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.

The one and only Uno

Pizzeria Uno in Metuch-ison-bridge (our portmanteau for the brewpub, given its location in a sort of nexus of Metuchen, Edison and Woodbridge) has a Monday night beer dinner coming up.

The ever-gregarious PubScout Kurt Epps is emcee of the event and has details here.

As most folks know, this Uno is the only one that features beer brewed on site. Mike Sella's beer, Moshe's menu and Kurt at the microphone ... you'll be in good hands if you go.

If you missed Beer Wars ...

Independent filmmaker Anat Baron has some news regarding the availability of her beer industry documentary in the movie aftermarket.

Anat was kind enough to do an interview with the blog last year, so it's fitting her efforts enjoy some support here.

Here's Anat's email:

I'm thrilled to announce that my feature documentary BEER WARS will finally be available to the mainstream audience for whom it was intended. Anyone in the US and with a TV or a computer (or even a gaming console), will be able to rent or buy the movie beginning Monday, February 1. This was made possible through digital distribution deals with Warner Bros. and Netflix. Please help support this launch by renting or buying the film (if you haven't already done so) or by spreading the word to everyone you know. Feel free to forward this email, post the film's availability on or tweet about it to your followers.

THE SPECIFICS: In the U.S. Beer Wars is available to rent On Demand through Digital Cable and Satellite providers Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Charter, Insight, Bresnan, Verizon FiOS, AT&T U-Verse, Dish Network and DirecTV. It is also available for Download on iTunes, Amazon Video On Demand and Playstation.

The film is also available on Netflix either on DVD or “Watch Instantly” beginning February 2. And the DVD is now available for purchase from Amazon. As well as the movie's website.

The growler gang

The New York Times has a piece about growlers, looking more at how the ranks of the growler crowd and the places that fill them have evolved lately.

The story doesn't seem to reveal much by way of news or a dramatic trend (and the story is all about New York). But some of the history of growlers is interesting, especially the bit about temperance groups and their disdain for folks drinking at home.

But in the spirit of recapping, here's our observations on growlers ...

For New Jersey brewpubs, growlers are, of course, a big business segment. But production breweries, namely Cricket Hill and High Point, also fill them during tours (they count as that two-sixpack maximum that breweries are allowed to sell under state law).

The best growlers are the 2-liter jugs with the gasket-fitted ceramic lids. They are the only kind Basil T's in Red Bank sells. A proper fill in one of these will store longer, thanks to how the lid latches tight and seals. (This type is also mainstay at High Point in Butler; on tour Saturdays, practically every hand is lugging one.)

Most brewpubs in New Jersey will fill either the 2-liter or the half-gallon jug.

Speaking of the 64-ouncers, most folks know the cap seal of those bottles may not be as snug as their 2-liter brethren. Hence, some pubs take the trouble to tape or shrink wrap the capped bottle (i.e. Iron Hill and Triumph). But let's face it, CO2 is happiest as a gas not dissolved in liquid, and the tiniest of leaks is the path to flat beer inside a week.

However, if you can get a fill to the lip of the jug, then you stand a better chance of beer bought on a Monday storing just fine to the weekend. Absent headspace, there's nowhere for the CO2 to collect, so it stays dissolved in the beer. The trouble is, a lot of times the folks behind the bar at the brewpubs are very busy (or simply have no idea about storing growlers; yes good help is still hard to find). So making sure your growler has minimal ullage (that headspace) isn't on the minds of bar staff.

Standouts
In Jersey, there are a couple of growler distinctions. Climax Brewing in Roselle Park bottles exclusively in the half-gallon jugs. Over in Milford, the Ship Inn sells the 64-ouncers, and 5-liter boxes of beer (it's a plastic bladder inside a box, and comes with a reusable gravity-flow tap).

Meanwhile, Iron Hill in Maple Shade, the newest addition to the Jersey beer scene, has an automated growler filler that uses a tube inserted into the half-gallon jug so it fills from the bottom up. The result is less air in your take-home beer to make it go stale, and thus, a better shelf life.

Cheers.

Exit 4 in 12 ounce bottles

We first learned about this during a visit to the Cherry Hill brewery in early December, when head brewer Casey Hughes pointed to the list of beers under production at Flying Fish.

A new batch of Exit 4, the award-winning FF beer that launched the Exit Series almost a year ago, was on the board and in the fermenter.

After being sworn to secrecy until an announcement could be made, we were offered a sample of the still-young beer, and Casey said plans were under way to put the American-slanted Belgian trippel in 12-ounce bottles as a year-round offering.

It marks the first time FF has backed up to revisit any of the so-far three brews released in the multiyear special series. (It also marks the first time FF has a release a beer in 12-ounce bottles that doesn't feature clouds on the label.) Sometimes, you just can't move on to the next thing.

Exit 4 in 12-ounce bottles hits the shelves in February. The release party for the Great American Beer Fest gold medal winner is 6 p.m. next Thursday (Jan. 28) at Swift Half Pub in Philadelphia.

A thawing of the ice?

Looks like some regulatory ice is melting for New Jersey brewers.

Earlier this month, a measure that would allow beer samplings (liquor, too) at packaged goods stores (and bars) easily cleared the state Assembly. The state Senate approved it last summer. With bipartisan support, it's hard to imagine the legislation not being signed into law by the governor. (It may well have been signed already. With the transition from Jon Corzine to Chris Christie this week, action by the governor's office hasn't been in sync with updates on the state Web site.)

