Posted on

Gusto Brewing Company

I would drive a long way to taste a damn good brew, but fortunately I do not have to,

We have the best beer in the state right here in North Cape May. Cape May Brewery is really, really good. Gusto Brewing Company is even better.

Our merrie crew hunkered down on Sunday, and despite the delightfully cool and dry climate inside the brewery, opted to drink outside in the garden. (OK, don’t get overly romantic here, you want lush surrounding and Adirondack chairs around a fire pit, go to Cold Spring Brewery, but know you’re going for the scenery.)

I brew beer, My son and his girlfriend brew beer. My daughter and my son-in-law brew beer. We used to brew because we wanted exactly what we wanted. Gusto makes a good case for letting someone else do the work.

We tried several brews, all of them excellent, but two stood out, one for its cleverness, the other for its skill.

The Inside Joke: Tangerine+Peach Créme is a fruited sour with a creamy, rich mouthfeel and a complex (in a good way) estery swirl of flavors, but to describe it that way makes it sound too serious. It’s fookin’ good without being cloying.

The Real Fake Doors is a better bitter, done exactly right. The Fuggle hops were spot on, balanced perfectly by the crystal malt. I felt like I was back in London, experiencing the sounds and aromas near the Thames. It is not hard to make an ESB, but it’s difficult to make it just right. This was a fookin’ home run.

We also had the Slam Poet, a classic IPA that shows off by not showing off, and the Little Spoon oatmeal stout, also good stuff.

The menu varies, as it should, and the staff has always been nothing but friendly. Our first visit was four years ago, when the tour consisted of a card and a formal signing in a composition notebook acknowledging you took the tour, but now a quick glance at the wall (and the merch) suffices.

But don’t tell anybody, The Atlantic City Press damn near ruined our beach a few years ago, and things got pretty crowded for a bit. The beer here is as good as beer gets. My fear is Gusto gets too successful. Until then, we’ll keep sharing our oasis with folks who stumble down the shore, as long as they keep it semi-secret.

If the place is too hoppin’ (it is summertime, no?) grab a 25 oz crowler of a 64 oz growler. They also carry 4-packs.

Posted on

Chaos on the Delaware Bay

Nope, not the fireworks, though shooting up major fireworks into the teeth of a thunderstorm squall, though that does make for chaos.

Hours earlier, when the Scott Avenue beach looked like the Fourth of July scene in Jaws, a two year old was digging in the sand.

And two year olds are really good at digging, and soon he had a small pool to play in.

He stumbled upon some horseshoe crabs, as happens often in early summer, and his Granddad buried them again, to await the next high tide.

And then, miraculously it seems, the pool filled with tiny horseshoe crabs, spinning and swimming and looking as exuberant as late June lightning bugs. They spun and swam wildly with an exuberance too many of us no longer recognize.

These are “older” horseshoe crabs, weeks old instead of minutes, reared by Rutgers in Lower Township. Photo from”Rutgers lab churning out baby horseshoe crabs,” Washington Times, 9/27/2014 (AP Photo/Wayne Parry)

We tried “saving” them, most of them anyway. Hundreds, maybe thousands ,were sent into the bay.

And maybe one or three will survive the next decade and return to the beach as mature adults. laying eggs for a 12 year old child to discover again.

Posted on

Harvesting potatoes

North Cape May is, according to the USGS, is fill. Just north and west of us are nice, loamy soils. Strawberry festivals, lima bean festivals, even barley festivals (if beer counts)

But fill that’s mostly sand makes for good potato gardens–some compost, some nice seed potatoes from Pinetree, a tiny bit of sulfur, a little bit of hilling, and then a ridiculous amount of fun while on all fours digging up potatoes with your grandbabies.

Yes, it’s early–they haven’t even flowered yet–but the kids are here this week, and we needed blue potatoes for a patriotic potato salad.

Posted on

Bees and blueberries

A few miles away Kid Rock is waking up, getting ready to defile a beach as only he and his fans can, so we’re staying away from Wildwood this weekend.

Honey bee on a milkweed flower.

But sometimes a backyard is more than enough.

If you have a small patch of land not blanketed in mown grass, herbicides, and pesticides, you have a lot going on right now. Go take a look.

Posted on

Limulus love

Every year thousands creep their way to the edge of their world and celebrate the long June days as only a critter around for hundreds of millions of years can.

They came before the dinosaurs.

The only other humans on this half-mile patch of beach were a few kids flipping exuberant males back on their many feet, their parents drinking at the local watering hole across the street.

A few moments earlier, only a few of the critters were visible, but cued by voices humans cannot hear, they rose from the waters, seemingly in unison, to creep to the top of the tide line.

An hour later, most will be gone. A few will not return to the water, their gills a treat for the gulls.

In a couple of weeks, the high tide will help release the few of the millions of new critters that survive through June.

Most will fall prey to the ghost crabs, the gulls, the grackles, the killies and kingfish. The Audubon Society folk will praise the eggs as fodder for the red knots, perhaps easier on human eyes but certainly not nearly as interesting as these creatures from the depths of the bay.

Decades ago I stumbled on thousands of horseshoe crab babies, moments before they emerged from their now transparent shells, spinning and spinning as if anticipating their release.

Never saw a red knot do that.

Posted on

eScape the Cape

Every year around this time of year we have a local triathlon, Escape the Cape. People pay good money to jump off the ferry, push their bodies to exhaustion, and buy a few beers.

I don’t do that, but I do grow garlic. (OK, garlic mostly grows by itself–some of my plants literally grew from cloves too small to bother to peel–I just toss them towards the garden.)

So when we hear the noise from the terminal starting at 5:15 AM on an otherwise lovely early summer Sunday, it reminds me to go cut the scapes.

And in just a few short weeks after the scapes, we’ll get the bulbs.

Posted on

They’re baaacckkk….

Well, they never really left.

Ghost crabs spend their winters right here in North Cape May, snuggled a few feet under the beach in their burrows, waiting for spring.

You get through winter several feet under the sand. You greet living again after a long months in your dark wintry tomb. And then you keel over at your doorstep as the sun sets, again, on your patch of Earth. There’s a lesson here.

If the beach is not crowded and you sit real still (their eyeballs work real well), you can see them going ghost crabby things during the day.

Enjoy their company and try not to step on their doorways. They’re locals, after all.

Posted on

Bay at dusk

We keep posting photos, hoping to catch the feeling, the awe, the awareness of being alive and yet mortal.

But we never get it quite right, because we are far more than just our eyes.

Posted on

The cheap NCM life

Bottled last summer’s beach plum wine, fruity, a tad astringent, but hey, practically free, as a private jet flew overhead. The beach plums come from two bushes in the backyard.

Made some bread from home ground wheat, cheap and good.

Eating kale from the garden tonight, as cheap as cheap gets. Kale grows like a weed in North Cape May, and requires little more effort than stooping to drop the seeds in the ground.

A good life is cheaper than the jet life.