Consumer preference ... oh, and maibock

Tasting room lineup

High Point Brewing is reliably a maker of German-style beers. But that's more of a footprint and less of an identity in a craft beer landscape that continues to evolve with styles, driven, of course, by the preferences of the people who drink beer. 

It's sort of like art answering life that explains how a brewery known for well-received bocks, märzens and wheat beers would stir a sour ale into the mix.

On the heels on the brewery's annual maibock release, founder Greg Zaccardi talks about such marketplace responses; how his brewery in Butler, on the northern edge of Morris County, has embraced new state rules that finally nurture New Jersey's 18-year-old craft beer industry; and how High Point, as a contract brewer, has given a helpful lift to another emerging brand.

BSL: This is the first big event you've held since regulations that had hemmed in New Jersey craft brewers were lifted last fall. Regulars to your annual maibock release would certainly notice a big difference. For instance, tour guests could buy your beer by the glass, and even before this event, a specific beer release – your maibock release – you had taken advantage of that greater outreach to the public. Can you talk a little about how that has served High Point as a craft brewery?

GZ: Governor Christie finally made it reasonable to run a brewery in New Jersey. Customers want more than just a few-ounce sample in a plastic cup. When I was a homebrewer and would seek out all of these great breweries and go to them, it was disheartening if you got a plastic shot glass. I never liked doing that, (but) that was really all we could do.

Being able to sell beer by the glass is not only good for us, it not only generates a little bit of a revenue stream, it helps us continue along in our journey toward growing our brewery. It also gives the consumer an enjoyable experience.

We still give free samples, and if they like what they're drinking, they can actually get a full glass, hang out – we're here for three hours – they can listen to me explain the art and science of brewing beer. Or they can just hang out with their friends in a brewery environment, listen to the fermenters bubble away, and just experience the vibe of being in a brewery.

So it's a great thing: It's sustainable for the business end, and I think it's great to be able to offer that experience to people who care about our beer.

Tour at 2013 maibock release

BSL: At your brewery, where the focus is German-style beer, lagers and wheat, you recently featured a cherry chocolate sour, a Belgian style, back during the Christmas holidays. Beer styles nowadays are ever-evolving, and beer enthusiasts are quite intrepid, with a taste for exploring. Craft brewers embrace that, and their taprooms support that sort of laboratory experience, creating those one-off beers that grab the attention of beer fans. How does the new business climate support that end?  

GZ: The other thing this new law allows is to host events. And it helps us run our non-tour weekends better. We can afford to do special one-off brewery exclusives, like our Belgian holiday ale, which was very different for us, as somebody said, a bit of a step outside our comfort zone. You need to do that every once in a while, and we're looking forward to doing more stuff like that. If all you do is make one type of beer day after day, it starts to get to a yawn factor.

We've really tried hard to be as efficient as we can with our brewing practices here so they run in a predictable way. That's good, but the flipside of it is you become dangerously complacent, and it can get boring. We have some young brewers (head brewer Alexis Bacon and assistant brewer Thomas Maroulakos) here that enjoy all sorts of wild beers. Both of them went up to Vermont recently, toured some breweries small and large in Vermont. It's great to see their enthusiasm. I know I wouldn't do that anymore. But these are guys who are excited about craft beer, and that comes with the responsibility of being creative. If you don't offer an opportunity to be creative, you're going to wind up with people getting very bored. 

Doing these one-offs benefits the brewery, and it certainly benefits the growing demand for the consumer. 

BSL: But to be clear, that's not the first time you've done a Belgian style. You've contract-brewed those for other people (including Boaks). 

GZ: We did a Chimay clone which we were really proud of ...

BSL: That was Chimay red.

GZ: Chimay red, right, and we even had people who sell Chimay come and tell us that they liked it better than Chimay.

BSL: Freshness factor ...

GZ: Absolutely. Freshness is huge. People tell me how much they love our beers, which is very flattering and I'm very grateful for it. They'll go, "It tastes better than the beer I got from Germany ..." But you know what? If the role were reversed, if we were exporting Ramstein from Butler to Bavaria, I don't think it would hold up as well. I can't expect it to be a fair fight there. Beer is best consumed closest to the brewery, for a lot of reasons. It really does taste great when it's fresh from the tap, especially when it's a seasonal, especially when it's a limited brewery offering. You're just hitting pure gold on those things. 

BSL: Speaking of seasonals, let's talk about the maibock. It's a marquee beer for you; it's a big event that you've always built things around, and this is the first time you've done it with that greater flexibility courtesy of the state. How would you say things went?

GZ: We were packed. 

BSL: High Point traditionally did monthly tours from March to December. How have you redesigned those open houses? 