Groups tracking the legislation have said the change could take effect as early as May. However, it's important to note that legislation in New Jersey usually takes effect four months after signing. Such is the minutiae details of the Statehouse.

How it works
It goes like this: Tastings could be conducted twice a month at packaged good stores and bars (the plenary retail consumption and retail distribution licensees), with patrons being allowed four 3-ounce samples. Beer to be sampled must be from the stores' stock (which probably translates to those stores wanting brewers to donate the beer).

Obvious restrictions also apply, meaning no minors and no samples after hours. There are some well-duh restrictions, too: Tastings must be done on the licensees' premises (it's not like they're going to come to your house to give you samples).

If we're reading the bill correctly, breweries would be allowed to assist in the samplings, but distributors would not. Looks like breweries (designated "manufacturers" in the bill) wouldn't be relegated to standing there and just smiling. The language of the legislation doesn't specify they can't pour, as are the rules at all of the beer festivals except the annual Garden State Craft Brewers Guild festival, which enjoys special dispensation for that event.

Two schools of thought
So how big of a deal is this? Depends on whom you ask.

Some brewery owners are doing a happy dance at the thought of a rule change, seeing it as a chance to fan out to points of purchase, engage customers and give them the Pepsi challenge – putting their beers up against the plethora of brews from around the country and world that wind up on the shelves. (OK, we embellish there. It would not be side-by-side tasting.)

Garden State brewers are very confident about their beers, and point out Jersey-made brands lack not quality but the exposure that mainstream marketing can bring. Reaching out to the retail customers, they say, can go a long way toward turning around that exposure problem. And if nothing else, the added marketing dimension is better than the current system in which store patrons cannot try before buying.

On the flip side, though, waits a numbers dilemma. And the likes of Budweiser.

Some brewers wonder if there is sufficient bang for the buck and the labor involved. If they have to give away two cases of beer to hundreds of packaged goods stores for sampling two times a month, things could get pricey, not to mention cut into inventory. And practically every production craft brewer in the state right now is running at capacity and could stand to expand. On top of that, not all folks showing up at liquor stores are there to buy beer.

Meanwhile, there's Bud. And Miller. And Coors. Any one of the monster-sized beer producers can outspend the little guys and go after customers with samples from their portfolios of imports and craft brews produced under labels not widely known to be under their banners. (That Spaten Optimator or Bass ale you just drank is in the AB-InBev stable.)

Nonetheless, most Jersey brewers are up for the opportunity to greet the beer-drinking public where they buy. Sometimes underdogs win. So stay tuned.

Illustrating a point

Not to belabor our grouse over that ugly Beeradvocate cover, but there is this addendum to make ...

It's easy to take a swat at someone else's work; it's another thing to show you can do better. A few minutes spent looking through the photos we've shot in the past three years turned up this image from 2008.

These hops ended up in Weyerbacher Brewing's special harvest ale of that year, tossed into the hopback on the heels of being picked on a late-August Saturday, from the acre of Cascades and Nuggets Dan Weirback put in the ground at his farm in Lehigh County, Pa. (Dan grew the hops the summer after that late-2007 price spike; now that there's a glut in the hops market, some brewers are pretty much irked and questioning what happened back then.)

So is this a cover-worthy photo, or at least an example of an eye-catching photo? Honestly not to brag, but we say yes.

NJ beer has a friend in DC

His name is Rep. Leonard Lance.

The 7th District Republican congressman left the following comment today to an August post:

Hello,
I wanted to let you know that I recently toured Climax in Roselle Park to announce my membership to the House Small Brewers Caucus.

I am proud to be the only member of the New Jersey congressional delegation on the Small Brewers Caucus.

In an effort to reducing the tax burden on New Jersey’s brewers, I am a cosponsor of HR 836, the “Brewers Excise and Economic Relief (BEER) Act of 2009,” which effectively returns the federal beer excise tax back to its pre-1991 level of $9 per barrel.

This legislation would reduce the tax burden for all brewers and specifically reduces the small brewer rate by 50% to $3.50 a barrel.

Rest assured I will continue to support and promote New Jersey's small domestic producers in order to keep this American industry thriving. These are good jobs in our local communities that protect a fine American craftsmanship.

Best personal wishes,
Leonard Lance
Member of Congress

Climax Brewing owner Dave Hoffmann says Lance came by on Monday. And while he's grateful for Lance's outreach, Dave says he explained to the congressman that the heaviest hand of government yoking Jersey brewers comes from Trenton, not Washington.

Still, what Lance is doing is significant – lend New Jersey craft brewers a voice in Washington. And consider this: The caucus will turn 3 years old this year. Since its founding, no member of Jersey's House delegation bothered to take an interest in the state's craft beer industry until Rep. Lance, who has a distinguished track record of putting New Jersey first, stepped up.

For that he deserves points. Let's hope the seven other Jersey representatives on the Hill who have breweries in their districts follow Lance's lead.

No, no, no

The new issue of Beeradvocate came today ...

Maybe this is hypercritical, but Jason, Todd, guys, that cover photo is garbage. Sorry, but that is a throw-away image from the Canon's flashcard, a quick frame shot to find an f/stop and gauge room lighting (if you left your light meter at home), and then the photographer chimps at the back of his camera, deletes the pic and lines up a real shot. Not a closeup of crap.

