NJ beer: Dive bars embrace Jersey craft beer

If you’re going to be a hometown bar, it stands to reason that you’d want to serve hometown beer.

Fortunately there are plenty of neighborhood dive bars across New Jersey that proudly pour brews created close to home.

“It’s not that I have anything against any other breweries, but I would rather support my state’s breweries,” said Al Cross, manager at The Snug Harbor in Kearny, Hudson County. “And it doesn’t matter where (in the state they’re from).

“We get stuff from Brotherton too, and Brotherton’s all the way down in Shamong (Burlington County); they make a great IPA and they make some other really good beers, so I serve them, too. It’s not like regionalized so much, it’s just the ones that I think and my customers think and overall people think are the best.”

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Cross, who’s worked at The Snug Harbor for nearly 30 years, said the Elm Street bar started catering to the craft beer crowd almost a decade ago.

“But there was no really New Jersey breweries to get it from (at the time),” he said. “So we would have Founders (Brewing Co., Michigan) and Dale’s Pale Ale (from Oskar Blues Brewery, Colorado) and 60 Minute IPA (by Dogfish Head, Delaware) and whatnot, and people loved it, which made us increase our taps.”

Over the years The Snug Harbor doubled its taps from eight to 16; half of those taps are typically reserved for New Jersey beers, and there’s a general focus on the incredibly popular India Pale Ales.

“Right now, everything is IPA-centric, everything,” Cross said. “We have like four or five going almost all the time. The craft world is extremely IPA-centric. We do serve an array of all styles — we have wheat beers, we have light beers, we have IPAs, we have stouts, we have saisons, we have pilsners, we have lagers, and everything is constantly rotating.”

Cross said he’s also worked out a strategy for introducing local clients to the brave new world of inventive New Jersey craft beers.

“You can see the advanced palate on some people and then you just see your regular craft beer palate and then like the newbies that come in, they want to try something,” he said. “And you always start them off with a lager because an IPA would blow them away. You give them a lager or a pilsner, they’re like, ‘Oh, this is really good.’ Then you’ve got them, and they’re going to start trying other stuff as time goes by.”

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The new name is Jersey’s dive bar scene is Nic’s Hometown Tavern in Hazlet, Monmouth County, which opened in early November. Co-owner Scott Nicholl, an architect by trade, said the look of the Route 36 watering hole “certainly isn’t dive bar, but the feeling and comfort is.”

Nic’s opened with two New Jersey beers in its 16 taps, but just a few months later half of the tap lines are ruled by local products.

The most popular Jersey beers, Nicholl said, are typically Carton Brewing from nearby Atlantic Highlands, Kane Brewing Company from Ocean Township and Middletown’s Belford Brewing Company.

Icarus Brewing Co. from Lakewood is gaining popularity, Nicholl said, and the brewery will be the focus of a tap take-over on Friday, April 13 at Nic’s.

Strong local products, it seems, are helping to change the concept of what drinking at a local dive bar can be.

“It’s amazing, it’s all these hipsters taking over everything,” Nicholl said. “I grew up in bars through the ’80s and ’90s and … (now) there are 16 taps, eight of them are local breweries, but the other eight are constant domestics that no one’s ever going to change.

“My father’s going to drink a case of Miller Lite, it doesn’t matter what kind of beer you give him and he certainly isn’t interested in finding a better one. But now, it used to be you’d have like one kind of interesting beer, one variety, now we can carry eight, which has just never been the case before.”

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For further local dive adventures, be sure to check out the Bond Street Bar in downtown Asbury Park, Monmouth County. In recent years it’s become the gateway to a sprawling, multi-level, partially underground drinking complex, but the original Bond Street is still a no-nonsense bar that constantly serves up the likes of Kane, Carton and Asbury Park Brewery.

Just north of Asbury Park in Long Branch stands another longtime Monmouth County favorite, the Nip-N-Tuck Bar and Grill on Norwood Avenue. Nip-N-Tuck has been pouring Jersey brews, particularly Kane products, for years.

And of course, it’s impossible to discuss New Jersey’s dive bar landscape without talking about the iconic Jay’s Elbow Room in Maple Shade, Burlington County.

Tommy Michaux’s family has owned the storied South Jersey bar for 40 years, but they only started carrying New Jersey craft beers five or six years ago.

“I’ve learned a lot,” Michaux said. “I knew nothing about (local beers) when I started (carrying them), but I could see the industry was going in that direction.”

Since 2013, the bar has grown from eight tap lines to 20, with six of those currently occupied by New Jersey beers. Particular favorites of Jay's include Kane, Carton and Fairfield-based Magnify Brewing Company.

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Michaux said Carton’s signature Boat Beer session ale and 077XX East Coast Double IPA “put them on the map,” and he's currently pouring a favorite for his customers: Regular Coffee, an imperial cream ale that “just draws people from everywhere. They’ll come to drink that.”

"I only now have two (tap) handles that don't change," Michaux said, "and that is I have a Bud Light handle — that's my all day, every day, $2 pint — and then I've got Yuengling Lager which, in South Jersey, that's kind of a staple of the Philadelphia area. And those handles never change.

"Everything else changes. Like today, I have on Kane Sneakbox (American Pale Ale), yesterday it was Kane Head High (American-style IPA). So when the Head High kicks, I don't replace it with the Head High, I replace it with something else, because I go by the Winston Churchill philosophy. You're going to love this: Winston Churchill said, 'To improve is to change, to perfect is to change often,' so that's what I do with the craft beers. I'm always mixing it up."