GZ: We have a new format to our tours. We're only doing four instead of 10; we're opening the brewery to more events throughout the year, not just limiting it to 10. (Maibock day) you saw a wooden barrel tapping of the maibock; you could buy beer by the glass; you could fill growlers; you could buy hot sauce and pickles (by the bottle and jar from vendors); there's an artisanal wood stove pizza-maker outside (independent of the brewery) making pulled pork and Margherita pizza ... 

The good thing about the maibock is we made a decent amount of it. It's draft-only; it's wonderful this year and it's still 100-point rated on Ratebeer. 

BSL: How far will you have distribution on it, since you now have distribution to parts of South Jersey that you didn't have in the past? Are you able, for instance, to get sixtels to a Canal's or Spirits (Unlimited) stores in those areas?

GZ: At this point, we're just doing full kegs through our southern New Jersey distributor. But we should be able to reach some of the South Jersey communities that really appreciate good craft beer. We're there in bottles now (with Ramstein Classic and Blonde). Geographically, it's going to be in Pennsylvania, up to Reading; that would be the farthest point from the brewery that the beer will be available. It's going to be available essentially in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. But this is the first time ever (Ramstein) maibock will get beyond Princeton. 

BSL: What was maibock production like for this year, how is it in relation to your overall brewing?

GZ: Our brewing schedule has gone up by 30 percent this year. We've got another fermenter in here. We're doing four to five brews a week. We're doing exclusively draft of the maibock. There's (only) so much we can do. We've got to start to be able to provide some consistency on our Double Platinum Blonde (weiss beer). That seems to be really taking off for us, with the expanded distribution through Ritchie & Page.

You can see the line (points to a map of New Jersey) ... It used to be right in the middle, by Raritan Bay. Now we're all the way down. It's almost a 50 percent, in geographical increase, in the size of the market. 

BSL: Two-thirds of the state covered ...

GZ: Yeah, and before that we were in a little less than half. Fortunately, they're patient with us. We never overpromise them volume. By the same token, I don't want to neglect the rest of my home state. That part of the state is growing with craft beers. There are breweries, and with breweries there, the bars are going to pop up. There are festivals held down there ...

BSL: Taking a glimpse at the state industry overall, for a moment, High Point has been brewing Boaks Beer on contract for five years, and now you've taken on Bolero Snort as contract while owners Bob Olson and Andrew Maiorana plan their brewery. High Point is sort of the beneficent brewery that is enabling other people to get into the business.

GZ: I never thought of myself as an enabler (laughs). With the guys from Bolero, we were impressed with their real focus – dedication – to making their brewery happen. I think we turned them down (initially) because of capacity issues. But there's a new fermenter here for them because of them. That's being filled by their beers, and they're making great beers. 

They're great guys to deal with. They've really invested a lot in their operation. We're happy to do it. At the end of the day, the building is here, our overhead exists whether we have the lights off or the lights on. It still costs us the same amount of money every hour. 

BSL: But there are some people who might not want to do that, because you could potentially be putting a tap handle out there that competes with you. In another respect, it's the essence of this industry, rising tide lifting boats, being more communal. Plus early on in craft brewing, Bud and Miller did what they could to keep the small guy out of business.

GZ: I've never been afraid of competition. I know that sounds a bit arrogant. But here's an Italian guy in northern New Jersey making southern Germany wheat beers, fighting against breweries like Hacker-Pschorr, Paulaner, Hofbrauhaus, which is funded by the state of Bavaria. Our competition has been steep from Day One.

There will always be competition out there. (With Bolero) it's not like were making them a proprietary recipe from Ramstein. They're seeing some really good success with their black India pale (lager). For us, we have to make the very best beer we can make. The rest of it is up to the consumer. If the consumer wants a Belgian chocolate cherry sour ale, we're going to make it for them. If they want a black India pale lager, which is the Bolero Snort beer, we'll make it for them. So long as it's good. 

Signs of spring, talk of winter

Forget groundhogs as harbingers of spring.

Here's a sure sign that winter will make its scheduled hand-off: a collection of green Post-It notes stuck on the production calendar at High Point Brewing.

The notes read maibock.

Yes, spring is coming. So is that maibock, officially on March 12th at an open house at the brewery in Butler. There are 30 barrels of it fermenting right now, brewed at the end of last week, the headwaters of a planned run of eight 15-barrel batches, already pre-sold to Ramstein draft accounts.

But as much as there is a longing for spring, there's still a reason to talk about winter: High Point saw some firsts with its current versions of Winter Wheat Doppelbock and Ice Storm eisbock, some minor but noteworthy circumstances that illustrate how hot craft beer continues to be nationally and in New Jersey.

For starters, High Point dedicated two 12-barrel batches of its multi-tank run of the winter wheat exclusively for freezing and concentrating into Ice Storm, the Ramstein brew (12% ABV) in the Aventinus vein that has grown from a one-keg experiment eight years ago to a wildly popular beer that's expensive to make, sells out fast and has helped underscore the Ramstein brand. (This should give you an idea of the cost involved with producing Ice Storm: those 24 barrels of winter wheat doppelbock yielded 8 barrels of eisbock after freezing part of the water content and drawing off the remaining concentrated liquid.)

