Homebrewers! Time to Strut Your Stuff!

Show off your best pilsners, ales, stouts and lagers at the 3rd Annual Jersey City Homebrew Competition. Beer aficionados, this is your chance to taste—and judge!

The competition will be held from 4 to 8 pm on Saturday, October 5th. It will be a highlight of the city’s 4th Street Arts and Music Festival.

“I’m a drinker of beer, not a brewer myself,” says Mark Bunbury, 29, an organizer of the event and founder of Jersey City Ties (jerseycityties.com), a recently launched non-profit group of young professionals devoted to “community building and service events.”

Bunbury spent his early childhood in Jersey City and returned after graduating from law school at the University of North Carolina. He is an attorney specializing in employment law at DeCotiis, Fitzpatrick and Cole in Teaneck.

A beer aficionado, Bunbury attended Hoboken’s Battle of the Brews last year and was inspired to bring something similar to Jersey City. His organization has teamed with the Jersey City Brew Club (jerseycitybrewclub.com)–which produced the first two, smaller-scale Homebrew Contests–to “kick it up to another level.”

This year, 30 entrants (so far) will provide at least five gallons of their home brews for judges and guests (who will be offered 4-ounce tastings). They will vie for nearly $800 in prizes and gift certificates, including People’s Choice awards.

Tickets, $20 on the day of the event, can be bought ahead of time for $17 at brownpapertickets.com.

The panel of seven or eight judges is still being chosen, says the Jersey City Brew Club’s Kendall Alvarez Eskew. The judges will come from “a mix of backgrounds, with professional brewers, amateur brewers and possibly some other industry-related people.

"We’d like to have all our judges be registered with the Beer Judge Certification Program, a great program that sanctions contests around the country," Eskew adds. "We want certified judges, so that our brewers know they are getting good feedback that can help them grow. Everyone has their own judging criteria, of course, but BJCP provides guidelines for judging, and you will often see professional beers rated on the same scale.”

The Brew Club started as a casual group of locals. “The growth of homebrewing has coincided with the growth of craft beer," Eskew says. "Each has grown about 10 percent a year over the last several years, and our club has seen more and more people joining. It’s been run by consensus until now, sort of ‘for the people, by the people.’ We will soon have officers.”

At club meetings, members often bring in outlandish beers flavored with chamomile honey, coconut and chocolate, even blue cheese. Competitions entries tend to be more serious.

It doesn’t take much space or equipment to brew good beer at home. “If you want a basic setup, all you need is space for a pot and a bucket, and a few little things here and there," he says. "Everything can fit in a closet easily. If you want to get crazy, there are people with entire garages dedicated to brewing.

"It’s easy to get started, and just as easy to get carried away with new gadgets.”

A Jersey native and graduate of NJIT, Eskew, 27, moved to Jersey City five years ago. He works in the software industry, but plans to open a Jersey City liquor store and homebrew supply shop later this fall.

He started with winemaking in order to stretch his college party budget. “My first experiment was explosive, and ended with corks popping out of bottles and wine flying all over my couch, TV and even the ceiling,” he says with a laugh.

JERSEY CITY HOMEBREW COMPETITION

 

SUZANNE ZIMMER LOWERY is a food writer, pastry chef and culinary instructor at a number of New Jersey cooking schools. Find out more about her at suzannelowery.com.

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