Office trolley

An aggregator moment ...

Nate Schweber, whose name some folks may recognize from New York Times bylines, takes a beer snapshot of Westfield for patch.com, and highlights the Union County town's watering hole, the Jolly Trolley, which sets up pints these days under its corporate banner, The Office Beer Bar & Grill. (The item also is in today's news feed column on the right; Nate also fronts the band New Heathens, who have a couple of albums to their credit – Hello Disaster and Heathens Like Me.)

The Office wades into craft beer deeper than just being a chain of craft beer friendly bars. The folks there also sponsor competitions for the brew-it-yourself crowd, Homebrew Wars, in which winners get to go commercial and make scaled-up versions of their beer at High Point Brewing in Butler.

A West Coast-style IPA turned in by Ian Burgess and Brett Robison landed in the winners circle of the most recent Homebrew Wars. The beer is scheduled to go on tap at Office locations during the week of October 18th.

Who's your guide?

It's none other than John Holl, the Jersey journalist who contributes reporting and analysis on craft beer to newjerseynewsroom.com.

The focus of John's efforts is a guidebook about craft and pub breweries throughout Indiana, another title in the Stackpole Books breweries series pioneered by Lew Bryson (who's also co-author of 2008's New Jersey Breweries with Mid-Atlantic Brewing News columnist Mark Haynie).

John is working on Indiana Breweries with Nate Schweber, a name you may recognize from the print and Web pages of The New York Times, where John also wrote for several years. Nate also fronts the band NewHeathens.

Publication of Indiana Breweries is scheduled for June 2011. John says the next few months will be spent touring Indiana and gathering string, then, of course, getting down to brass tacks and shaping their reporting into the book's chapters.

The Hoosier State is familiar ground to John, whose news reporting cred also includes a stint at Indiana's capital city paper, The Star.

" There are more than 30 brewpubs and breweries in the state, and I'm really looking forward to revisiting many of them. I was a staff writer for the Indianapolis Star in 2003-2004 and spent a lot of time driving the state and visiting a lot of fine breweries," he says.

Besides having a chronicler from The Garden State, Indiana beer has something else in common with New Jersey. Like Jersey, it sometimes doesn't command the attention it deserves.

"Indiana beer is often overlooked by people, who focus on beers from Missouri to the West and Michigan to the northeast, but the Hoosier state has some really great places," John says. "We're hopeful that this book will encourage people to hit the road and visit not only the breweries but the towns and attractions in the area."

Any Hoosier beers that would appeal to Jersey drinkers?

"I think there is such a diversity among the Indiana brewers that even people with very particular tastes will be able to find what they want," John says.