Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name and where they help you siphon wort into fermentation containers as you design labels for your Knockout Stout.
It's not as uncommon a refrain as it might seem. Beer drinking and appreciation have come a long way since Norm and Cliff guzzled endless mugs of frothy-headed brew in Boston's best- known pub.
And a new business on South Street in Freehold caters to the growing number of area beer connoisseurs, letting them pay to craft their own beer using professional equipment and high-quality ingredients.
Since The Brewer's Apprentice opened in December, customers have slapped down between $125 and $155 per visit to select from more than 80 beer recipes, grind and mix ingredients and bring them to a fragrant boil. Two weeks later, they return to pour their fermented masterpiece into 72 22-ounce bottles, the labels of which they also design.
It is New Jersey's first and only "BOP," or brew-on-premises. The idea came to Jo Ellen Bianchi, 39, of Wall Township, when she lived in Florida and ate many a meal over pints of hand-crafted beer at brewpubs. Upon moving with her husband to New Jersey, though, she learned that no such businesses existed in the state.
There were several in Pennsylvania, but New Jersey's Division of Alcohol Beverage Control regulations stood in the way of such enterprises. Those regulations changed last year, though, and The Brewer's Apprentice opened in December.
Strict rules abound -- beer can not be sold or consumed in the facility, and customers must call ahead so Bianchi can help them in the relatively quick-and-simple process of obtaining a home-brewing license. But the place is slowly attracting a diverse group of clients who range from neophytes simply anxious for a break from Bud, to experienced home brewers who know their altbiers from their lagers.
"I want it to be a friendly atmosphere with a knowledgeable staff, where people feel they have free range to experiment," said Bianchi, who owns and runs the business with her mother, Barbara Hamara of Brielle. Bianchi's sister, Penny vanDoorn, 33, of Aberdeen Township, is a financial partner in the business but does not work there.
Many of the brewery's customers are beer lovers who have experience home brewing but stopped because primitive equipment and a lack of expertise yielded inconsistent results.
The Brewer's Apprentice was designed to eliminate such problems. A spanking clean workplace with six gleaming vats and giant buckets of grain, the facility lets people turn out consistently good beer, Bianchi and customers said.
Two sets of customers brewed two Sundays ago and will be returning today to bottle their creations. Carl Perks, 33, and his brother Vic Jr., 35, arrived just before 10 a.m. with their father Vic, 58, to share some family time while brewing two batches of beer -- Impression Altbier and Boulder Urquell.
Carl and Vic Jr., from Stanhope and Scotch Plains Township respectively, had brewed here once before and decided to return with their father, who lives in Scotch Plains.
"My brother and I taste everything, but Budweiser's a staple for us," Carl said. "No Coors Light," he added.
Later that morning, Paul DeSantis, of Howell Township, and his daughter Jennifer, 10, arrived. DeSantis, like the Perkses, is experienced at home brewing. He came to The Brewer's Apprentice, he said, "because when we moved to New Jersey, we didn't have the space to home brew. With the kids, my wife said, 'Get it out of here. It smells.' "
Jennifer seemed excited to be spending a Sunday morning making beer with her dad, however unusual a childhood pastime it may be. Bianchi says no rule prevents children from accompanying their parents, since consumption on the premises is forbidden. She simply makes parents aware that the process can last about two hours and that their children may get bored.
The DeSantises selected Semple's Best Bitter. "If you like a strong amber bitter, this should be your recipe," the brewery's recipe book instructs.
The Perkses and DeSantises had a good idea of what they wanted to make when they arrived. Other customers don't, Bianchi said. To assist, she starts by asking what commercial brands they enjoy. The most popular recipe has proven to be Taj Mahal Pale Ale.
On the other end of the swilling spectrum, some serious brewers bring their own recipes, which Bianchi encourages. Several successful recipes have made it into the house recipe book.
Some customers even request or bring their own special ingredients, including the hops, which are the dried flower cones of the hop vine that are used to "bitter" the beer, add aromatic properties and naturally preserve it. Although most of the hops used at the brewery arrive ground into pellet form, one connoisseur keeps a plastic bag of hops still in their flower form in Bianchi's refrigerator and insists on using them.
Bianchi shrugs off such finicky behavior. "It's fine," she said, "because we want to appeal to both experienced brewers and people who come in here knowing nothing. People can really come and be serious about the brewing."
