STRANGE BREW
Local Belgium sour brewery named one of world’s best new brewers
HOPEWELL TWP » Don’t expect any staple crafts beers, such as IPAs, porters or stouts, to ever be served at The Referend Bier Blendery.
And the owner is completely fine with that.
“Maybe monthly we get someone who is thirsty for a stout, a porter, or an IPA and we can’t help,” Referend founder and head blender James Priest said last week in an interview at the brewery. “We’re doing this because most people don’t. But then when people want us to be doing what everyone else does, then we just have to tell them, ‘That’s not what we do.’”
But what the Hopewell Township brewery does produce is specialized beer that is crafted using old-world techniques from Belgium and people are taking notice.
Referend, which started brewing in 2016, recently received international recognition for its Belgianstyle sour beers. RateBeer, a go-to online website that focuses on beer reviews, named Referend #10 on its list of “Best New Brewers in the World” out of more than 6,400 competitors.
Priest, an ambitious 29-year-old Chicago native, settled on setting up shop in Hopewell because of its vicinity to Princeton and Sourland Mountain — a tip of the hat to his beers.
“When I saw that on a map, I said ‘This is great, we’re making sour beer,’” Priest said. “By virtue of the process, the beer is some degree of sour always.”
The Process
What separates Priest from the pack is the painstaking process he uses to create his final product.
Since his Hopewell establishment is not a true brewhouse and lacks the equipment, which is why his place is called a “blendery,” Priest takes his recipes to other breweries to create a wort, which is unfermented beer. So far this year, Priest has worked at Lone Eagle in Flemington, Stickman Brews in Royersford, Pa. and Cape May Brewing Co. in Lower Township to produce the beginnings of his beer.
Priest will then pump the wort into his mobile coolship, which is a giant stainless steel pan that is housed in the back of a box truck.
The wort will cool overnight.
By the next day, the liquid is transferred into neutral oak barrels that once stored wine.
And that’s when the magic occurs.
A process called spontaneous fermentation will start to take place. Priest will not add yeast or bacterial cultures at any point.
Within a week, the liquid
will start fermenting and the beer can take anywhere from four months to four years to be ready.
“We don’t really release anything younger than four months,” said Priest, who runs Referend with his wife, Melissa, and several part-time employees. “Our average age is nine or 10 months for beers we are serving and selling in bottles.”
Priest may be the only brewer in the U.S. using this strict process to create his art. He said it is a modification of an old Belgian method and business model.
“All around Brussels, especially a century ago, it was full of gueuze blenderies, where pub owners or people with cellars who’d have a handful of barrels would buy lambic wort or beer from local breweries,” Priest said, noting lambic is the highest profile spontaneously fermented beer in the world. “They would source wort or beer and then age it and blend it themselves to create unique house characters or they would make a kriek where they would source their own sour cherries and add them to the barrels themselves and serve them onsite there. The difference for us was that we don’t have lambic breweries here.”
Blending
Once the liquid has fermented, Priest will start tasting through the barrels and decide what the best route is for the beer.
If it’s beautiful on its own and has a ton of character, Priest will let it be.
“If something tastes totally unobjectionable but not particularly interesting and it’s got a good acid profile, it’s usually a candidate for fruiting for us,” Priest said, adding Referend fruits many of its beers. “Part of the reason we’re in New Jersey to begin with, there’s a lot of great fresh local fruit to be had between late May and early October.”
Priest has blended calamansi, bergamot, yuzu from a local citrus farmer in his beers. Grapes, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, peaches, nectarines, elderberries, chokeberries, Hammonton blueberries and elderflower have also been added to the mix. Referend also uses all New Jersey grains for its beers.
New Jersey hops, however, are hard to come by so Priest works mostly with hops from the Pacific northwest.
Currently one of the beers on draft and available in bottle at the Referend tasting room on Reed Road is Berliner Messe: Kyrie, a ruby red wheat beer refermented with New York Balaton cherries from the Hudson Valley and some local Pennsylvania Montmorency sour cherries. The beer smells and tastes like a cherry picked right off the vine.
Berliner Messe, a pale tart wheat ale, serves as a base beer for at least seven of the brewery’s different creations so expect to see Berliner Messe in many of the beers’ titles as it is a series. The beer is quite refreshing and would be perfect on a hot day. Referend also produces a lambic-style saison.
Due to the brewing process, the local ingredients shine through all of the beers, leaving a taste that is fresh and natural.
The Biz
The Referend tasting room opened in December 2016.
Brewing occurs seasonally between late September and early May, “where the microbes in the air are more favorable to a healthy fermentation for the beers we’re trying to produce,” Priest said.
The fermentation process with the ambient air “defies science” and Priest basically “cedes control” to nature, he said.
From barrel to barrel, Referend’s beer can taste different.
“Consistency is never really the game here,” Priest said. “We can blend for consistency to some degree but at a certain point, it’s up to nature.” For example, one barrel in the cellar was filled in December and went through its primary fermentation of foaming over, which generally only occurs once.
Priest and his wife recently went on a trip to Belgium and he received an interesting text from an employee stating that the same barrel was overflowing again without any explanation.
“I’m excited for it,” Priest said. “That was definitely a first.”
The different oak barrels in the cellar, such as bourbon, rye whiskey, wine, French and Hungarian, can also create distinct characteristics in the beer.
The unpredictability of the process, however, sometimes leads to undesirable outcomes.
“It’s sort of built into this method of production that not every ounce is going to make it,” said Priest, who started working in the beer industry more than seven years ago at Baxter Brewing Company in Maine. “You’ve got to be unafraid of dumping beer.”
Sometimes patience will fix a batch that might have been dumped.
“I can taste through a bunch of barrels and there are major flaws in them and they are not good,” said Priest. “And I can come back to them six months or a year later, and they cleaned up into something great without flaw.”
Priest estimates that he has dumped 5 percent of his product.
For the 2016-17 brewing season, Priest produced 350 beer barrels and sold 50 barrels.
“By most comparisons, it’s embarrassingly low,” the head blender said. “But the important reason for that is the majority of the beer needs longer to age. We need to set so much aside. It’s really almost a game of selling as little as we can to survive while saving as much of it as we can to let the beer age to its full potential.”
In 2-3 years, Priest hopes to have a lot of beer and a more sustainable amount of money.
The brewer realizes he will not win over everybody with his truly unique sour beers.
“If people drink this sight unseen or it’s labeled as something too generic on a draft list, I fear for its reception,” said Priest, who used to work at the beer bars Tria and Hawthornes in Philly. “As much as possible I want to get this into the hands and mouths of people who at least have a fighting chance to enjoy it. You have to want it or be in that moment open to trying something new if you’re still unfamiliar to it.”
The best place to find The Referend beer is at the blendery’s tasting room, 1595 Reed Rd., Unit 2 in Hopewell, where bottles and draft selections are sold.
Tasting Room Hours:
4-7 p.m., Thursday & Friday
2-8 p.m., Saturday www.thereferend.com
Other Locations That Sell The Referend beer:
• Jockey Hollow Bar & Kitchen, Morristown, N.J.
• Brick Farm Tavern, Hopewell, N.J.
• Poor Henry’s Pub & Restaurant, Montville, N.J.
• Taphouse 15, Jefferson, N.J.
• Wurstbar, Jersey City, N.J.
• The Shepherd & The Knucklehead, Hoboken, N.J.