Hackettstown: Jersey's Brew Town

MAN SKIRT
 

Inlaid in the wall of a brick building is a night depository, left over from a former bank, serving as camouflage to any passerby who doesn’t think to look up. A modest sign hangs overhead: No pants, just great beer.

Inside, on the raised floor where bank tellers once stood, a man in a brown canvas kilt pours off partially fermented pale ale from a 228-gallon cylindrical-conical tank. He tastes it first, before a quick dip of the hydrometer in the pail reveals how much alcohol the yeast has produced, which is not as much as he’d hoped.

“I started like everyone starts, with a pot on a stove and a plastic bucket. Most of what I know is from practice,” says Joe Fisher, the homebrewer turned founder of Man Skirt Brewing. When I visit, he’s just finished leading a class of curious Centenary College biology students around the brewery. The water profile, he explains to them and me, is more basic in Hackettstown than in his hometown of Lebanon, and as a result the pH of his usual mash is too high for the enzymes in the grain to convert starches into sugars for the yeast to eat. To compensate, he’ll add acidulated malt, a type of malted barley to which lactobacillic acid has been added—a common brewing technique in locales with alkaline water.

One of Man Skirt’s current brews is an English-style best-bitter ale that comes in at a sessionable 4.2% ABV and is decidedly not bitter, but rather falls on the malty-sweet side of the spectrum. Also on tap in his Kickstarter-funded tasting room is an American robust porter— not as heavy as a typical porter, it brings in rich dark chocolate and coffee notes with a surprisingly light mouth-feel.

Next in the brew kettle is a German bock brewed with rye flakes and peppercorns. Fisher plans to focus mainly on his favorites going forward— classic British styles, as well as American and German. “I need to make beer that I’m passionate about in order for people to like my beer,” he says. “If I’m forced to make styles I don’t like, it’ll show in the final product.”

Along with sourcing local hops, from farms like Bentley B. Hops in Newton and Rope Swing Hops in Green Township, Fisher’s ambitions include making use of a room in the brewery that’s still full of safe deposit boxes. The future Man Skirt cask room will feature barrel-aged brews “straight from the vault.”

Fisher stills works as a computer programmer when he’s not cleaning kegs and hauling bags of grain. In fact, it was his experience in electronics that compelled him to replace his original plastic bucket with a fully automated homebrew system he built from scratch in his basement.

HOMEBREW UNIVERSITY
 

One block east of Man Skirt is the brewers’ paradise known as Homebrew University. From the outside it looks like a general store, with vintage beer barrels and a cider press in the window, but inside it’s half chemistry lab and half intellectual café. Lining the walls are boil kettles, bottling stations and a shelf of custom-labeled beer bottles from a few of the 200 batches brewed here in the past year. In the center of the room are sealed barrels of malt and samples of pelletized hops. Customers wander among the starter kits or stop to talk with the owner, Warren Wilson.

Homebrew University serves as a one-stop shop for brewers from across the tri-state area—but it really is a school as well.

In 2009, when Wilson, Fisher, and a few others began a craft beer club called NJHOPZ, it was mainly to perfect recipes, tour breweries, learn as much as they could from one another and promote what Wilson calls “beer philanthropy.” By 2012, he had decided that as much as he loved to brew, teaching was the center of his business.

The next year, Homebrew University opened; it operated purely as a supply store until Wilson received his license to brew on-site in August 2014. Today, homebrewers enroll in classes to learn the history of different styles and how to formulate recipes, taste grain, smell hops and predict how beers will taste.

“With a homebrew store there’s already a following,” explains Wilson. “Knowing that two other folks were interested in opening breweries in town when I opened, I knew this place would become a destination, which I think Hackettstown needs.”

Yet even as the craft brewing industry swells around him, Wilson is never one to judge the drinkers of “the BMC”—Bud Miller Coors—recalling a time when he himself knew very little about beer. Though he consistently refers to those beers themselves as “yellow swill.”

CZIG MEISTER BREWING
 

Two blocks away from the store is the second of three breweries opening in Hackettstown within a year, this one owned by another founding member of NJHOPZ and frequent visitor to Homebrew University.

Czig Meister Brewing, the brainchild of Matt Czigler, former head brewer at Kane Brewing Company, is slated to open in the spring of 2016. Czigler plans to start with four year-round beers, which run the gamut of base flavors. A hoppy pale ale, a “malty-caramel” amber ale, a “malty-roasty” stout, and a “clean malty” Kölsch.

Kölsch is a traditional Old World German-style beer; it’s a hybrid ale and lager, as it uses an ale yeast that works better at lower temperatures. Because lagers are more time-consuming to produce than ales—the former need two or three weeks of fermenting plus a few months of conditioning, while the latter need only a week of fermenting—they are unpopular among craft brewers wary of investing extra space and time in a product that doesn’t bring extra profit. Czigler’s Kölsch will be the best of both worlds: a lager-type flavor with a touch of background fruitiness, after only one extra week in the tank.

All four Czig Meister originals will also undergo a unique “cold crash” method, which involves quickly dropping the temperature of the beer from 68˚ to 32˚ within 12 hours, in order to send the yeast to the bottom of the tank, improving clarity while avoiding filtering, which robs the beer of flavor. “I’ve filtered beers before at other places I’ve worked, and I just feel that the beer loses something,” Czigler says. With his method: “You’ll be able to see your hand through it, just maybe not read a book through it.”

Czigler has a strong science background in microbiology and biochemistry, which earned him a spot in the 2011 class of the prestigious Siebel Institute, a brewing school with campuses in Chicago and Germany.

A year later, Czigler was working at the Adirondack Brewery in Lake George, New York, when Governor Christie signed into law a bill that allowed New Jersey breweries to have tasting rooms. Before this, they could only sell one growler after a brewery tour; now visitors could buy pints, flights, growlers, bottles and cans totaling up to a keg’s worth, 15½ gallons.

In 2014, after two years at Kane Brewing, Czigler set out to take advantage of the new law and bring Hackettstown further into the realm of beer tourism. “The way I look at it, one brewery is great,” he says, “but if people outside the area hear there are two, it makes it more of a destination, especially with all the restaurants in the area.” The new law does prohibit selling food on the property, but it doesn’t prohibit “BYOF”—which is to say, customers bringing their own food or ordering takeout.