains will also be used on occasion to stir some Belgian styles into the lineup. Gilhooly says Port 44 will dedicate its guest taps to beers made by fellow Garden State craft brewers. Cricket Hill, in nearby Fairfield, has been a big supporter of Port 44 and is a logical pick for a guest brew.

"Always a Jersey beer on the guest taps," Gilhooly says. "We really want to do more than anyone else has done ... extend an olive branch and get Jersey beer. We want to promote Jersey beer."

Newark was once home to dozens of breweries, but Prohibition and industry consolidation following the resumption of legal beer became their undoing. The Pabst brewery, with its landmark beer bottle water tower, closed in the mid-1980s, leaving Anheuser-Busch the sole brewer in the city. (The 55,000-gallon Pabst water tower came down four years ago; a year ago, it sat cut into several sections in a junkyard in Newark, off the New Jersey Turnpike.)

Friend of the blog and beer scribe John Holl, who has written occasionally about New Jersey's beer history and is now working on a book about Indiana's breweries and brewpubs, says brewing was once the fourth-largest industry in Newark.

Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, the city's beer barons oversaw a $20 million industry. That amounts to roughly $430 million in today's money.

Morristown Pale Ale

Matt Lamm's Morristown Pale Ale, reproduced in a craft beer-batch size at High Point Brewing last month, has been flowing from the taps at The Office Beer Bar & Grill's various locations across North Jersey for a week now.

A launch party and ceremonial barrel tapping was held at The Office's Morristown location on Feb. 18.

You may recall Matt, who lives in Morristown, won the privilege to help brew the scaled-up version of his recipe by taking first place in the homebrew competition sponsored by High Point and The Office at the end 2009. We caught up with him to get a report on how the pale ale he helped brewed in that commercial-size batch Jan. 19 turned out.

Coming in slightly less hoppy, the orange-hued beer is a still a tasty approximation of his original and delivers some toasty malt flavors, Matt says.

To be sure, the beer is a good drinking experience, and Matt's pleased, especially when you consider amplifying a homebrew recipe by a factor of about 100 is no easy task.

Check out the video and see why. And try Matt's beer.

(Photos courtesy of Tina Gehrig and Matt Lamm.)

Exit 16

The next Exit Series beer from Flying Fish will be a double IPA made with wild rice. But the most important thing to know about the beer right now is, you can't get your hands on it until March.

So don't ask.

FF hasn't officially made the announcement on the beer (it's not on their Twitter page or Exit Series Web site) and word got out a little prematurely. That's been a bit of a pain for the Cherry Hill brewery.

Beernews.org, which dug up the scoop, says it was in the brewery's newsletter, but we're told Beernews plumbed federal regulators' Web pages and got ahold of the Exit 16 label.

Nonetheless, everyone knew another Exit was coming at some point. And we got it half right – it's North Jersey, this time the Meadowlands, famous for a man-spoils-nature saga and a sports complex that has been named for an NFL franchise from New York; a governor who brought you the state income tax and an NHL team; corporate naming rights (Continental Airlines Arena/Izod Center); and lately an ill-conceived giant retail complex called Xanadu that was probably conjured up in an opium dream like Coleridge's Kubla Khan.

The upcoming brew will be the fourth Exit, and if you were expecting another stop in Belgium, well, blame this blog. Word from the top guy on the kettle was that the next one could be another Belgian-ish brew. Not happening. There was obviously a different direction taken.

Milestone
FF is closing in on the first anniversary of the Exit Series' that started during the spring of 2009 with the just re-released Exit 4, this time in sixpacks.

Like the fish, time flies.

A little exposure

The blog makes Paul Mulshine's column over at nj.com, the Web site of The Star-Ledger of Newark.

Thanks for the mention, Paul.

Cheers.

Beer and bones

This item is sure to get quite a bit of play.

But an interesting side point to note is, the article is not just a quick hit, lumping all beers together. Rather, it's current and speaks to different beer styles.

And that's refreshing.

Uno's dinner, addendum

It seems there are some fits and starts tugging at this month's Pizzeria Uno beer dinner. It's still on the menu, and Kurt Epps has a couple of follow-up notes about it.