OK, so it's a closeup of a mash tun being cleaned out. It's not even a good photo of that (it's cluttered-looking as far as composition goes, and your eye falls immediately to the door latch area).

But really it's not about anything. Nothing.

What's so compelling about cleaning out a mash tun? You can't tell the rake is a rake (sorry, two feet of handle identifies nothing, whereas the end of the rake would have); that muddy color on the right is probably steam, but you have to hang out at a brewery to know that. The image is flashed-out overexposed on the left; meanwhile, the action (the falling grain) is underexposed. It's not color balanced, so the raked-out grain looks green, and if you had to fix it in post, then you're just playing garbage in garbage out.

But most of all, the shot perspective is indicative of nothing. It's slightly to the left of head-on, over a shoulder. It's just junk and shouldn't be on the cover, nor anywhere, for that matter.

Sorry, but it's a bad job. And it if were a beer, you guys would be going "D-".

In search of ...

Stainless steel ... some extra tank space, to be extact.

Last year was a pretty good year for New Jersey brewers, with some nice spikes in growth. For instance, High Point was up nearly 30 percent as of last month. Growth is up about 45 percent for River Horse, which is where the blog's compass of discussion is pointing today.

They're slammin' busy along the Delaware Canal in Lambertville. They have been for some time, to the point where an extra brace or foursome of 40-barrel fermenters and an extra pair of bright beer tanks would comfortably ease the production pace for brewer Chris Rakow, his assistant, and the packaging staff. (There have been some personnel changes at RH, and Chris, formerly of Harpoon Brewing, has been handling the brewing for a while now.)

The pace has been tight enough to force RH to pull back on some of its product-lineup plans, a tough thing for a brewery that has been really amping up its flight of brews over the past 27 months (i.e. a double wit, a double ipa, a dunkel, a honey wheat, a stout and an unfiltered lager).

Demand for last year's summer ale trumped some jazzing up of RH's Belgian triple and a planned bottling a fall dunkel. However, RH did unveil a second season, or redux version (as the brewery calls it), of the hybrid oatmeal milk stout it debuted in 2008 in the Brewer's Reserve roster. (Note to RH followers: Consider this busy pace when wondering why the RH Web site runs a little behind on updates.)

So some more steel is rather import.

RH has been scouting around for used tanks for a while (pre-owned is, of course, more economical that commissioning a metal fabricator). But getting that optimal match between brewery needs and what's available on the market, says RH co-owner Glenn Bernabeo, can prove challenging. But, he adds, the brewery hopes something can be in place around March.

Meanwhile, look for an RH rye pale ale to come out soon (most likely draft) and the reviving of back-burnered plans to pumpkin-spice the Belgian triple.

Maneuvering room may be tight, but the folks at RH are still have some tricks up their sleeves.

Imperial pils

Quick note:

The Garden State Craft Brewers Guild's January update is out, and if you're in North Jersey, or you are an adventurous roving South Jerseyan, you might take note of the imperial pilsner from Ramstein.

High Point featured this at the guild's festival last summer in Camden. It's a great beer, and worth checking out. But you'll have to travel to Manhattan or Brooklyn.

For now. Hopefully it can wind up on this side of the Hudson.

Decade from Hell's silver lining: Craft beer

Time magazine called 2000-2009 the Decade from Hell.

The New York Times and Princeton's Paul Krugman played it by the numbers, or more precisely, number, denouncing the 10 years from Y2K to this year as the The Big Zero.

To be sure be sure, the past 10 years have been packed with enough high anxiety (from 9/11 through almost economic depression) near the starting and finish lines to last a century, while the middle years featured two ongoing wars, a disaster named Katrina and techno-changes (i.e. online social networking, blogs and YouTube) that burst onto the scene as rapidly as our scared pulses raced in 2001.

It certainly has been a decade to make you reach for a drink, to settle the nerves or marvel the innovations. And happily, beer has been a king of our collective glass – beers of all kinds, in fact, save those bland light lagers that seemed more akin to dial-up Internet than the adventurous frontiers borne of Web 2.0.

Craft beer, microbrew ... whatever we call it now, by whatever distinctions (brewery size, methods, or an overlap of both), it has definitely come on strong (a $6 billion industry now, with nealry 1,500 breweries nationwide) in the headwaters of the 21st century, with variety and consumer choice unseen since Prohibition, its repeal and the subsequent, long-lingering consolidation hangover that defined the fade of the 20th century. (Check out the fact pages from the industry group Brewers Association, the folks we nicked the graphic from.)

Over the decade, imperial brews widened their reach, from double IPAs that could be found in the late 1990s, to just about everything that seemed like it could use some amping up (imperial pilsner, anyone?). Although, imports were down nearly 10 percent through half of 2009, according to the BA, they are very much an indelible part of the package store shelf-scape, both exotic and straight-forward, and many of them are a continued source of inspiration for homebrewers and some Jersey pub brewers (Belgian browns at the Tun Tavern or Harvest Moon, for instance).

Good restaurants discovered it wasn't enough to have a well-represented wine list. They also needed beer lists that spoke to changing palates. Meanwhile, distributors, who could rightly or wrongly be faulted for once acting cool toward craft brews, have gotten behind them as an important market segment.