"This year we made more eisbock than we've made in the cumulative amount of time that we've ever made it. For the first time, we actually brewed batches of winter wheat that were dedicated solely to becoming eisbock," High Point founder/owner Greg Zaccardi said last Saturday, a snowy day that saw a steady stream of beer enthusiasts swing by the brewery for sample tastes and to get growler fills.

"This batch that's on now never was served as winter wheat. It was converted to eisbock, and that's a new thing for us. And the reason for that is we had so much demand for it that it made a lot of sense to just focus on it."

Then there's this: High Point bottled only a tiny fraction of the winter wheat doppelbock this year – 10 or 15 cases to have sixpacks on hand during its release open house last year – leaving the lion's share as draft. To be sure, the backbone of High Point's business has been draft beer; the winter seasonal is among only three of High Point's dozen beers that get bottled. But the brewery's tilt toward draft business is growing, and it signed on with Micro-Star keg service last year to ensure an ample supply of half barrels.

"This year the decision to not bottle was essentially (draft) pre-orders," Greg says. "This was the first year we really never did a substantive quantity bottling. Normally we do hundreds of cases.

"We always wanted to be at least 65 percent draft. Since we started with Microstar, we're up to about an 80-20 ratio," Greg says. "The more draft beer we can do, in my opinion, the better it is. It's a 100 percent reusable container; there's a lot less waste in terms of beer spillage going through the bottling line ... the system is set up to have better turnover, better management of draft beer than bottled beer. The consumer has a better chance of getting a very good draft beer than a very good bottled beer."

The draw of seasonal brews can't be ignored, either. Ice Storm is "wow factor" kind of beer, Greg says. "At this point if you really want to make something special and make an impression in the community you have to do something that is wow," he says. It's a situation that seems to steal the thunder from brewers' year-round labels, but you probably won't hear many complaints.

"As a brewer you really want to put all of your energy behind a couple of flagship beers, seasonals being something to mix it up, to accent your core brands," Greg says. "But it's not only me; it seems that Sam Adams and a lot of my contemporaries have a lot of more excitement when it comes to their seasonal releases than their core brands."

But just as seasonals have been helping brewers' bottom line, so have the rising number beer bars in New Jersey and in neighboring states. That's enabled High Point to grow (up 15 percent for the business year that ended last month) in a smaller sales market than it served a dozen years ago. It's also translating into some planned expansion this year, a couple of 30-barrel tanks due to come on line at the end of the spring.

"There's a lot more taps available, a lot more tap space available. There are places that normally wouldn't carry a sixtel of craft beer but have given it a try, and now they have two sixtels that they rotate through, in a place that's a beer and a shot joint," Greg says. "That didn't exist 10 years ago. Even the specialty beer bars these days didn't exist. If they did, what was exotic was Molsen and Bass; it wasn't a local craft."

Ramstein Maibock, sehr gut!

Back in March, less than a week after it debuted, a 2-liter growler of High Point's Ramstein maibock showed up at a beer night event in Somers Point, an Atantic County shore town that hopefully is making it's way into High Point's distribution loop.

The bock was gone practically before you could say, "Achtung, baby!" It's just that good. And here's the verdict from the RateBeer jury.

Roll out the barrel

If you like Ramstein Maibock (we do), then this is something you don't want to miss: Ramstein Maibock, barrel-aged and dry-hopped with fresh Hallertauer hops.

The dry-hopping may break from tradition with a German style beer, but American brewers have been making their mark by rewriting the rules (double IPA, anyone?) and coloring outside the lines. This is one in which High Point Brewing steps in with its expertise and sets the pace.

The tricked-out, limited version of the bock tops the bill for High Point's June open house this Saturday (2-4 p.m.), backed up with the Ramstein flight of Blonde, Dunkel Weiss and Blazing Amber.

And if you're a Ramones, Blondie or Lou Reed fan, the added bonus for Saturday is you can glimpse photos of those performers from their heady days, courtesy of Lower Third Enterprise. The images will be on exhibit and for sale.

You don't need the Reverend Horton Heat to tell you that rock 'n' roll and beer go together like Les and Paul.

Meanwhile, we trekked up to Berkeley Heights in Union County on Wednesday for a chat with Trap Rock brewer Charlie Schroeder (more on that very soon) and to visit a brewpub that's worth the two-hour drive from our southern Ocean County shores. (There's a classy polish to Trap Rock that you quickly come to appreciate once past the entrance. And even with a seven-barrel system, Charlie keeps nine house beers flowing, plus a version of one of those on a handpump.)

Pictured is the lovely and gracious Melissa Hudasko, slightly reprising her New York Times pose from last year.