Praises continue to pour in for Red Bank brewery and Italian Grill Basil T’s.  The restaurant and its hand crafted beer received high reviews in recent restaurant rankings from the readers and writers of two leading New Jersey magazines.

New Jersey Monthly’s 27th Annual Readers’ Choice Restaurant Poll awards the brews of the Red Bank brewery and Italian restaurant as the winner in the Best Beer and Best Pub categories in Central Jersey.

Inside Jersey’s Best of N.J. Restaurants feature listed Basil T’s as the winner for Best Brew Pub in New Jersey.

Basil T’s continues to impress critics and guests with its fresh Italian meals and homemade beer.  The 24-year-old restaurant has become a local favorite and one of the best restaurants and bars in Red Bank.  The Red Bank microbrewery features a minimum of six hand crafted ales each season.

All of the beers are brewed by Gretchen Schmidhausler, who is only the second Head Brewer in Basil T’s history.  She has been brewing beers for over 14 years and is a graduate of the American Brewers Guild’s Craftbrewers Apprenticeship Program, in Woodland, CA.

Basil T’s was recently featured in Draft Magazine’s Online Exclusive: Top 10 Beers Brewed by Women, honoring Basil T’s brewer Gretchen Schmidhausler.

Gretchen and Basil T’s have also received recognition for The Original Basil T’s Maxwell’s Dry Stout:

• Gold Medal Winner, 2006 Great American Beer Festival (GABF), “Classic Dry Irish Stout”
• Bronze Medal, 2003 GABF, “Coffee Flavored Beer”
• Gold Medal, 2002 GABF, “Coffee Flavored Beer”

The next time you’re looking for an evening out, Basil T’s will not disappoint you.  Plan an evening in Red Bank to enjoy a fresh, authentic Italian meal and a refreshing, cold, award-winning beer at one of the finest restaurants and microbreweries in New Jersey.

Brewmaster Gretchen Schmidhausler of Basil Ts Brewery & Italian Grill, one of the best bars in New Jersey, recently returned from a trip to Germany where she had the enviable opportunity to sample some locally-brewed varieties of beer.

During her stay in Bavaria, one of the world’s true beer meccas, Gretchen visited Wurstkuchl, a tavern situated along the Danube River . Wurstkuchl (pictured, right) has roots that date back to the 12th century when the location provided slow-simmered meals for stonemasons, dockers and crane workers.

Though now geared largely toward visitors, Wurstkuchl serves much the same purpose it did hundreds of years ago: providing its patrons with delicious food and drink.

While there Gretchen enjoyed Bavarian wheat beers, dark and golden lagers, and Rauch (smoked) beers. The tastes and aromas will serve as inspiration for future beers brewed at the Red Bank bar Basil T’s.

Never satisfied with producing anything less than the best, Gretchen is always looking for ways to improve an already award-winning selection of beers at Basil Ts.

Visit the Basil T’s website to view its world-class authentic Italian menu and to learn more about its six, handcrafted beers: http://www.basilt.com/

Learn More About One of the Top New Jersey Bars

Stay current on all the latest news, including Gretchen’s adventures in the brewing world, here and at: http://www.basilts.net

Basil T’s, Where Fresh is Fresh, and Homemade is Really Homemade. To us, it’s much more than a slogan, and more like a defining statement of our entire restaurant. The catch phrase for Olive Garden is “When you’re here, you’re family.” Despite the pleasant message of a welcoming dining environment, when you’re there, you aren’t literally family. Olive Garden isn’t going to send you a card on your birthday or expect an invitation to your wedding. But at Basil T’s, we follow our slogan to the T (pun intended).

If you walk into the kitchen of our Italian restaurant in NJ, you won’t see any bags of pasta, but you might spot bags of flour. That’s because we make all our pasta, from scratch, in house.  We make the dough, we cut the rigatoni, we ruffle the pappardelle. Doing this adds a unique freshness and authentic taste to all of our pasta dishes we serve at our NJ restaurant.

Walk around a little more, and you’ll see tomatoes. Lots and lots of tomatoes. Here in the Garden State, we take advantage of the abundance and freshness of our state vegetable, the Jersey Tomato. We purchase all our tomatoes from local farms whenever they are in season and are proud to say that Jersey tomatoes make some of the best Pomodoro sauce around. All our tomatoes are ripened in our NJ restaurant for the juiciest, most flavorful taste possible. Many places will use tomatoes as soon as they receive them, but we know you can’t rush perfection.

Jersey tomatoes aren’t the only seasonal ingredients we include in our menu. We carefully select every element of every dish, and compliment our menu with items like dandelion greens, broccoli rabe, ramps, wild mushrooms, fava beans, watermelons, cantaloupe, apples during their peak of freshness and seasonality. We also only use fresh, never frozen hand-cuts of seasonal fish, and avoid farm raised seafood products as we believe the quality and taste are sacrificed.

After you’ve had the homemade pasta topped with the homemade sauce, you’ll probably want to wash it all down with, you guessed it, our homemade beer. (Our gold medal, award winning, homemade beer to be precise.) With five deliciously distinct styles and our many seasonal brews, there’s a beer for every taste and a Sampler if you’d rather taste every beer from our Red Bank brewery.

Last but certainly not least, is dessert (if you’ve managed to save room for it) made by our own pastry chef. Our house made pastries are inspired by authentically Italian recipes from places like Attanasio Pastry Shop in Naples, birthplace of the Sfogliatella. Basil T’s owner Victor Rallo wanted to make sure our recipe was authentic as possible, so he dropped in on the kitchen of Attanasio on his last trip to Naples.

At Basil T’s, we have a passion for everything we serve. Our approach to dining embraces the entire spectrum of fresh and homemade in order to bring that passion to you. That’s why when we say fresh and homemade, we mean Fresh and Homemade!