MAN SKIRT



Inlaid in the wall of a brick building is a night depository, left over from a former bank, serving as camouflage to any passerby who doesn’t think to look up. A modest sign hangs overhead: No pants, just great beer.

Inside, on the raised floor where bank tellers once stood, a man in a brown canvas kilt pours off partially fermented pale ale from a 228-gallon cylindrical-conical tank. He tastes it first, before a quick dip of the hydrometer in the pail reveals how much alcohol the yeast has produced, which is not as much as he’d hoped.

“I started like everyone starts, with a pot on a stove and a plastic bucket. Most of what I know is from practice,” says Joe Fisher, the homebrewer turned founder of Man Skirt Brewing. When I visit, he’s just finished leading a class of curious Centenary College biology students around the brewery. The water profile, he explains to them and me, is more basic in Hackettstown than in his hometown of Lebanon, and as a result the pH of his usual mash is too high for the enzymes in the grain to convert starches into sugars for the yeast to eat. To compensate, he’ll add acidulated malt, a type of malted barley to which lactobacillic acid has been added—a common brewing technique in locales with alkaline water.

One of Man Skirt’s current brews is an English-style best-bitter ale that comes in at a sessionable 4.2% ABV and is decidedly not bitter, but rather falls on the malty-sweet side of the spectrum. Also on tap in his Kickstarter-funded tasting room is an American robust porter— not as heavy as a typical porter, it brings in rich dark chocolate and coffee notes with a surprisingly light mouth-feel.

Next in the brew kettle is a German bock brewed with rye flakes and peppercorns. Fisher plans to focus mainly on his favorites going forward— classic British styles, as well as American and German. “I need to make beer that I’m passionate about in order for people to like my beer,” he says. “If I’m forced to make styles I don’t like, it’ll show in the final product.”

Along with sourcing local hops, from farms like Bentley B. Hops in Newton and Rope Swing Hops in Green Township, Fisher’s ambitions include making use of a room in the brewery that’s still full of safe deposit boxes. The future Man Skirt cask room will feature barrel-aged brews “straight from the vault.”

Fisher stills works as a computer programmer when he’s not cleaning kegs and hauling bags of grain. In fact, it was his experience in electronics that compelled him to replace his original plastic bucket with a fully automated homebrew system he built from scratch in his basement.