And those megabrewers? Well in the past they may have seen craft brews as viable enough to produce through arrangements that kept their brand names out of sight. But last year, about the same time the economy was withering like a parched suburban lawn in an August heatwave, Budweiser began pushing an American ale, marketing it with slogans draped in talk of dry-hopping and Cascades cones. That was on the heels of Anheuser-Busch (which, as we know, has a brewery in Newark) realizing it couldn't outrun a hostile takeover with InBev, and therefore made friends with a merger to create Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world's largest brewer. The mash-up left Boston Beer and its Sam Adams brand as the largest U.S.-owned brewer, a turn of events notably ironic since AB buried the St. Louis family brewery of Sam Adams founder Jim Koch. (Cue Nelson Muntz and a round of ha-ha.)

Adding to AB's in-the-decade market moves is a wheat beer under the Bud Light trademark, a business model-defying development say some New Jersey craft brewers, who note the megabrewers aren't exactly setup to play to such niche tastes.

And speaking of New Jersey, since this is a blog about Jersey-made beer, brewers in the Garden State say the arc of the past decade goes from shakeout of a late 1990s craft brew bubble to more breweries and consumers. But on top that are fewer companies to distribute the beer, something that could be a crosscurrent to navigate in the coming decade, say some Jersey brewers.

Don "Joe Sixpack" Russell, Philadelphia's noted beer guide, points out that while the variety has surged, brand loyalty has ebbed. Consumers, he says, are drinking what's good, not what's advertised.

Additionally, Don notes there's a new generation of beer drinkers that has craft brew as a primary reference point. That is to say, craft beer has always been available to them, unlike their predecessors who recall the novelty of a Guinness nitrogen tap system coming to the corner bar, or even Sam Adams on draft.

There are also second- and third-generation brewers getting into the act, Don says, 20somethings emerging from college who homebrewed their takes on great craft beers and see themselves making their beers for wider audiences.

Happy New Year. The next decade beckons.

Highlights in Jerseyana beer
A brief list, and it's based more on recollection than research, which means it leans toward the more recent, rather than the past. Anyway, here goes ...

London calling: Flying Fish sends beer to Year 2000 Great British Beer Festival in the UK capital (we were there). But alas, the beer gets held up in transit and ends up being served at a subsequent festival elsewhere in Blighty.

Win some, lose some: Cricket Hill Brewing opens in Fairfield in Essex County (2002), with a brace of brews – East Coast Lager and American Ale, as its flagships. Blue Collar Brewing in Vineland closes (2005); Heavyweight Brewing exits New Jersey (2006), resurfaces in Philadelphia as the brewpub, Earth Bread+Brewery; Iron Hill brewpub, started in Delware by a trio of Jerseyans, makes a long-awaited homecoming, opening a location in Maple Shade (2009).

Lights, camera, action: Climax Brewing and its owner, Dave Hoffmann, is featured in the film American Beer (2004). Hey Dave, you exist as a cast credit in the Internet Movie Database. You're a star.

Ten years after: Breweries and brewpubs that hit the double-digit anniversary: Climax (2004); High Point (2004); Ship Inn (2005); Triumph (2005); Long Valley (2005); Flying Fish (2006); River Horse (2006); Harvest Moon (2006); Original Basil T's (2006); Artisan (formerly Basil T's in Toms River, 2007); Trap Rock (2007); JJ Bitting (2007); Tun Tavern (2008); Pizzeria Uno (2008); Gaslight (2008); Krogh's (2009).

Festivals: The Garden State Craft Brewers Guild moored its annual festival at Camden's waterfront in 2005. That followed the closing of the former site, Waterloo Village in Sussex County. and some roving around some. The Atlantic City beer festival sprang up at the resort town's convention center in 2006, while JJ Bitting began sponsoring an annual festival in Woodbridge.

Gone but not forgotten: Beer Hunter Michael Jackson, the world's guiding light for beer, dies in September 2007. Sadness in June 2008 when Jay Mission, Triumph's director of brewing operations and a luminary in New Jersey craft beer, dies suddenly.

Hippo rescue: New Jersey lost two production craft breweries in the decade, and the tally could have easily risen to three, if a couple of finance guys with a taste for beer hadn't pictured themselves as in being the beer business. Chris Walsh and Glenn Bernabeo shook up the brewery's moribund product line and restored confidence in the brand.

Read all about it: New Jersey Breweries guide book is published (2008). An on-again, off-again idea, authors Lew Bryson and Mark Haynie tackle a subject made difficult by the fact that the Garden State's craft beer scene, in terms of producers, is more spartan when compared to our neighboring states.

National limelight: First there was a brew that saluted the New Jersey Turnpike and the Jersey pop culture what exit tie-in; then there was brouhaha over it when the New Jersey Turnpike Authority erroneously assumed the beers projected an image of drinking and driving. Nevertheless, the TA simmered down and Flying Fish's Exit Series beers captured national media attention and a gold medal at the Great American Beer Fesitval in 2009. The next exit, the fourth in the series and first in 2010, will be up north, we hear, and will land in your glass with a Belgian bent.

Clean break: Basil T's in Toms River, long a separately owned brewpub from the original Basils pub in Red Bank, completes the break, announcing in October 2009 a name change to Artisan's Brewey & Italian Grill.

A brew in search of a party

A few more details about the pale ale that bested a coffee porter to win the Office Beer Bar & Grill homebrew contest.

