{"id":4331,"date":"2008-09-04T10:20:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-04T17:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lewbryson.blogspot.com\/2008\/09\/finally-iron-hill-in-new-jersey.html"},"modified":"2008-09-04T10:20:00","modified_gmt":"2008-09-04T17:20:00","slug":"seen-through-a-glass-finally-iron-hill-in-new-jersey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.browbrew.com\/?p=4331","title":{"rendered":"Seen Through a Glass: Finally: Iron Hill in New Jersey"},"content":{"rendered":"

\tUncle Jack<\/a> is reporting at the Beer Yard site<\/a> that Iron Hill will be opening their 8th brewpub sometime in spring of ’09 (roughly…) in — finally!<\/em> — New Jersey: 124 Kings Highway, Maple Shade, NJ, to be precise<\/a>. Close enough to Flying Fish that if I was standing in the parking lot and Casey Hughes told me he was buying a car, they could hear me laugh, with a following wind.<\/p>\n

As Jack mentioned in his blog post, procuring a liquor license was the tough part of this. Liquor licenses in this part of NJ are ridiculously pricey, and, I maintain, part of the problem of nuisance drinking. High liquor license prices put comfy, relaxed corner bars out of business. They also make it tough for brewpubs to open; competition in this densely-populated market is so tough that opening as a beer-only operation is daunting.<\/p>\n

The most exciting part of this news — and I mean that, I am<\/em> excited — is that Iron Hill planting the craft beer flag in this part of New Jersey is bound to have a rising tide effect on South Jersey. Flying Fish<\/a> has done very well in Philly, but continues to hit resistance here because of a lack of an on-premise outlet; Cork<\/a> has an excellent small beer selection, but is primarily a restaurant with limited bar space, Rat’s<\/a> the same; and sorry, but P.J. Whelihan’s<\/a> just doesn’t cut it as much more than a flash bar with a few big crafts, a kind of NJ-equivalent of a J.D. Wetherspoon’s<\/a> pub. Overall, this area is shockingly free of specialty beer taps and bottle selections, particularly given its proximity to the wonderful diversity and thick net of choices that is southeastern Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

Iron Hill should change that. It’s the Fort Apache theory: plant an outpost of craft beer in an area, and if it doesn’t go under — and you know Iron Hill won’t — more places will serve craft beer, more places will shift to a craft menu. That’s probably going to mean that we’ll see NJ fewer faces in the Philly beer scene. But that’s a change I’m willing to go through if it means they’re happier at home. Even if it does mean that New Jersey Breweries<\/em> will be out of date this time next year!
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\tUncle Jack is reporting at the Beer Yard site that Iron Hill will be opening their 8th brewpub sometime in spring of ’09 (roughly…) in — finally! — New Jersey: 124 Kings Highway, Maple Shade, NJ, to be precise. Close enough to Flying Fish that if…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.browbrew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.browbrew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.browbrew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.browbrew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.browbrew.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.browbrew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.browbrew.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.browbrew.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.browbrew.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}