Thursday, Jun. 04, 2009
welcome to the machine
New South Brewery in Myrtle Beach.
New South Brewing Co.’s label for its canned White Ale has been – finally – approved by the ominous-sounding Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, a part of the U.S. Department of Treasury usually known as TTB.
The Myrtle Beach microbrewery and TTB have been hitting the label back and forth like a tennis ball for about three months now. The approval was official late last week.
Dave Epstein, owner of New South, had originally hoped to get six packs of his White Ale on the local grocery and package-store shelves in late March or early April.
While New South’s Brock Kurtzman is happy to have the label approved, canning production has been set back even further, thanks to the drawn-out approval process.
“Even if we weren’t dealing with the canning machine, summer would be busy enough for us,” Kurtzman said.
With millions of tourists heading for the Grand Strand during the summer months, New South will be hoppin’ just to keep rolling kegs to its customers.
That means canned White Ale might not hit the shelves until August or September, Kurtzman said. As it would happen, White Ale remains New South’s most popular beer, especially during the summer months. For now, folks will have to drink it in draft form, in restaurants and bars. Brewpubs can fill growlers for at-home imbibing, but microbreweries like New South cannot, due to state law.
At New South’s recent customer-appreciation pig-pickin’, I got to see the canning machine. I was expecting something with conveyer belts, but instead, the canning machine was a stainless steel countertop with three small machines attached to it.
Basically, the machine fills two cans at a time, and binds six cans at a time.
“Very labor intensive,” Epstein said. The machine can produce about 25 cases per hour.
But the cool thing is: That very machine used to belong to Dale’s Pale Ale, an acclaimed brew from Lyons, Colo., that has grown into a larger canning operation and partnered with Paste magazine for a free-music download club (see www.pastemagazine.com/dales for more information).
Now that the label has been approved, Epstein and Kurtzman have a few more details to cover. They’ll travel to Virginia in about a month to see the first cans come off the manufacturer’s line, a necessity to make sure the label is printed and aligned correctly. They’ll also have to fly-in a representative of the company that makes the canning machine to make sure they’ve got it tweaked correctly. They’ll visit Top of the Hill Restaurant and Brewery in Chapel Hill, N.C., because the microbrewery uses a similar canning machine.
But ultimately, the only thing that stands between New South and its thirsty, would-be grocery store customers is a busy summer of filling kegs.
Meanwhile, on Friday (June 5), New South will start distributing the second batch of Kurtzman’s American Pale Ale to area TBonz Gill & Grill locations. Kurtzman and Epstein tweaked this batch, so expect a slight change in the flavor profile. Contact me at beerpour@yahoo.com and let me know if you think you figured out what recipe changes they made.
And on Saturday (June 6), Kurtzman gets hitched, or tied, or married. Congrats, Brock!
Contact Colin Burch - the Beerman - at beerpour@yahoo.com or visit his beer blog at http://maltyhops.blogspot.com
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