Matt Lamm says he originally crafted his Morristown Pale Ale – a golden-to-orange West Coast interpretation – months ago for a softball team party.

It had become Matt's custom to treat teammates to some of his beer creations after games. So the team's pitcher tapped Matt, who took up homebrewing five years ago while he was a University of Delaware grad student, to come up with something for an end-of-the-season party.

However, that get-together never happened.

And Matt, 29, who lives in Morristown and works in the pharmaceutical industry, suddenly had 10 gallons of beer that he was pleased with; yet it was a beer that also had lost its wider audience. A recent night out for a beer with his girlfriend, Selin, at the Office's Morristown location gave Matt's brew a new mission (beyond personal enjoyment) when they spied a notice about the bar's homebrew contest.

Matt entered what he had on hand: a blonde ale brewed from an extract and the Morristown Pale Ale, an all-grain endeavor backboned with Briess pale malt and shaped with some crystal (40 Lovibond) and Vienna malt, then hopped with Cascades and Centennial in the boil and dry-hopped with Centennials. Matt also plucked some Cascade cones from a first-year bine he had growing in planter on his deck and tossed them straight into the boil.

The result was a 5.2% ABV brew at 59 IBUs that Matt just finished the last of a week or so ago. As part of his victory, he'll get to help brew a scaled-up version at High Point Brewing, one of the contest sponsors. That's tentatively scheduled for the third week of January, with the finished brew to go on tap at Office locations in sometime in late February.

As for that coffee porter, the contest's runner-up, Matt hopes he can take a crack at the recipe created by Peter Kennedy of SimplyBeer.com, or a lager. But for now, he's focused on the grand-scale reprise of his pale ale, which will be part of a soiree after all – a ceremonial tapping at the Office, a party his softball teammates just may be able to catch.

Beer wars winner

The war is over, and a pale ale won.

Matthew Lamm of Morristown (that's Matthew in the middle in the photo at left) and his West Coast-style pale ale – brewed with some homegrown hops – walked away the victor on Saturday in the Beer Wars homebrew contest, sponsored by The Office Beer Bar & Grill and High Point Brewing.

Matthew, who holds a PhD in material science and engineering and is a senior scientist at a pharmaceutical company, now has a date with the mash tun and brew kettle in Butler, where he'll assist the folks at High Point in scaling up his recipe for a commercial-size batch of Morristown Pale Ale. Though when it goes on tap at The Office's seven locations in Febreuary, you'll find it renamed under the restaurant chain's house brew label, which High Point brews under contract.

More than a dozen homebrewers competed in this inaugural turn on the contest. Let's hope it grows.

The season of giving

One of the funniest things you can listen this holiday season is Lewis Black's rants on Chanukah and Christmas (it's on his disc Anticipation).

It's his take on how "Santa's ass" is "tied to the economy" and how the jolly fat man could be a disarming politician, as well as observations on the overly practical gifts Lewis says he received as a youngster during Chanukah (like a pen and pencil set ... "how lucky for me that I have two eyes").

It's even funnier after a few pints of Ramstein Winter Wheat, Flying Fish Grand Cru or River Horse Double Wit. But you can judge for yourself ...

Meantime, if you're looking for ways to keep Santa's ass part of the economy or not be too practical, then take a look at some ideas that friend of the blog John Holl assembled for newjerseynewsroom.com.

Cheers.

The next front in Homebrewer War

It's on to the finals at the Office Beer Bar & Grill.

More than a dozen homebrewers made the cut Tuesday night in the opening round of the Office-sponsored homebrewer contest, and they'll now vie in the showdown Saturday afternoon/evening at The Office's Montclair location. The judging begins at 5:15 p.m.

Guest judges for the finals will be Greg Zaccardi, owner of High Point Brewing, where the winning recipe will be scaled up and brewed under contract for The Office; Ale Street News editor Tony Foder; Lon Lauterio of Nash Distributors; and Greg Stanton of Stew Leonard's Wines of Clifton. The Office staff judges will be Craig Godfrey, Ed Schwartz, Phil Butler and Dan Shea.

Friend of the blog Tom Eagan, who tracks his homebrewing and other malt adventures at Destination Beer, is among the finalists with his oatmeal stout. Good luck to all brewers.

Speaking of High Point Brewing, Saturday is also the Butler brewery's last open house until March 2010. The makers of the Ramstein beer brand debuted their winter wheat doppelbock last month. But we're still squarely in the season for that brew, which Gourmet magazine gave some props to as a fine winter beer, so expect to find it featured at the open house.

The new brewer at Bitting

If you've been stopping by for a pint at J.J. Bitting over the past couple of months, you've been sampling the brewing efforts of James Moss, a Pacific Northwester who's taken over the mash tun and kettle from August Lightfoot.

Long a familiar face at Bitting, August made an exit from the Woodbridge brewpub in late September (the last keg of his swansong brew for Bitting kicked last week).

James, 27, followed his girlfriend from Oregon to the Northeast (she just earned a master's in teaching at Columbia) and scored the Bitting gig after spotting a job posting on ProBrewer. Before relocating to Brooklyn (he trains it down to Woodbridge), James was trying to land a gig as a cellarman with McMenamins, the multifaceted Oregon-based brewpub chain. His resume includes a stint at a winery and time at the Ram Restaurant & Brewery near Tacoma, Wash.

