Beer in New Jersey is nothing new.

After all, the landmark India Pale Ale from P. Ballantine & Sons Brewing Company of Newark, considered by some to be the first American IPA, hit the market in 1878.

Likewise, anyone who has flown into or out of Newark Liberty International Airport has spotted Anheuser-Busch's Newark brewery for Budweiser and related products, open since 1951.

But craft beer is a different story.

While local creations, and the devoted fans that come with them, have been around for some time, the current craft beer boom being felt in the Garden State is less than a decade old. “There was beer in New Jersey before we opened," Michael C. Kane, president and founder of Kane Brewing Company in Ocean Township, told the USA Today Network. "And I think a lot of people sometimes forget some of the earlier…beers in the state, like the River Horses and Flying Fish and Cricket Hill, the guys who were doing it probably 10 years before we opened (in 2011).

"So that’s always first, to acknowledge that we were early on in the sort of second wave but there was beer in New Jersey; it was small in volume and numbers, but there was beer there.”

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From a national perspective however, New Jersey still has a long way to go. According to statistics from trade association the Brewers Association, the state currently ranks 45th in the country in breweries per capita, with only 1.3 breweries in the state for every 100,000 adults 21 or older. The Brewers Association reports that it ranks 31st in barrels of craft beer produced per year and 46th in gallons per adults 21 and older.

Breweries are multiplying at a rapid rate across the state, with the Brewers Association showing 24 in 2011, the year Kane started pouring beer, up to 90 in 2017. That's a 375 percent growth in six years, less than the 438 percent in nearby New York (75 to 329) but higher than the 320 percent (88 to 282) in Pennsylvania.

New Jersey saw a 43 percent growth in its craft beer industry since 2015, according to a study done by the research company C + R., tying it with Kentucky for the most craft brewing growth in the country.

New Jersey crossed the 100 brewery threshold in 2018, and much of the growth can likely be attributed to Gov. Chris Christie's 2012 signing of a law allowing smaller breweries to increase production from 3,000 barrels a year to 10,000 and giving consumers the chance to drink on site, as long as they toured the brewery.

Among the operations that have reaped the benefits of Jersey's beer boom is Magnify Brewing Company of Fairfield, which recently marked three years in business. Magnify founder and president Eric Ruta, who grew up in Ridgewood, says much of his vision for the company came from his time spent at Bates College in Maine, when he immersed himself in the bustling food and craft beer scene of Portland about 45 minutes to the south.

"For being such a small city, there's a lot of local beer, everybody drinks super-local and there's a lot of excitement," says Ruta, who releases new Magnify cans every Wednesday. "Every week there's something going on [in Portland], some new beer or something exciting."

Ruta says he hopes to transplant that vibe to his home community with Magnify. "The original goal was to create this community around beer that we'd see in Maine with local support," he says. "We're super-focused on northern New Jersey the same way a lot of these places are focused on Portland, Maine."

Colorado brewer Zac Rissmiller recently tried a quartet of New Jersey beers for the first time: Head High from Kane, Vine Shine India Pale Ale from Magnify, Ill Street Blues New England Style IPA from Brix City Brewing in Little Ferry and Maiden Voyage double dry-hopped pale ale from The Alementary in Hackensack. Along with enjoying the beers, Rissmiller was impressed by the beer culture that has developed across New Jersey in a relatively short period of time.

“That’s a pretty short turnaround time to really get a culture going, to really get a good base for yourself," he says. "So, I think it’s really cool and really interesting that it doesn’t take that long to get a scene going."

A former Lockheed Martin engineer, Rissmiller won awards and regional acclaim during his time at Colorado's Elk Mountain Brewing, Resolute Brewing and Rockyard Brewing Company. He's now the co-owner of 1623 Brewing Company, based in Maryland.

Based on his national perspective, Rissmiller expects big things from New Jersey beer. "With the population density out there, I can’t imagine it would take even a couple more years to get to a point where they’re rivaling places like heck, even Vermont or San Diego, upper Northwest, Colorado, any of the big area for brewing," he says. "New Jersey, I think, is coming up pretty quickly on that, actually.”

Jersey brews are starting to catch the attention of connoisseurs outside of the state like Erin Wallace, owner of the Old Eagle Tavern and Devil's Den pub in Philadelphia. Wallace, a board member of Philly Loves Beer and Philly Beer Week as well as co-leader of the Philadelphia chapter of the Pink Boots Society for women in the beer industry, has noted the growing quantity and quality of Jersey products as of late.

"In the last 10 years, the amount of local breweries from Philly we've had open up (is impressive), but then I watched it happen in Jersey and it seemed to be a lot quicker," she says. "It took 10 years to build up a ton of breweries in Philly, and it seemed like it kind of happened overnight in Jersey where all of a sudden you turn around and there's a hundred breweries."

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The in-the-know Philadelphia beer crowd, Wallace says, is starting to get hip to New Jersey's rising brewing scene. "I've been very pleasantly impressed with what I've had over here, I find it really interesting," she says, citing particular favorites such as Eight and Sand Beer Co. in Woodbury and Zed's Beer in Marlton. "So far, when I've been hitting some of these newer, smaller breweries that are open, I just think they're making really solid product."

Blake Crawford still believes New Jersey has plenty of room for growth. Crawford is a chemical engineer and co-owner of The Alementary brewery in Hackensack, where he runs the brew house.

"We're just now getting to the point where a significant amount of beer is being produced, coming out of New Jersey," Crawford says. "So, that's how we view the state as a whole and how we view Bergen County specifically, it's a wide-open market.

"And so what that means is the New Jersey breweries are doing their best to be innovative and to cut new ground, because when you're sitting in this position relative to even our neighboring states there's a lot more room to be creative, there's a lot more room to push some boundaries."

But even now, according to Crawford, only between 3 and 4 percent of the beer consumed in New Jersey is made in the state. "Most New Jersey residents, when you look at the stats you say, 'Wow, we have over 100 breweries in the state,'" he says, "but still a really tiny portion of the beer that gets consumed in New Jersey is made in our home state."

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Crawford said changing that means legislative action to alter both the laws regulating breweries and the number of liquor licenses in the state. "New Jersey has some very, very antiquated liquor laws, and those laws serve to limit the growth of the brewing industry," he says. "So, when you look at even our immediate neighbors like New York, New York has an extremely vibrant not only craft beer scene but an extremely vibrant just artisanal product scene as a whole and that's made possible because New York has changed their laws to give breweries, wineries, meaderies, distilleries, everybody in the game, more flexibility.

New Jersey's beer boom hit a speed bump in September when the state issued new restrictions on breweries, most controversially limiting breweries to hosting 25 events and 52 private parties a year. By early October state regulators pumped the brakes on that, suspending enforcement of the new rules pending further consultation.

For Crawford, the path forward for New Jersey's craft beer scene and its place in the national context is, ultimately, a simple one: "We need to have more beer, and we need to have more places to have that beer sold," he says. "Once you get that culture going, it becomes kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy."