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)

Victoria Beer Week, take 2

Five years ago I went to Victoria, B.C., the capital of the province and a touristy cruise-ship stop, for their second-ever beer week.  This month I got back to the event and found all breweries I had stopped off at in 2014, all seemingly thriving. I stayed in Swan's Hotel and Brewery for a night; Swan's had a deal on some small second-floor rooms right over the pub, discounted for the noise factor, and I took one.  But the pub was being remodeled, was closed, and I missed the decibel experience.
Canoe Brewing, a block from Swan's, seemed unchanged, still with the great waterfront view and the stylish interior.   But the next stop on my Saturday afternoon stroll was to Phillips Brewing Co., and

In 2014 Phillips was a straight production brewery in the B.C. mode, growler fills just a few hours a week and bottle sales just in bombers. Today, a jazzy new sign heralds a lively brewpub, a dozen house-brewed styles on tap, hockey on the tube, and growlers filling up every day.  My server told me this had happened in 2016 with more changes like a line of soft drinks and canning for the beers and the pop.
Phillips has definitely seen big changes.
Beer week in Victoria is a series of events curated/produced/imagined by festival staff, led by beer writer Joe Wiebe.  The Saturday night program was called All About the Wood, a celebration of barrel aging.  A dozen breweries from across B.C. brought beers they had aged in a variety of barrels--bourbon, wines of all sorts, gin, rum, tequila.  Some poured from kegs, some from bottles.
Brewers or knowledgeable people from the brewery fielded questions about this process.  Bourbon barrels, by law, can only be used for bourbon once so they are available to brewers after that, with plenty of oak still on hand to mingle with the whiskey flavors. Wineries and distillers of other liquors get more use out of a barrel before they sell it.  Dageraad Brewing in Burnaby brought their Cuba Libre, a Belgian dark ale aged in rum barrels.  Well-used rum barrels, the brewer said, some used so many times they were falling apart and leaked too much beer to be usable.
An unusual taste was Quintus, a dark saison brewed with figs and sumac berries and aged in whiskey barrels.  Torchlight Brewing came over the mountains from Nelson, over on the eastern side of B.C/

Sunday morning I walked up Government St. past Phillips and then past Vancouver Island Brewing, founded in 1984 and still going strong.  The city had posted a rezoning notice to the effect that VIB was applying for a pub license for on-premise sales, just as Phillips had done.  A left at the next corner took me past Hoyne and Driftwood, side-by-side production breweries as they had been five years ago.  A couple more blocks and I was at Moon Under Water, another pleasant experience from 2014.  Maybe three dozen people had gathered, all home brewers here to learn from Clay and his brewing staff by following the early steps of making an ale on the small pilot brewing system.  The ticket here included a sandwich and a pint of your choice--I chose Creepy Uncle Dunkel, which was the same beer I had here five years ago.

The picture on the right shows the homebrewers jotting notes on the brew day worksheet the Moon folks provided.  The three tanks over the stored kegs caught my eye.  I wondered if they were horizontal fermenters.  No, Clay said, they were a new Dutch-made system for delivering beer to the taps in the pub out front.  Saves time switching out kegs and delivers more consistent beer to the front of the house. 

So all the breweries I had seen in 2014 were still going strong in Victoria, in several cases growing and adding new features.  A great beer town.
(Visited 03/02-3/19)

Snohomish: a new ale trail and PBJ in acan

The attractive town of Snohomish, Wash., about a dozen miles east of Everett, has gone from no breweries to six in just that many years.  I've visited each of them and posted my notes here.  When I read a story in Northwest Brewing News about ale trail programs in other areas in the region, such as those in Bend, Bellingham, the South Puget Sound, and the Inland Empire, I was keen to check out the new Snohomish Ale Trail.
I started at Sound to Summit Brewing, still operating in the same business park off Bickford Ave.  The doctor and dentist couple who launched this brewery have sold it to the folks who own Lost Canoe Brewing, the next nearest and next oldest brewery in the town.
I took an ale trail program to Lost Canoe after collecting one stamp at S2S.  I was happy to see Lost Canoe was fermenting in sturdy metal tanks now (the last time they were using plastic tanks they had to hang in chains from the ceiling).  Here I had a pint of peanut butter porter, and then noticed a new mini-crowler machine that could fill 16-oz cans.  How cool is that!  A pint for here, a pint to take home.  The bartender said she could pour a blend right in the can, half peanut butter porter and half raspberry wheat ale.  Two stamps and a conversation can to take home.

I checked into a B&B a couple miles out of the town and took a nap, time to metabolize the intake. Later, restored, I checked in at the Spada Family Brewery's taproom, in the downtown area, for one of their signature sours, and then out to Haywire Brewing, still in the old dairy farm barn. Supper was a burrito from Ixtapa and a pint of Loose Rooster at Sno-town Brewing, all at the same corner on 2nd St. Hot IPA made with the peppers Frank's mother grows down in Arizona.
The sixth brewery here, Scuffypunk, was not open in my time frame so will have to bring my dance card back there another time. 
(Visited 02/10/19)

A stitch in time tastes fine in Wilmington

Wilmington, Delaware, the largest city in the First State (first to ratify the Constitution back in 1787) presents a pleasant downtown, even if retail has been gutted by malls which sell without sales tax to the nearby Jersey and Pennsylvania folk.  Seven or eight blocks from the train station, up Market Street, one can stop at the pub of Stitch House Brewing Co. for a pint.