Like a lot of craft brewers, James was a homebrewer before he was a commercial brewer. Turning pro was a goal he started bringing into focus about five years ago.

What's in store in Woodbridge
Bitting patrons will find the familiar mix of brews that have drawn them to a barstool at the former coal and grain company building situated beside the tracks NJ Transit's trains travel. James says he may sneak one of his porter or IPA recipes into the mix, but overall he plans to ease folks toward his brewing personality and brew interpretations. (For the record, he has an affinity for porters, oatmeal stouts, double IPAs and IPAs done with a Pacific Northwest slant.)

"Experimenting is one of the things I like about brewing. There's so many options to try," he says.

James just brewed Bitting's Barley Legal barley wine with the help of Tom Paffrath, who used to tend the kettle at Basil T's (soon to officially be named Artisans) in Toms River.

Look for that big brew to go on tap in early February. The Bitting winter warmer that James turned in goes on tap this month.

Cheers.

Update – Homebrewer contest

... The opening round will be judged next Tuesday.

We checked with Greg Zaccardi at High Point Brewing on Monday for some confirmation about the contest. So yes, the game is on, with the victor collecting the spoils of a $100 Office gift card, bragging rights, a commemorative tap handle, perhaps best of all for a homebrewer, the opportunity to help brew his or her recipe on a grand scale, namely at High Point in Butler.

The winning beer will go on tap at the seven Office Beer Bar & Grill locations, under the Office's house beer label.

Once again, here are the rules, and entrants should RSVP the Office at: beerwars@cbsteakhouse.com

• All styles are welcome.
• Criteria will be based on the quality of each beer and the commercial viability of a late winter beer to be sold in The Office Beer Bar & Grill, beginning in late January.
• Entrants will provide the equivalent of six 12-ounce bottles for the event.
• The restaurant winner will chosen by 50 percent guest votes, and 50 percent judges. Overall appeal is the single criteria.
  
• Each restaurant winner must provide an additional six – 12 oz bottles, or the equivalent for the championship.
  
• The winning beer will be determined by a panel of industry professionals.

Participants must comply and agree with the following conditions:

• 21 years old or older
  
• All participants must be present at the time of judging
• The winning recipe is to be provided, and the winner will relinquish any commercial rights for the winning the recipe.
• Employees of The Office Beer Bar & Grill and our vendors are not eligible to enter.

*EDITOR'S NOTE:
If you've entered the contest, shoot us an email at beerstainedletter@yahoo.com ... We'd love to hear from you.

Porter pilgrimages

For a while, Charlie Schroeder at Trap Rock had been mentioning to us the Colonial Porter he was putting on tap at the brewpub.

Getting some of that for Thanksgiving seemed like a good idea. In fact, having porters – plural – on the dinner table sounded like a doubly-good idea.

So yesterday, a course was set for Charlie's digs in scenic Berkeley Heights to sample a pint of the 6.5% ABV porter jazzed up with a gallon of molasses. It will accompany some Big Vic's Short Order Porter picked up Monday at Basil T's brewpub in Red Bank.

Charlie says the porter evolved from a brown ale he did a little experimenting with, namely by adding molasses to it to deepen its character. The molasses transformed the beer (and its chocolate malt) into a smooth brew that Charlie further shaped with the addition of the black malt "to balance some of the sweetness out instead of using more hops."

"It was something that happened by accident," Charlie says. "It started out as a brown ale that I wanted to make taste better by adding molasses, but then it turned out to be a porter."

It was a great pint at lunch. Gonna be good with dinner, too.

Also pouring at Trap Rock are a rye pale ale, Thorny (5.7% ABV, named after a grounded red-tailed hawk cared for at a raptor rehab center in Millington) and winter warmer that are worth a try. Ditto for some aged strong ale, Virgil (8.5% ABV, named for a turkey vulture that arrived at the raptor center in the mid-1980s). It's a beer Charlie brews once a year and sets aside a keg to age for eight months to a year. (You won't find Virgil on the brewpub's beer list, so ask the bartender about it. However, the quantity is limited so hurry, and alas, it's not available in growlers.)

The rye in Thorny, Charlie says, "acts almost like another hop. It's spicy. It's mimicking a hop, and by putting it with other hops it really gives it an interesting flavor profile you normally wouldn't get if you just added hops, a different hop."

He brewed Willie's Winter Warmer (6% ABV) using three different crystal malts, including a crystal rye malt, stacked on a base of pilsner malt. "It's like an Anchor Steam. It's a San Fran lager yeast fermented at an ale temperature, low 60s, and I used the different crystal malts," Charlie says.

Over at Basil T's in Red Bank, brewer Gretchen Schmidhausler has a honey brown ale that will be coming on, as well as the brewpub's Red Ribbon Ale seasonal made with star anise. But Big Vic's porter is on tap now, and it's quite tasty. There's note of sweetness to it as a pint by itself, but combined with food, there's a roasty quality that emerges. It's delicious beer, a two-pinter easily. But judge for yourself.

Homebrew in the queue

This announcement tumbled into the email queue today, and what follows is the actual email text. We didn't get a chance to reach out to the folks at High Point about it. But anyway, here it goes:

Do you have aspirations to be the next Beer Baron? If so, The Office Beer Bar & Grill is hosting the perfect competition for you! The Home Brewers Wars - sponsored by High Point Brewing Company, makers of Ramstein Beer - will answer the question: who is the best amateur brewer in New Jersey?

