FAQs

We reliably have locally made (thanks to SEPA being snack capital of the world) chips and pretzels in the Cellar Bar at all times. When our hours overlap with those of Heart and Hearth Deli & Smokehouse their food can be ordered directly for delivery to The Referend. During special events we typically have food trucks on farm. Outside food is permitted.

Dogs are unfortunately not allowed in the Cellar Bar, but leashed dogs are very welcome in the biergarten and in the Barn Bar for any events.

Your children are very welcome under the watchful eye of their legal caregivers! They will not, however, be served beverages containing alcohol until they’re 21 years of age or the US legal drinking age is lowered.

We find a staggering success rate among patrons that do not otherwise like beer. In process and outcome our beer tastes and smells profoundly different from “beer-flavored-beer”. So worth a shot, and if not we also serve various wines from Therein Wine and some PA-made spirits.

We offer all of our draft and cask beer (& wine) in 5oz pours a la carte. We’ll gladly pour you several such glasses at once if you’d like to compare and contrast.

Not typically, no. Growlers are probably the most sustainable packaging choice for home consumption (cask beer on site being best?), so we’re thrilled when people use & reuse them, but

Our beers are naturally refermented in the keg and bottle for carbonation, and transferring to a growler undoes much of that hard work.

The main exception is that we will fill growlers if we have a still beer (Jung, OED, e.g.) pouring. These will still require the usual refrigeration and fresh consumption common to just about all growler fills.

We have and we increasingly will! Join our mailing list to hear about all such events.

We do not, with the exception of reservations for tours for large groups. Our seating is first come, first served.

When our schedules align, we accommodate retail sales by appointment outside our posted hours. Give us a call at 609-474-0443 or email at info@thereferend.com to set up a time.

Every beer that we sell has seen temperature ranges of 50-70F (sometimes lower, rarely higher), so that the beer develops hardiness in this range. (This is an intentionally-forgotten bit of old wine and beer wisdom buried, presumably, by companies that sell refrigeration.)

Bottles can be kept in the range above, which closely matches ambient basement temperatures in the region. Lower temperatures will slow aging processes, higher temperatures will accelerate them.

Try to keep bottles from high heat (72F+), sunlight, freezing, fast temperature swings, and excessively dry air. But slow seasonal shifts of anywhere from 33F-70F are natural and good. If you have a whole wine/beer fridge dedicated to bottles of The Referend, you could set it to 50F and hope it doesn’t break.

There are a few factors here.

• In most circumstances the ambient air is warmer than the bottle being served (whether brought up from a cellar or refrigerator), so the formula would include bottle volume & number of drinkers (to determine duration) and ambient temperature. In general, serve bottles on the colder side when it’s hotter out.

• Personal preference. Some like it warm, some like it cold. As a rule, the beer will be less aromatically expressive the colder it is.

• Lively bottlings/gush risk. There have been a few bottlings* over the years that, owing to high carbonation and too many nucleation points in the bottle sediment, are likely to gush upon opening. So we open any such risky bottles carefully at cold temperatures. The pressure in a room temperature bottle is roughly double that of the pressure in a bottle at 33F. *(The Real Thing 2020, Tender Buttons Vanilla 2022, Simulacra and Simulation 2018, A Ghost Is Born 2019, The Way of All Flesh 2020)

• Colder is therefore always safer as service temperature, but one would still want to leave plenty of time for the beer to come up to its optimal temperature for sensory appreciation, which would range from 50-65F.

For our few crown capped bottles, please store upright.

For our cork and wirehood bottles:

In the short term (if you’ll be popping the cork in the next year or two) it’s not likely to matter, so keep them oriented however is easiest for you.

If you plan on keeping the bottles cellared for years or decades, consider storing them horizontally. This will keep the cork wet(ter), and more importantly will increase the surface area of the lees in contact with the liquid, which is itself an antioxidative process, and which improves the taste/texture of the beer considerably over time.

The baskets keep bottles at a consistent angle to enable better control of the bottle pour, keeping lees out of the glass if desired.

Most traditionally, bottles containing sediment are decanted, pouring the clear beer or wine and leaving the lees behind in the bottle. This is how we serve on-site vintage bottles at The Referend, though you’re certainly welcome to add back lees if you like.

