Clown Shoes Beer Garden State Rhapsody is arriving in #NJ! Good news, we’ll be sampling people on this New Jersey exclusive beer at The Big Brew Beer Festival later this month at the NJCB table! This is exciting and please stay tuned for more events around this beer.
We think this is the first time that there’s been an exclusive beer to the NJ market not brewed by a New Jersey Craft Beer brewery released in bottles. Maybe we are wrong, but we can’t find other things. Beer nerds, let’s check help Clown Shoes celebrate their first anniversary of being in New Jersey with this beer! Here’s what Matt from Clown Shoes, the Director of Operations, has to say about the beer!
Clown Shoes has taken the approach of designing special beers for each of its markets, catered specifically to the local culture. We have a sincere appreciation for all the places we’re fortunate enough to send beer to, and we wanted to undertake this project as a way to show that appreciation. I’m from New Jersey originally, so this beer is even more special to me personally. Garden State Rhapsody is a blend of two different barrel-aged beers. We filled 12 rye whiskey barrels with Undead Party Crasher (our imperial smoked oatmeal stout) and blended it with 3 rye whiskey barrels that were filled with an experimental barleywine ale. The result is a rich, decadent monster of a stout that hits you with flavors of chocolate, espresso and dark fruits, with a layer of sweetness and spice from the rye barrels. The beer was in barrels for 6 months, giving it time for the flavors to mature. The label features our Undead Party Crasher fighting off snake demons in the depths of the Pine Barrens of NJ while riding the Jersey Devil. We were originally going to call this beer “Jersey Devil in the Rye” but the name was rejected by the TTB, so we decided to call it Garden State Rhapsody, and this is our ode to the great state of New Jersey.
At Big Brew Beer Festival, we’ll have this at our table for all VIP guests and for NJCB Members ONLY for the rest of the time. Sorry, but we gotta reward you for being a NJCB Member. Memberships will need to be shown for samples. Thanks to our friends Clown Shoes and Peerless Beverages for making this happen.