Armed with their recipe, the Perks men got to work. The altbier recipe had Carl measuring wheat malt, crystal malt and chocolate malt grains with a plastic scoop onto a large scale. He then ground them, each grain cracking open and releasing its earthy aroma.
His brother, meanwhile, was pouring clear glucose syrup from a giant barrel into a large glass pitcher to start making Boulder Urquell, a pilsner. The glucose is a brewing sugar used to lighten the beer's body and color. This pilsner recipe is an all-extract version, meaning it is made without steeping any malted grains.
The elder Vic, his hands shoved in his pockets, walked between his two sons, eyeing the activity and looking like somebody who would be very thirsty in about two weeks. He began to measure pale malt syrup from a barrel next to the one containing the glucose. The malt syrup was just as sticky and slow-moving as the glucose but caramel in color.
"We used to do it at home," Carl said of making beer as he worked the grain mill. "Sometimes it'd be good, but nothing like here. It tastes fresher here."
"And they have the temperature control," Vic Jr. said, "which is the biggest thing."
After they added the extracts to hot water in one vat and the grains to an adjoining vat, the men stood around their table with Bianchi, enjoying one of the fringe benefits of a trip to The Brewer's Apprentice: beer talk.
Phrases like "aroma" and "texture" floated through the air, as the four touched on the merits of adding fruit to beer and the taste of a relatively new recipe for coffee-flavored stout -- Knockout Stout.
Bianchi had headaches of her own: "Fruit is very hard to brew with," she told her rapt audience. The previous week, she had added 20 pounds of fresh peaches and six cinnamon sticks to a batch, and she was eager to see how it turned out.
As the malt solution continued to simmer, the men removed the grains from the altbier vat, picking up the mash basket, a colanderlike object that allows the grains to steep in water but hastens their removal, like a tea bag.
Over the next hour, the Perkses added different combinations of hops to the simmering malt solution. The odors of baking bread and mellow herbal tea mingled in the air.
The DeSantises were also keeping busy. Paul was more of a beer cowboy than the meticulous Perkses, tweaking his recipe by substituting some hops with others and measuring ingredients more quickly.
"I have yet to taste a beer that's too bitter," he said of his personal preferences, explaining why he chose to use one type of hops over another. Meanwhile, Jennifer helped Bianchi scoop a dark malt syrup into boiling water with a spatula.
At one point, the DeSantises' vat boiled over, sending fluid cascading over the edge of the vat and onto the floor. Yet another advantage of brewing beer here rather than in your own kitchen: Bianchi and her staff clean up spills and resterilize any equipment if it becomes necessary. She says 80 percent of the time she spends at the brewery is spent cleaning and preparing the facility for customer use.
Perhaps the most exciting part of the beer-making process came when the liquid's time in the vats had ended and it was ready for transfer to fermentation containers. Bianchi, Hamara and an assistant monitored the equipment as the fledgling brewers opened valves and stood back. Wort, unfermented beer, raced through pipes to a heat exchanger unit, where it was quickly cooled to about 75 degrees.
Holding a clear plastic tube connecting the machinery to the plastic fermentation containers, Bianchi could see when the water used to flush out the system gave way to wort.
"Beer!" she shouted, signaling her mother to start collecting the fluid. Once the vats had been drained and the wort once again gave way to clear water, she shouted, "Off!"
Things didn't always go so smoothly during this critical step, Bianchi said. "At the beginning, we had to learn an awful lot very, very quickly," and there were some minor disasters, including one episode in which an entire batch of nearly finished wort was released into the waste drain.
But things went as planned for the Perkses and the DeSantises. With the process nearly complete, both groups of brewers added varying amounts of yeast and water to the containers to begin the fermentation process.
Bianchi also took a specific gravity measurement, which indicates the wort's density. A measurement taken after fermentation will reveal the degree of attenuation -- how much the yeast has fermented the wort -- and indicate the beer's alcohol content.
"A lot of our customers want to know that stuff," she said.
Stopped with specially designed airlocks, the containers were wheeled into a large refrigerator, where they will remain, surrounded by other people's fermenting beer, until they are bottled and brought home.
The beer the Perks brothers made back in March is "long gone," Vic Jr. reported with a grin.
"You give a lot away," Carl said of their 72-bottle stash. "But I saved one until just a week or two ago. I just couldn't finish it until I knew we were coming back."
Posted: 09/07/97 02:47:13 PM