The Referend Bier Blendery

Bhavna and I had a tour of The Referend Bier Blendery hosted by Melissa Ducommun who is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Name: The Referend Bier Blendery
Location: Pennington, Mercer County, New Jersey
Recommended Beer: Berliner Messe
Notes: Taproom open for pints, flights, growler fills, merchandise and bottles & cans to go. Upstairs taproom and deck open during weekend hours. Outside food allowed. Only service animals are allowed. Parking lot located next to the brewery.

This fall, The Referend Bier Blendery in Pennington opened its doors to the public. Twice a month, on the first and third Saturday, The Referend Bier Blendery will offer a public tasting of two or more Berliner Messe ales and Alleluiavers ales aged on New Jersey peaches and nectarines, and Gloria, which features an American dry hopping.

The Referend Bier Blenderyy specialises in the production of spontaneously fermented beers. This is a style of beer making used by ancient beer-making cultures and popularised by the modern lambic brewers of Belgium's Pajottenland.

The Referend Bier Blendery, beer, blendery, brewery, people[exif id="23711"]

The Referend Bier Blendery, beer, blendery, brewery, people[exif id="23714"]

My wife and I took a short tour of the brewery hosted by Melissa Ducommun, a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Melissa took us outdoor and showed us the stainless steel fermentation tanks into which The Referend Bier Blendery will be pumping wort obtained from local New Jersey beer brewers. The fermentation tanks are large, shallow pans called a "cool ship", where wild yeast and bacteria will settle on overnight. The "cool ship", which was custom fabricated by Trenton Sheet Metal, sits in the back of a truck that will be driven from location to location.

The Referend Bier Blendery, beer, blendery, brewery, people[exif id="23716"]

The Referend Bier Blendery, beer, blendery, brewery, people[exif id="23717"]

The cool ship is outdoors to reduce contamination to the breweries where Referend obtains wort. Most beer is fermented by commercially cultivated yeast. However, spontaneously fermented beer depends upon the unpredictability of the wild yeast and microflora's presence to impart a singular aroma and flavour profile. The presence of wild bacteria would be disastrous for any commercial beer batch infected by it.

Melissa explained that after the wort has cooled, it is put into aged oak barrels and racked in the blendery, at which point fermentation will begin. The wild fermentation process is lengthy. The Referend Bier Blendery has used Chardonnay oak barrels for the long ageing process.

The Referend Bier Blendery, beer, blendery, brewery, people[exif id="23712"]

The Referend Bier Blendery, beer, blendery, brewery, people[exif id="23715"]

This winter, The Referend Bier Blendery will be brewing 500 barrels of wort to be 100 per cent spontaneously fermented and aged in oak barrels, gradually coming to maturity between four months and four years, depending on the style of beer. Melissa told us that the first bottled offerings would finish conditioning in early 2017 and be sold in traditional corked and caged, 750-ml green glass bottles.

Wild Sunflowers

My photography and post processing skills have improved in the last few years so I decided to go back and re-process some of my older images. I'm not certain, but I think this is a wild sunflower. The image was taken several years ago while driving along Wargo Road. It was pickup day at the Honey Brook Organic Farm in Pennington and I noticed patches of these flowers on the west side of the road. I had my Nikkor 85 f/1.8 and had been putting it to use for over a month. I don't think I had a purchased tripod at that time or if I had not yet started keeping it in the car wth me. The image was captured just before noon and it was summer. There was a lot of light.

My post processing skills were minimal back then. The series of images sat in my Lightroom catalog. I did nothing with them.

The original looked like this.

-NIKON D5100-20130908-NIKON_D5100_20130908_4247-blog

In Photoshop I removed some cobwebs. I used one of Matt Kloskowski's Lightroom presets to highlight the upper right hand corner to isolate that region and simplify the image. I like the result. What do you think?

Honey Brook Organic Farm

My family and I have been members of the farm for several years. I love walking around looking for interesting things to photograph. I've got a number of barn photos, flower photos and lots of butterflies and other insects but very few landscape photos. The weather has been especially hot and humid so we’ve not had much of an opportunity to pick produce or flowers. This photo was taken last Sunday. It's a three exposure HDR (Adobe Lightroom, NIK HDR Efx Pro).