The Great American Ale Trail - Christian DeBenedetti [149]
Milford
THE SHIP INN
61 Bridge St. • Milford, NJ 08848 (908) 995-0188 • britishbrewpub.com
SCENE & STORY
The Ship Inn has the distinction of being New Jersey’s first brewpub, and resides along a sleepy creek which forms the border with Pennsylvania. It was built as an atmospheric 1860s Victorian home that had formerly housed a bakery, bowling alley, and ice-cream parlor with a backdoor speakeasy during The Great Mistake. The 7 bbl brewery was added in 1995 (making it the first New Jersey business to legally brew and sell its own beer since Prohibition), and it’s a traditional brick-and-copper-clad affair with open fermenters, a rarity in the United States (tours by appointment).
PHILOSOPHY
The poetic pub. The interior is quiet and relaxing, with deep green walls, weathered wood floors, pewter mugs, exposed beams, antique brickwork, tin ceilings, and best of all, no televisions.
KEY BEER
There are three house beers on at all times (Golden Wheat Light, ESB, and Best Bitter) plus a porter, brown, or stout and a seasonal, but even the biggest beer doesn’t go much higher than 6% ABV. Why not try them all?
BEST of the REST: NEW JERSEY
ZEPPELIN HALL
88 Liberty View Dr. (near Grand St.) • Jersey City, NJ 07302 • (201) 721-8888 • zeppelinhall.com
This is a massive watering hole with traditional biergarten stylings outside and somewhat corny medieval trappings inside. No matter, it’s got a craft-enhanced beer list, with Ommegang, Victory, and Dogfish Head brews on tap alongside some German classics.
HIGH POINT BREWING
22 Park Pl. • Butler, NJ 07405 • (973) 838-7400 • ramsteinbeer.com
Established in 1994 by Germany-trained brewer Greg Zaccardi as America’s only brewery doing exclusively German-style wheat beers (under the Ramstein label), the operation has loosened up some of late, stylistically speaking, but wheat is still the go-to grain. It’s a low-key affair, hardly on New York City’s craft beer radar, but no less an authority than Michael Jackson deemed Zaccardi’s 9.5% ABV Winter Wheat (a dopplebock) “powerfully enveloping, deep and complex.” The small industrial-style facility is open for tours on the second Saturday of every month from 2 to 4 p.m.
THE COPPER MINE
323 Ridge Rd. • North Arlington, NJ 07031 • (201) 428-1223 • thecopperminepub.com
The Copper Mine may have named itself for too common a metal. With twenty rotating taps and some fifty labels from U.S. and imported craft beers, the bar opened in November 2008 and specializes in Northeast craft brewers such as Defiant, Flying Fish, High Point, Saranac, and the recently launched New Jersey Beer Company.
Delaware
Rehoboth Beach
DOGFISH HEAD BREWINGS & EATS
320 Rehoboth Ave. • Rehoboth Beach, DE 19971 (302) 226-2739 • dogfish.com • Established: 1995
SCENE & STORY
Named for a spit of land on the craggy Maine coast, Dogfish Head is the brainchild of Sam Calagione, who grew up in a winemaking family in Massachusetts and was once kicked out of prep school for unruly behavior. According to Burkhard Bilger’s infamous 2008 New Yorker profile, this included the following: “flipping a truck on campus; breaking into the skating rink and playing naked hockey; ‘surfing’ on the roof of a Winnebago, going sixty miles per hour down I-91.” (Not to mention selling shoulder-tapped cases of beer he hid in his hockey bag to students for a profit.)
Today the company he leads (along with his effusive wife, Mariah) has become, along with Sierra Nevada and the Boston Beer Company, one of the best-known craft breweries in the country, widely imitated and envied by competitors. Once touted as the smallest in the nation, it now hovers around 11th out of over 1,700.
The success of Dogfish didn’t always seem to be in the cards. After stints in graduate school in New York and a bit of modeling—and having only brewed perhaps ten batches of beer—Calagione headed to Delaware to open that state’s first brewery since Prohibition using a tiny pilot system and a bunch of commercially untested and unconventional—even haphazard—recipes. The state