Exciting developments are happening at Carton Brewing.

The Atlantic Highlands-based operation, a fixture of New Jersey’s craft beer scene for nearly a decade, initially built its regional reputation on ales with big, distinct flavors like the Boat Beer session ale and the 077XX East Coast Double India Pale Ale.

But things are beginning to expand in a more old school direction.

Big changes came in March, explained Augie Carton of Middletown, who co-owns Carton Brewing with his cousin, Chris.

“It took me five years,” Carton said, “to do a six-month project.”

That project? Expanding Carton’s existing, 5,000-square-foot East Washington Avenue facility into a 10,000-square-foot space next door, effectively tripling the size of Carton Brewing’s Atlantic Highlands footprint.

The expansion, where Carton started brewing beer in March, came just in time.

Over the years, the company has found room for small-scale experimental creations, such as the Sakura cherry blossom salted sour ale or the Regular Coffee imperial cream ale, while working to keep up with demand for its flagship offerings; Carton said he’s producing twice as much Boat Beer and 077XX in 2018 as he was in 2017, and his product can now be found in 100 stores.

However, the increased space has allowed Carton to embark on some passion projects of his own on a much bigger scale, to terrific results.

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“That (expansion) spreads it a little further, makes it go a little farther, and that takes some pressure off those little things so now you can see them more often too,” Carton said.

Take, for example, This Town, a straightforward, classic lager introduced last year and only available in Monmouth County.

“We want a lager, we want This Town doing this,” Carton said. “We want there to be a good, dependable, every day available, fairly priced from-our-town lager for Monmouth County. That’s been something we’ve wanted for seven years, but things like that you can’t get to until you have multiple tanks. … The more traditional stuff, we can now make more regularly.”

To mark its seventh anniversary in August, Carton released Inside Our DNA, an oak-aged India Pale Ale reportedly inspired by the landmark IPA introduced by the P. Ballantine & Sons Brewing Company of Newark in 1878.

In an era of constant IPA innovation and one-upsmanship, Carton wanted to look back to the style’s roots. But to do that, he needed a specific wooden barrel known as a foeder, and the space to store it, which is where the expanded facility came in handy.

“The first American IPA was a New Jersey thing, and we thought that was worth having fun with,” Carton said. “But to do it, I had to buy a wooden foeder uniquely for that task and give it time in that foeder, and to do that, I needed to have the new building to have the space, because I couldn’t give up the space for one tank in the old, smaller building to do a beer that is a year-long project when we couldn’t make enough Boat every three weeks.

“But now that we’ve got this bigger building with more space, I can give up 12 square feet of floor space to a 30-barrel wooden foeder to have a fun, kind of long-term project.”

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Carton prides himself on having lived within a mile of his brewery for 47 years. As his brewery creates products that celebrate Jersey Shore small town life and the state’s brewing history, he tells us that the current craft beer movement across New Jersey has the potential to create neighborhood fixtures for years to come.

“We were the 13th brewery in New Jersey, now I think there’s 100, and I think that’s great,” said Carton. “I think finally we’re getting to a point where every neighborhood, or most neighborhoods, have their place. And I think the more neighborhood places there are the more neighbors who wouldn’t necessarily go seeking craft beer come to it because they want to see what their neighborhood place is doing, and some percent of those people will be converted to people that expect more from their beer. And ultimately it just makes a stronger, more interesting, more diverse beer culture in New Jersey as each neighborhood finds their group.”

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“I think we have the ability to support a lot more breweries than we have, even at this point,” Carton added. “And I think someday we’ll get to the point where literally there’s a brewery of some size for every community in New Jersey, and when that brewery makes that community happy in a very small 10-to-20-year window we’ll see one of America’s least dynamic craft beer cultures become one of America’s strongest beer cultures, if this trend continues.”

Carton Brewing, 6 East Washington Ave., Atlantic Highlands, cartonbrewing.com.