At home, if you don’t have a basket you can simply ensure that you have glasses numerous and large enough to hold the contents of the bottle and gently pour all of them in one steady stroke, cutting off the pour at the end as sediment starts to leave the bottle.

The glassware you like best! There are traditions of serving these beers in tumblers, in champagne flutes, in wine glasses, in stanges (for still lambic), even in stoneware.

We typically find maximal enjoyment drinking from a nice light thin stem with a bowl big enough (and pour light enough) to get our nose in there. Stemware has the added advantage of not (automatically) warming the beer with our body heat.

Sometimes in more casual settings it does feel good and right to use the traditional tumbler though.

From 2017/18 on, we’ve worked with Rabbit Hill Farms in Shiloh, NJ, an estate grown malthouse for everything in our Berliner Messe and traditional Gold range, and most of the grist for Wittgenstein and Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Berliner Messe: 60/40 raw wheat/pilsner malt

Referend Gold: 60/40 pilsner malt/raw wheat

Wittgenstein: 45/45/10 raw wheat/pilsner malt/rolled oats or flaked wheat

Mont Sainte-Victoire: 60/20/20 pilsner malt/raw wheat/specialty grain (spelt, rye, oats, buckwheat)

We also brew with Deer Creek malt (Glen Mills, PA) for our spontaneous barleywines, and with spec malted local organic grain by Double Eagle.

This “question” has thankfully been decreasing in frequency as people gain beer familiarity and stop thinking of wheat beers as a ‘90s brewpub monolith of banana & clove.

If there’s a readily discernable commonality to Shock Top, Blue Moon, 3 Floyds Gumballhead, Weihenstephaner Vitus, Allagash White, New Glarus Spotted Cow, Schneider Aventinus Eisbock, Cantillon Gueuze, Trillium Fort Point, Anderson Valley Gose, and almost all of our beers, it eludes us.

Wheat beers are legion! If anything, they help demonstrate the supremacy of fermentation.

We do not know the inner workings of your body and are not dieticians nor medical doctors, all we can speak to is our product (its ingredients and processes).

Natural fermentation (over a substantial period of time) reduces gluten considerably. So where a hefeweizen (short fermentation packaged while still cloudy) may contain 200-400ppm gluten, our Berliner Messe contains approximately 30ppm gluten. Our fruit refermented beers carry less still. We’ll continue to invest in testing to get a better picture of our beer profiles.

Best of all, we achieve this low gluten content naturally through spontaneous fermentation, which inherently creates a product rich in prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics.

For comparison, the FDA allows “gluten-free” labeling on products less than 20ppm.

Both of the maltsters we work with most (Rabbit Hill Farms & Deer Creek) practice floor-malting, which accurately describes the evental site in which the grain sprouts/germinates: the malting floor.

When contrasted with drum malting (a large mechanical rotating vessel which turns the wetted grain over), floor malting is labor intensive process which requires regular raking of the grain bed to maintain consistency.

The Oxford Companion to Beer reads, “today floor malting is considered a niche artisanal practice,” which is all but a necessity to carry out our own niche artisanal practice.

A turbid mash is a type of step mash in which a portion of the turbid/milky mash liquid at each temperature rest is removed from the mash tun to a separate vessel to be heated separately. It takes several hours longer than a simple single infusion mash, and is performed to leave less fermentable sugars in the wort to aid in a longer, more complex fermentation.

Apart from potentially driving complexity, we believe that turbid mashing is also a main factor in the ageworthiness of wild beer. With the exception of our spontaneous barleywine & imperial stout forays, all of our beers are turbid mashed.

On the brewday, we use aged hops, mostly whole leaf (3-10 years old), sometimes pellets sparingly (8-20 years old) to lend their antibacterial properties, tannins and structure, without the dominant bitterness and oils of fresher hops.

Choice varieties for us include Sterling, Crystal, Mt. Hood, Strisselspalt, & Tettnang. We’ve also begun to use barn-aged local organic whole leaf hops whenever possible.

We don’t always (our Berliner Messe/Airbier series is briefly boiled for 15-40 minutes), but for our traditional lambic inspired Gold series, we boil vigorously for 3-6 hours. For some of our spontaneous barleywines, we boil for 5-10 hours.

Long boils concentrate everything present in the wort by way of evaporation, and are reasonably thought to aid in the longevity of the resultant beer.

