When Michael Kane launched Kane Brewing Company (Ocean, New Jersey) in 2011, he brought more than fifteen years of homebrewing experience, national and international travel, and business savvy to the brewhouse. Appropriately named, Kane Brewing is an embodiment of Kane himself with a sense of place specific to his hometown.
“I didn’t leave my day job to start the brewery until I was thirty-five,” says Kane. “The beauty of what I wanted to do is a long-term approach, to open a brewery and do my own thing with no partners or investors. I’ve spent a lot of time focused on being able to do this on my own, and I have a clear vision to bring craft beer to New Jersey. I don’t say that without the knowledge of great breweries in the area,” Kane continues, “But more to bring awareness to what is not exactly a ‘craft-beer’ state.”
Kane, who grew up in New Jersey, says that the state has an educated consumer base for craft beer without a lot of craft-beer production. “It wasn’t [about] getting consumers on board,” he says in reference to the European-beer-style-loving East Coast beer drinkers. “It was getting retailers and wholesalers to realize there was a market for this kind of product.” So Kane decided he would use his two favorite beer categories—West Coast–style ales and Belgian-style beers—as a platform to bring local craft beer to New Jersey.
Kane’s West-Coast focus was inspired by traveling, when he was blown away by the differences between East and West Coast IPAs. “Compared to English styles [in the East], I was blown away by the really dry, hoppy, aromatic IPAs [in the West]. It was a whole new world.”
West Coast–style IPAs have scaled-back malt profiles and are focused on bright flavors and aromatic profiles, says Kane. “That’s our philosophy with hoppy beers: a lot of pilsner malt, a tiny bit of crystal, and the rest is just the hops.”
The Kane IPAs, including the Head High American IPA and the Overhead imperial IPA, have the slightest “clean bitterness that hits you in the beginning,” says Kane. They use neutral yeasts to maintain the focus on the flavor of the hops and are usually dry hopped for big hops aroma.
“We brew what we like,” Kane reminds me when he describes the other beer style for the brewery. A lot like his IPAs, his Belgian-style Single Fin Belgian-style blonde ale is clean, bright, and crisp. This year-round offering from the brewery is one that beer geeks love, Kane says. “We modeled it after a Belgian single—super low alcohol, drinkable, flavorful, dry, and crisp on the palate. Light in body, Belgian single seemed to be the obvious choice. We thought it would be a good platform for pulling flavor out of yeast and malt, at only 4 percent ABV.”
Single Fin, like a lot of the other Belgian-style beers at the brewery, is brewed with “Trappist-style” yeast, says Kane. “Our first, and the yeast we liked the best, is Belgian Abbaye 2 (ECY13) from East Coast Yeast. That’s what we’ve used the most. [But] we love to experiment, so we’ve also tried White Labs Trappist (WLP500), and we’re about to try some batches using their Belgian Abbey Yeast (WLP530). For most of the year we have a saison strain as well. Most recently we’ve been using a blend of four different strains from East Coast Yeast, but we’ve used the single Dupont strain from White Labs in the past for both our saisons and wits,” he says.
At Kane Brewing, the Belgian-style beers are dry and highly carbonated. “Our Belgian-style quad, for example, is between 11 and 12 percent ABV, dark, and very dry. It’s traditional, with higher carbonation and dark fruit notes,” Kane says. “We want to honor the Belgian tradition, but are by no means experts in Belgian-style beers. We’re an American craft brewery with a twist.”
Often responsible for that twist are the 150 non-sour barrels in the brewery’s expanding barrel program, including bourbon, tequila, French and American oak, brandy, and cognac barrels. This program yields such beers as the annual release A Night To End All Dawns, a 12 percent ABV imperial stout that ages in bourbon barrels for fifteen months. In 2014, Kane created three additional versions of A Night To End All Dawns—one aged on Madagascar bourbon vanilla beans, one aged on dark roast coffee from nearby Rook Coffee Roasters, and one aged on roasted cacao beans.
Many of the retired wine barrels that Kane uses come from two local New Jersey wineries: Working Dog Winery in East Windsor and Valenzano Winery in Shamong. For Kane Brewing, the emphasis is on New Jersey whenever possible. “We use a lot of different products that come from New Jersey in our beers,” says Kane. “Coffee, ingredients from local farmers, and even a local microbiologist with a small yeast company—we’ve used his Trappist yeast strain.”
New Jersey is smack in between New York and Philadelphia, so the area is gateway to many other craft-beer cities, Kane says. “Some brewers have even moved past New Jersey because markets are easier to penetrate elsewhere. We [self-distribute] and have mostly draft sales. We’re totally focused on New Jersey.”