The first round of competition, "The People's Choice," will be held on Tuesday, December 8th, beginning at 8 p.m., at all Office Beer Bar locations. Homemade beers will be judged by customers and professional brewers alike, with a victor emerging from each of the seven Office locations.

On Saturday, December 12th, the seven finalists will face off at 5 p.m. at the Montclair Office Beer Bar, where judges from High Point Brewing Company, Nash Distributors and High Grade Distributors will choose the best home brewer.

The winner will receive a $100 Office gift card, have the chance to spend the day working with the brewers at High Point to create their recipe from scratch, will receive a commemorative tap handle and plaque and the first keg will be tapped during a ceremony in late January. The winner's beer will then be sold throughout our restaurants for beer lovers to enjoy.

So head down to the basement and start brewing! Please RSVP to beerwars@cbsteakhouse.com if you plan to submit a beer.

THE OFFICE BEER BAR & GRILL HOME BREWERS WARS RULES

All styles are welcome. Our criteria will be based on the quality of each beer and the commercial viability of a late winter beer to be sold in The OFFICE BEER BAR & GRILL beginning in late January. Entrants will provide the equivalent of six – 12oz bottles for the event.

The restaurant winner will chosen by 50% guest votes, and 50% judges. Overall appeal is the single criteria. Each restaurant winner must provide an additional six – 12 oz bottles, or the equivalent for the championship. The winning beer will be determined by a panel of industry professionals.

Participants must comply and agree with the following conditions:

• 21 years old or older
  
• All participants must be present at the time of judging
• The winning recipe is to be provided, and the winner will relinquish any commercial rights for the winning the recipe

Employees of The Office Beer Bar & Grill and our vendors are ineligible.

More tales of stout on a half shell

Flying Fish's use of oysters in a stout may inspire homebrewers to put bivalves in the boil, too. But a couple of homebrewers from Monmouth County's bayshore turned in an oyster stout four months ago.

Shucks, that's a couple months before FF folks officially tipped their hand about where and what the next Exit Series beer would be.

Bill Comella of Highlands says he likes FF's Exit 1 Bayshore Oyster Stout, but it was Ventnor Brewery's Oyster Stout that inspired him and his co-brewer, Bobby Soden, members of the WHALES homebrew club, to get shellfish (OK, bad pun) with a 10-gallon batch of foreign export stout. The pair brewed on a three-tiered system fashioned from half-barrel kegs and used oysters bought at the Lusty Lobster seafood market in Highlands.

"We just put 'em in a big sack and dropped it in the boil with 10 minutes to go," Bill says. "Then we ate the oysters. There was more stout in the oysters than there was oyster in the stout."

And the beer? "It came out great."

The Ventnor Bill refers to is in the United Kingdom, not the Ventnor south of Atlantic City. The latter, as we know, is tangentially world famous as one of the yellow properties in Monopoly (Ventnor Avenue, price $260; rent $22 unimproved, $1,150 with hotel); the former is located on the Isle of Wight, famous in rock 'n' roll history for a multiday music festival in 1970 that was bigger than Woodstock 1969 and was one of Jimi Hendrix's last live performances.

Bill discovered Ventnor Brewery's oyster stout while in Amsterdam a few months back. The brewery went out of business last March, a victim of a seasonal economy and stingy bankers who wouldn't float it a loan to hold it over until the economy emerged from its winter doldrums.

Barristers, beer and a new book

Add one more title to the bookshelf on New Jersey beer.

Mike Pellegrino, a lawyer in Denville and appreciator of better beer, is the author of Jersey Brew, The Story of Beer in New Jersey. Don't think of the 160-page book as an examination of current beer trends and the state's craft beer scene.

Besides beer, Mike is a fan of history, and his book is an intersection of the two. The Garden State craft beer scene is but a coda to the remembrance of all the labels once brewed in New Jersey, like Krueger (the nation's first canned beer), Ballantine Burton Ale (imagine some bar talk on Burton ale at a Garden State watering hole in 1985, and not in a historical context ... no way; it was unheard of again until the mid-1990s) and Camden Bock Beer. (There's 110 images of old labels in the book.)

The part of the book likely to prove most appealing to readers is the Garden State's colorful defiance of Prohibition (January 1920-December 1933), which New Jersey was dragged into kicking and screaming. The state rejected the temperance movement as it was visited upon state legislature after legislature, and only bowed after the 18th Amendment to the Constitution poured it down the state's throat like a bitter cocktail.

Mike says beer was openly sold in New Jersey during the Terrible 13, and federal agents who prevailed upon the illegal taps to enforce the law were hard-pressed to pressure those caught to rat out where the beer came from. Under Prohibition and a corresponding gangster era, there were even some innovative and sneaky ways to move beer around, such using fire hoses. (Sounds sort of like beer baron Homer Simpson and the booze-filled bowling balls sent to Moe's Tavern when Springfield went dry.)

Besides being a chronicler of New Jersey beer history, Mike's also an independent defender of the state's modern craft brewers. A recent op-ed piece he wrote for the New Jersey Law Journal examines the disparities between how the Garden State treats its vintners and brewers.