Yes and no! There’s no style of brewing that embraces variables more than that of spontaneous fermentation, which makes it inherently difficult to tell what factors are most at play in different post-fermentation beer outcomes.

When we traveled to different host breweries to brew our wort, this question was complicated by water source and variability of brewing equipment quite a bit. And after our move to Kutztown, PA, this question cropped up even more: was the air here different/worse/better than that of Jersey breweries? However, even this line of questioning is complicated by the fact that half of our early wort (first five seasons) was first coolshipped in Royersford, PA, closer to our Kutztown blendery than our Pennington origins.

The exact siting of our coolship (and vessel implemented as coolship) absolutely helps shape the ensuing beer, but it’s much less to do with some perceived permanent air on a given property (the wind does not care one whit about property lines), and far more to do with wind exposure, surface area to volume ratio, and season/weather. As well as the potential of microbial retention in the immediate vicinity of the coolship (wood above the coolship; Cantillon’s tile roof, e.g. etc.), especially if steps are taken to hold steam longer in the coolship room. We are still tinkering with the degree of steam retention/wind buffering we’d like our coolship corncrib to offer.

It (fermentative microflora) is absolutely present and airborne everywhere always, and steps are taken to ensure that early colonization of the wort comes in large part from the wind’s gifts.

But the wort then travels through our cellar with its own biome and into well-cleaned wood barrels, which are by design not sterile vessels. So while the earliest fermentation may be the work of airborne microbes, yeast living deep in the porous oak will eventually contribute to the fermentation as well.

Absolutely. In deep winter, when there’s less life per cubic foot of air and our barrel cellar is cold, fermentation can take a week or two to begin in earnest. In spring when there’s pollen visible on the breeze, signs of early fermentation can occasionally be seen in the coolship the morning after the brewday.

Aside from temperature difference, windy weather is the easiest to notice and to picture; these fermentations begin more quickly because more wild spores are dragged over the coolship’s surface. And any wind ripples on the surface of the wort increase the surface area considerably.

We do not tempt fate too much by brewing when it’s hot out (it’s inefficient inside and inadvisable outside), one of the rare instances where a whole batch was unusable was brewed on a fluke 72F day in mid-February that we had already booked with a host brewery.

Precipitation seems to effect somewhat lesser differences than we were led to believe.

Neutral oak denotes cooperage that has been used for several seasons/vintages of holding—most typically—wine.

New oak imparts considerable flavor and aroma of toasted wood alongside fresh tannins which are already heavy-handed for wine production and which would absolutely obliterate our beers.

Neutral oak on the other hand, has seen such features softened while still providing the tight-grained porosity of fine oak which allows for slow and steady microoxygenation of the beer.

A puncheon is a larger barrel (400-500L) that we prefer for many of our beers for their surface area to volume ratio. Their staves are also often a few mm thicker than our smaller barrels. Both aid in slowing oxygen ingress.

Yes! We use whiskey barrels not because they are good barrels (they are shoddily built from the skinniest bits of barely-dry oak and charred to high hell, then stored in insane rickhouse heat), but for their beautifully intoxicating prior tenants. As such, we tend to use bourbon barrels only twice: once for maximum impact for Veni Sancte Spiritus or Le Différend or spontaneous barleywine, and once in a subtler form for Pomes Penyeach.

Then they become planters for blueberries here on the farm.

Foudres (also foeders) are a logical extension of the benefits offered by puncheons (improved insulation and stave thickness, slowed oxygen ingress), but at a volume excessive to our present desires.

The benefit to foudres is also their drawback. There’s a certain efficiency of space and time to a larger vessel that comes at the expense of agility and risk mitigation. We’ve always prized 400-600L puncheons/demi-muids as a perfect midpoint between a standard barrel whose character develops fairly rapidly and a foudre with a slower-paced, more homogenizing effect. The larger the vessel (in our tiny cellar) the lesser the blending opportunities, and in case of oaken disaster, better to lose 500L than 20-50hL (4x-10x).

Foudres may be horizontal or vertical; the fermentation dynamics are drastically different, and other than one-off Flemish Red projects, we prefer horizontally oriented barrels.

Almost always. All of our Gold series is fully barrel fermented. Berliner Messe/Airbier undergoes a spontaneous preacidification (which is itself a kind of lactobacillus dominant fermentation) in tank prior to its spontaneous fermentation in barrel.