The Mug Club at the new Iron Hill in Maple Shade is already proving to be a great deal. The ceramic mug you get when you join is probably enough to offset at least $10 out of the $35 membership fee, and then you also get 24 oz beers for the price of a pint as long as you maintain your membership every year. If you figure on $6 per beer, you’re effectively saving $3 every round, which means you’ve broken even after 8 1/3 beers.

That should have already been enough to justify joining, but then Iron Hill held their first Mug Club Party this past Saturday, offering free appetizers, t-shirts, door prizes, and an exclusive beer tasting to any Mug Club member who cared to partake. If they keep throwing these shindigs every quarter like they’re promising, then the club will prove to be an even more tremendous value than we expected.

Mind you, we’re under no illusions that we’re spending less money by being in the Mug Club, but it sure feels that way. We just prefer to, you know, downplay the fact that we’re going out for beer twice as often as we normally would.

It’s a pretty brilliant strategy, and almost resembles a sort of perverse bonds program. From our perspective, we buy into the program for a nominal fee, and essentially get a larger payout from it the longer we stay invested. For Iron Hill, though, they’ve effectively convinced the public to pay them for the opportunity to spend money there more often.

Genius.

Head brewer, Chris, serving the ravenous hoards.

Commentary aside, there were two exclusive beer offerings at the party, available only to Mug Club members. The first was a Cherry Vanilla Porter, aged on whole Mexican vanilla beans and concentrated sour Montmorency cherry juice from King Orchards in Michigan. It tasted like Cherry Garcia. They also had a grotesque chimera of a beer called Entirely Inappropriate, which was made by priming Octoberfest with actively fermenting Tripel wort in a firken, and then dry hopping it with Amarillo hops. I bet it was delicious, but unfortunately, the last person to get to try it was the guy in front of me in line.

The beers were not free, but the food was. At the far end of the bar area, the staff had set up a spread of hummus with feta and tapenade, nachos, and HUGE, inch-thick sweet potato fries with dipping sauce.

'Twas of the tasty persuasion.

The party was capped off with a very limited tasting of a 2003 bottle of Barleywine. Throw a steak into a cage of hungry lions, and you’ll get an idea of how this played out, but those who held their hand out quickly enough (I managed it twice, once for me and once for Mel) were treated to a smooth, complex elixir of malt and alcohol that had clearly weathered the last six years in that bottle with great enthusiasm.

Theoretically, one could have spent $7 that afternoon on an entire, albeit not very healthy, meal, but once we were in the door, it was pretty hard to resist the siren’s call of a juicy burger, a portabella mushroom sandwich, and a growler of IPA for the ride home, proving once again that the best way to get people to part with their money is to make them pay for the privilege.

Brewpubs, Opinion, Restaurants 1 Comment »