NJ beer: Kane Brewing Company's secret to craft beer success

"Jersey Brewed" is a new video series by features reporter Alex Biese and videographer Brian Johnston. The series spotlights all aspects of beer culture throughout New Jersey, with new episodes posting every other week.

Watch our series premiere, a visit to Kane Brewing Company in Ocean Township, in the video at the top of this story.

New Jersey's beer scene can be divided into two distinct eras: before beer began flowing from Kane Brewing Company in Ocean Township, and after.

Since launching in August 2011, Kane has become a dominant player in the state's craft beer boom thanks to the remarkable quality, consistency and variety of its beers.

The business has more than two dozen full-time employees, and its Bloomsbury Avenue tasting room is regularly packed with customers getting flights of samples, filling growlers and taking cans to go by the case.

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The beer

Kane's monumental success is thanks, in large part, to its flagship beer: Head High, an acclaimed American-style India Pale Ale that started as an early home-brew recipe for company president and founder Michael C. Kane.

It helps that you can buy and drink the clean and crisp Head High in the same room where it's brewed, Kane told "Jersey Brewed."

"These kinds of IPAs are meant to be drank fresh, and the fact that we’re making so much of it now that we’re brewing it and packaging it and you’re probably drinking it within two to five days of it being packaged," Kane said. "That really helps sort of build the brand, the freshness, the hop character, the flavor, the aroma. It’s all there.

"And sometimes maybe you don’t get that with a beer that’s been shipped across country or come from another state and (has been) sitting in a distributor’s warehouse for a while."

So the triumph of Head High is, in some ways, a self-perpetuating phenomenon.

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"It sort of builds on itself," Kane said. "The more you sell, the more you brew, the fresher it is and it turns faster, but we’ll go through a couple of tanks a week and so that sort of helps keep the beer fresh and keep it moving, so I think that’s a lot of it.

"And I think it’s just a good, clean, approachable IPA, not too bitter. It’s more on the flavor side and aromatic side, and I think people have really sort of bought into that.”

The brewer

When Kane left his Manhattan finance gig nearly a decade ago, he'd already found some success as a home-brewer, having won gold and silver medals at the 2009 National Homebrew Competition.

There was some precedent for brewery success stories in the Garden State, thanks to perennial favorites like River Horse Brewing Company in Ewing, Flying FIsh Brewing Company in Somerdale and Cricket Hill Brewing Company in Fairfield.

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But Kane benefited from exceptional timing. When they opened, Kane estimates, there were between 1,200 and 1,500 breweries in the United States; now, there are more than 6,000.

“We thought (New Jersey) was a very under-served market," Kane said. "It was highly educated, a lot of people really involved in beer, really passionate about beer but there wasn’t the number of breweries, sort of a lot of local beer people could get behind.”

The tasting room

Kane's brewing facility and tasting room, located in a Bloomsbury Avenue industrial park just off of Route 35 north of the Asbury Circle, is open 5 to 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, noon to 7 p.m. Saturdays and noon to 5 p.m. for tastings, full pours, growler fills and can purchases.

Upon entering there's the original intimate tasting room, where guests can also purchase plenty of Kane-branded merchandise. You then step through a door into the sprawling brewhouse, where you can enjoy your beverages at picnic tables or on barrels that have been re-purposed as high-top tables.

The operation largely has a utilitarian, highly functional look, which is understandable; after all, you're enjoying some of the state's most in-demand beers in the room where they're brewed.

The boom and beyond

By 2012, during Kane's first year or so in operation, Gov. Chris Christie signed a law allowing smaller breweries to increase production from 3,000 barrels a year to 10,000, and allowing consumers the chance to drink on site, as long as they toured the brewery.

The impact of the legislative change was felt quickly: There were 40 production breweries and nearly 20 brewpubs in the state by late 2015, more than double the amount at the time Christie signed the bill.

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Kane launched with three beers: the amber ale Afterglow, the Belgian blonde Single Fin and, of course, Head High.

In addition to the limited edition, small batch surprise creations available in the tasting room on pretty much a weekly basis, Head High is now one of three beers consistently available in cans alongside the American-style Imperial IPA Overhead and the Sneak Box American pale ale.

“It’s great to see people still coming back to that beer which pretty much made us who we are,” said Derek P. Fleming, brand manager for Kane.

Available on tap across the state, with plenty of those taps pouring Head High, Kane is expanding into the off-site canned market as we speak. Products are now in about eight stores, with the expectation for Kane cans to be in 25 to 30 New Jersey shops by the end of the year.

That growth begs the question: when will our neighbors — say, those in New York or Pennsylvania — get to try Kane's product for themselves?

“It’s always something that we talk about," said Fleming. "We’re growing and we like more slow, calculated growth. We don’t want to ever over-extend ourselves, where maybe beer quality suffers.

"So the idea of how we grow is to make sure we still have everything dialed in and we’re running a fine-toothed comb through it. ... Once we kind of hit a certain point here maybe we’ll look to go outside the state but we like kind of controlling where all of our beer goes because we know who’s pouring through the beer, who’s taking care of it. When you start going out of state or you start signing with a wholesaler, it’s in someone else’s hands. And our beer, we want it to always be cold and it just needs to be taken care of.”

Kane Brewing Company, 1750 Bloomsbury Ave., Ocean Township, 732-922-8600, http://www.kanebrewing.com.