The Stitch House name is based on a former retail tenant, the Linen Mart; its original use was as an ice-making plant. The brewery opened March 18 this year and was doing a good trade after eight months, on a sunny Sunday afternoon.  Twelve beers were on tap, eleven their own and one a collaboration.  This lineup included three IPAs and two pale ales, and in more adventurous territory, a rauchbier, a kolsch, a shandy, and a pilsner.  I had to sample the Baby Guava Dava, a sour Berliner Weisse made with guava in the boil and kettle-soured, I assumed. A tasty example of the style. 
With a mac and cheese plate I paired one of the pales, Big Stitch Nick, a clean-finishing ale with little aroma (5.6% abv).  The collaboration is called Out and About Oyster Stout, brewed for a recent festival event.  Andrew Rutherford, head brewer at Stitch House, worked with his counterparts at Iron Hill, Two Stones Pub, and Wilmington Brew Works to concoct this delicious black stout with the oyster juices trumping the usual coffee and chocolate notes in a sweet stout. 5.2%.

Stitch House utilizes five seven-barrel fermenters and a brew kettle in the street side window.  Waitstaff said most of the production is consumed here on the premises, with one or two other downtown spots having their kegs on tap. A slow and steady launch seems like a prudent beginning.


(Visited 11/11/18)

Phoenixville Pt. II-crawling toward the castle

A pub crawl along Bridge St. in Phoenixville continues for three or four blocks past the Main St. corner where Root Down brews.  After Root Down, the next two are branch pubs.  The Iron Hill chain began in Newark, Delaware in 1996 and now has upwards of twenty locations in Delaware, south New Jersey, and the greater Philadelphia area. The business model is like McMenamins in the Northwest, with small breweries at each site supporting mostly on-premise consumption in their full-menu restaurants.  Some styles are made in all locations, others can be unique to that pub. By the way, Iron Hill says they won two GABF medals in their first year of competing, in 1997.

Further up Bridge St. one encounters the Rec Room, the  newest outlet of Conshohocken Brewing Co., opened last December.  The original plant and main production brewery opened around 2012 some fifteen miles down the same Schuylkill River in the town of Conshohocken. Its best known beer and recent medal winner at the World Beer Cup is an ESB, Puddlers Row. Know it well, and it is a good example of a style not all breweries make.

Several doors up from Conshy's Rec Room is Crowded Castle Brewing, located in another building

with a modernized facade in front of another repurposed business space.  This was once a printing press operation, vacant for some years.  These guys had eleven taps working, four of which were IPAs, and some unusual stuff in the other seven.  I tried some Centurial Sentinel, billed as an agave ale aged in tequila barrels, 5.4% and endowed with a desert aroma.  I gave the Defiance Alt a shot--they describe this as top fermented with a kolsch ale yeast and then aged cold like a lager.  Comes out medium dark with a nice head, good mouthfeel.  4.8% abv.

The logo, shown on the right, is a nice bit of work and will look good on a label when they get around to bottling. 
My last taste here was a short glass of Kahuna Umi Umi, a lager which earns the Hawaiian name by being aged on ripe pineapples.  That fruit does linger in the finish. 
A pleasant, cozy space with a good vibe.

(Visited 11/17/18)

Putting roots down in Phoenixville

   Phoenixville, Pennsylvania sits along the Schuylkill River near Valley Forge, maybe twenty-five miles outside Philadelphia.  The factories that got the town going are long gone now, but the 15,000-plus people who live there have found other kinds of work.  Including, of late, brewing.
My first couple of times in Phoenixville including stops at the brewpub of Sly Fox Brewing, a well-run operation executing a solid business plan including canning from the get-go and competitively priced growler fills (reminds me very much of Kulshan in Bellingham).  I didn't realize their downtown section was a lively spot for beer tourism until lately.
   Last Nov. 17 downtown Phoenixville put on a pub crawl: six stops at the four breweries, the distillery, and the wine shop, earned one some swag.  Said crawl was all along a three-block section of Bridge St., the main drag as those of us of a certain age used to say.  I misspeak: the first stop going east to west is Root Down Brewing, at 1 Main St., just off Bridge. This brewery, opened just

in 2017, occupies the space once used by a soft drink bottler; its brick facade has a mid-20th century look a bit out of step with the early 20th look of most buildings along Bridge St.
When I stepped inside and worked my way up to the bar--it was work, the pub crawl had drawn a real crowd--I scanned the tap list and saw 18 (eighteen) taps all their own beers.  On a second scan, I saw stars by two of those eighteen, for a gold and a silver medal at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, held just two months previous.  Now that's not stop the press news--talented brewers have come back from the GABF with multiple medals before. Chuckanut in Bellingham has, I know. I'm sure Dogfish, Sierra Nevada, Allagash, and other famous breweries with long track records have done so.  But the year after you open?

The back of the pub is given over to a food ordering counter, barrels for aging the product, and a flat open area, big screen for sports, etc. The fermenters were crowded behind the bar just like the people were jam-packed in front of it.
I tried the medal winners:  Bine, an IPA, 7.1% abv, gold in the American IPA style, and Salty by Nature, a sour gose beer winning silver.  The Bine had a nice nose and finish, the gose--shouldn't have tried that after a hop bomb IPA.
(Visited 11/17/18)