Five spices go into it. Four of them are the ones any brewery reaches for in September - cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and allspice. The fifth is the one Cape May Brewing Co. bothered to emphasize: what the brewery describes as "a s-load of real vanilla."

Mop Water is back for the fall. The Cape May, New Jersey brewery is bringing back its spiced ale, a 7.3 percent brown ale built on German malts and labeled on the can as a 5-Spiced Ale. It is available in 12 ounce cans at the tasting room and through retailers.

The malt choice is the part worth pausing on. A brown ale in the English tradition leans on roast and nutty character, while German malts run toward bready, toasty and lightly caramel depth without much roast bitterness at the end. That is a more forgiving base for a heavy spice load. Roast and cinnamon can fight each other, whereas toasted malt gives the spices something to sit on rather than compete with. Cape May describes the combination as suited to cool autumn evenings and bitter winter nights, which reads as marketing but also tracks with a 7.3 percent beer carrying that much vanilla.

The name is the brewery's own joke, and it is committed to it. The can carries an illustration of a mop and a sloshing bucket, and the release notes credit the recipe to "CMBC's Chief Mop Man," an in-house character who the brewery says mandated the beer. No further backstory is offered, which is probably the right call - the mop on the label does most of the work.

Anyone wanting to try it at the source has an occasion coming up. The brewery is running a Pumpkins and Pints weekend at its Cape May location from September 25 to 27, with a pumpkin painting station among the activities.

Editor’s Take

The can calls it a 5-Spiced Ale, which invites you to count, and counting is where it gets good. Cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice - that is four, and it is the standard autumn quartet that every spiced beer in North America reaches for around now. The fifth is vanilla, and the brewery does not list it so much as announce it: a s-load of real vanilla. Nobody writes that about their cinnamon.

There is a reason to put it last and put it in bold. Vanilla is not really a spice in the same sense as the other four - it does not add heat or bite, it rounds off the edges of everything standing next to it. Cinnamon and ginger both have a sharpness that can turn thin and potpourri-ish in a beer, and vanilla is the thing that stops that happening. On a German malt base, which brings bready, toasty depth rather than the roast of an English brown, you end up with the spices sitting on something soft from both directions.

And then they called it Mop Water. Cape May has taken a beer with genuinely appealing autumn credentials and named it after the grimmest bucket in the building, put a mop on the label, and credited the whole thing to a Chief Mop Man. I have read a great many earnest seasonal names invoking harvests and hearths and falling leaves. This one is funnier than all of them and I suspect it sells better too.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.

Mop Water Counts Five Spices, and Vanilla Is the Loud One

Cape May's fall spiced ale is back, named for a bucket and built on cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice and what the brewery calls a s-load of real vanilla, over a German malt base at 7.3 percent.

Source & Editorial