The Nov. 9 article in the journal, for which Mike is an occasional contributor, picks up on an oft-made point about post-Prohibition beer and wine, namely the greater freedoms wineries enjoy compared to brewers. That would include the sharp differences in the costs of brewing licenses vs. vintner licenses, and the state's almost inexplicable unbalanced approach to on-premise sales of beer and wine. The state blesses generous sales at the winery, while, as we know, craft brewers get handcuffed with the per diem limit of two sixpacks per person at the brewery tour gift shop.

Roll into that regulatory chasm the fact that wine can be sampled at packaged goods stores, but if you want to know what a beer tastes like before you buy, go to another state (or to the brewery on a tour day). It's not going to happen at the point of purchase here, much to the ire of brewers, who rather strongly believe that consumers who get to try will buy, not just their brands but any brand that can be sampled. (It's a rather sad irony, too, that part of the expressed mission for New Jersey's Alcoholic Beverage Control agency is to foster competition. Yet, something so simple as an in-store tasting of beer remains illogically and archaically verboten.)

To make such a widely observed point may seem like treading old ground. But for the craft brewing industry, the advantage of what Mike's article offers is the targeted audience of a professional journal that intersects with the people who make the rules. Understand that as: Some folks in Trenton may see it, read it and decide to correct the course and change the rules to be fairer, more business-friendly.

"If you didn't have ties to New Jersey, why would you open a microbrewery in New Jersey?" Mike says. It's easier, he notes, to set up shop in neighboring Pennsylvania or New York, where the rules aren't designed to stifle entering the game, while the New Jersey beer markets remain within reach.

"We set ground rules that make it clear, don't try it here," he says.

FURTHER READING:
You must subscribe to the Law Journal to read it online, so here's Mike's article in jpeg form (click to enlarge).

If there's winter wheat doppelbock ...

Then that High Point Icestorm eisbock is only a string of winter days away.

OK, maybe that's oversimplifying, since it's only mid-November, and the requisite below-30 degree temperatures to convert the doppelbock to eis have yet to pay visit to New Jersey. But have faith that it will happen, and Ramstein Winter Wheat will find its rich, velvety alter ego.

High Point turned loose the 2009 version of its Winter Wheat on Saturday with a signature, ceremonial barrel tapping before a capacity crowd at the brewery. (The turnout in Butler was exceptional, given that the weather was drizzling a rain that didn't clear up.)

The doppelbock's scheduled to be bottled this week, says owner Greg Zaccardi, who's fresh off a trip last month to the Mondial de la Biere festival held in Strasbourg, France. (High Point shipped over its Blonde and Classic wheat beers for the fest.)

Speaking of that trip to the Alsace region of France, High Point was approached with offers to export the Ramstein brand to Sweden, France and Germany. It's a high compliment, but one that's a bridge too far right now.

"Our production capacity really doesn't lend itself to being able to support that in a good way," Greg says. "We're keeping the lines of communication open. As we grow, we want to include them as well, because consumers in Europe, for centuries, have appreciated the style of beer we brew. It would be foolish for us not to bring beer to an area that really enjoys that type of beer."

Greg says there's every reason to be patient and re-examine the idea after a year's time. But it's more important to grow within High Point's local markets, those places where brewery has immediate interests. "We could just export and pat ourselves on the back, but you need to go beyond the one-night stand," Greg says.

Shout-out
At these beer releases, you run into a lot of familiar faces, and get to meet a lot of new people.

For Amanda and Bryan Stuht from Landing in Roxbury Township (Morris County), the wheat doppelbock release was their third Ramstein open house, putting them solidly on track to becoming regulars at the events.

Beginning homebrewers, they're avid beer enthusiasts with an appreciation for all styles (although Amanda will profess to a preference for hefeweizen). In addition, they enjoying a beer excursion whenever possible, like to Rattle N Hum Bar in Manhattan ... and High Point on a gray November day.

Cheers

Send in the Marines

November is a military month, and there are a couple of things to highlight for this week.

Tuesday at the Tun Tavern, the 234th Marine Corps birthday bash is being held, beginning at 7 p.m. Think, beer, camaraderie and a chowline in Atlantic City.

This annual affair draws a pretty big crowd, and it's Tun Tavern owner Monty Dahm saluting his fellow teufel Hunden – Devil Dogs.

Brewer Tim Kelly will have a pin of Leatherneck stout to complement the Tun's tap lineup that features Devil Dog Pale Ale and All American IPA, the latter of which is often dry-hopped with some Cascade hops grown in New Jersey.

If you're familiar with US history, and US military history in particular, then you know the Marine Corps was formed at an 18th century Philadelphia watering hole called – what else – Tun Tavern. Like most grog houses, it was a place to meet and conduct business. When the brain trust of the Colonies decided the best interest for the crown-ruled 13 was armed rebellion, well the Tun, on Nov. 10, became ground zero for signing up stout-hearted men to the cause of consigning George III to the status of ex-monarch.

That was 1775. This is 2009. The original Tun burned down almost 230 years ago. Its site, alas, is now pavement, as in I-95 cutting through Philly, part of Eisenhower's legacy as president (not Army general), the interstate highway system. A heritage-themed restaurant is at the Marine Corps Museum in Quantico, Va. And of course, there is Atlantic City and Monty's Semper Fi homage to the Corps.

You don't have to be a Marine to show up and salute the cause.

Meanwhile, PubScout Kurt Epps offered an item last week about Pizzeria Uno's expression of gratitude to those in uniform. Check out the link to the right for tribute video done by Kurt's sons.

Carry on.