The devil is up the creek in South Jersey

       I rolled into Devil's Creek Brewing Co. in Collingswood, New Jersey a day after their third birthday party (the same day my granddaughter Ella was turning five!).  No beer for Ella but plenty was flowing at the brewery's taproom.
      Collingswood is a dry town; the fancy restaurants on the main drag are all BYOB.  The only exception to the local prohibition law in the Garden State is an establishment for the manufacture of an alcoholic beverage.  The brewery is allowed to sell what they make here, by the glass, the growler, or cans to go.  No  guest taps, no wines or ciders, no food made on the premises, no TV screens, or anything else that seems pub-like.  But when they opened three years ago, Craig the bartender said

the lines went two blocks back. The novelty of getting a foamy mug without BYOB is still going strong.

   The 7-bbl fermenters need a double batch from the 5-bbl brew kettle in order to fill.  The production space and the taproom out front have the corner suite of a new building called The Lumberyard (what the space was for eighty-odd years, until Lowe's and Home Depot did it in).  The owners, Kathy Ganser and Anthony Abate, are actively involved in the business--she brewed one of the IPAs and applied her graphic arts background to designing the distinctive artwork here.
     Well.  My first four-oz flight had to be Birthday Cake (4.3%, 12 ibu), a cream ale putting out intense notes of raisins and cinnamon.  They made this for the second birthday in 2018 and had to bring it back.  A cleansing sip of water before the second taste, a delicate Pear Gose (5.1 %, 6 ibu).  Round three of the four flights was Caramel Apple Brown (5.4 %, 20 ibu), a malt-forward ale that delivered apples to the nose and caramel to the tongue--a medal-winner at a recent festival in Atlantic City.  The last was McBeer, an Irish take on the brown ale style (4.5%, 22 ibu) with honey for alcohol and sweetness.

The devil supposedly seen in the area in the 19th century looked a bit like a dragon, a chicken, and a kangaroo, according to art director Kathy.  I was delighted to find, among the glassware for sale, a pint in this curvy shape.  Most breweries sell tumblers, tulips, maybe pilsner glasses but this shape is a personal favorite.
Cheers to New Jersey!

(Visited 05/19/19)

Garden Path: stretching the concept of what a brewery is

The sign outside the building proclaimed it a brewery.  The familiar aroma of malt mashing away in a tun was lacking, but that depends on when a small brewery gets cooking.  I entered the taproom of Garden Path Fermentation,  near the Skagit County Airport in Burlington, Wash., looking at a bar with eight or nine tap handles ready to pour. Then I peeked through the glass into the production area in the back and saw nothing but barrels, hundred of wooden barrels. Where was the mash tun, the brew kettle, the cone-bottomed fermenters?
Amber Watt, one of the brewer-owners, took a small tour group into the back and explained the

unique process here.  She and her partner, Ron Extract (real name!) contract with Chuckanut Brewing, just a quarter-mile down the road, to produce the wort for Garden Path.  They truck the wort here, cool it down,  and usually put it in one of the half-dozen foeders seen here.  They pitch their unique yeast here (more about that in a moment) and get the souring fermentation underway here before transferring the beer to wine barrels.
The yeast they culture from local flora in the verdant Skagit Valley; several dozen carboys in a corner of the space are devoted to this process.  They normally pump the yeast into their yeast brink, clean out the foudre, and repitch to the next batch from the brink.  No two batches are alike here, and when they bottle, each batch is numbered on the label. 

Amber and Ron picked up a tank from a dairy in Wisconsin and have repurposed it as a coolship for some of their beers.  Here, they fill half the tank with hot wort from Chuckanut, and let the temperature attenuate overnight while the rest of the batch is cooled in the heat exchanger and taken to a foudre for yeast pitching.  The coolship half of the batch is hopped with whole flower hops and then added to the foudre half and let them ferment together.  "Our house culture is pretty hearty," Amber says, "so it takes over really quickly."  This process results in two beers, The Wet Hopped Ship and The Old School the New. 
All beers are bottled with a dollop of honey from an apiary a few miles up the Skagit.  "We want to use local ingredients whenever possible," Amber said, "and brewer's priming sugar was nowhere near as local as this honey."  I had a pint of the Wet Hopped Ship last St. Patrick's Day and small samples of a couple others, enough to aver that if your sour taste buds are on, you will encounter delicious flavors here.

(Visited 03/17/19)