Our Brewery
Great Beer Brewed Right Here in Mt. Olive, NJ
Jersey Girl Brewing Company brews beer on a 30-barrel brewing system. One barrel is equivalent to approximately 31 gallons of beer, meaning the system will be able to produce several hundred gallons of beer in each batch. 930 gallons to be exact.
With state-of-the-art equipment, we will produce some amazing craft brew. Then we'll up the ante with bold, small batch experimental beer on our Tippy system which we will serve in our sampling room. Our Tippy system can brew up to 27 gallons per batch. These are exclusive tap room only beers are available only while they last.
The Jersey Girl Brewing Company brewery is located in a 10,000-square-foot building. The tasting room occupies a little less than 10% of the building and will hold approximately 75 people.
The brew house, fermenting tanks, brite tanks, and cold storage will occupy the rest of the building with plenty of space for the business to grow. Currently there is capacity to produce about 4,000 to 5,000 barrels of beer a year, but there is room to add about ten more fermentation tanks and triple production.
In April of 2020, Jersey Girl Brewing added a new 5-head counter pressure canning line from Codi increasing packaging capabilities for broader distribution..
Brewing Our Beers
Basics of our Brewing Process
Malt is one of the four basic ingredients in beer, along with water, hops, and yeast. It's often made from malted cereal grains, like barley, but can also be made from other starch-rich materials, such as corn, millet, rice, sorghum, cassava, and teff. Malt can also take the form of an extract or concentrate which can be used to brew beer. The type of malt used can affect the beer's color, flavor, and aroma. For example, darker beers like porters and stouts use dark malts that can give the beer coffee or chocolatey notes. Malt liquor is brewed from a mixture of malted barley and corn, while beer is brewed from malted barley only.
Brewing typically begins with getting the ingredients ready. Grains are up first and depending on the recipe or style, a variety of malt and grains can be used. Our grains come in 55lb bags or supersacks. On average one of our beer batches uses between 1,200 and 2,000 lbs of Grain.
Whole grains are put through a gristmill that cracks and opens the kernels. From there, it’s transferred to the mash tun where it is mixed with hot (upwards of 155°F) water where it steeps for a time. During this process simple sugars in the grain are released, which will later become the base of our alcohol. The result is a thick oatmeal-like substance called mash.
The Mash is transferred to our Lauter Tun which acts like a coffee filter. The false bottom allows liquid to pass but hold back the grains. The sugary liquid, now known as wort, is drained from the Lauter Tun and transferred to our brew kettle.
While in the brew kettle the wort is brought to a boil, with a standard time for many beers around 90 minutes, although some go for longer and others shorter. Usually during this process hops are added at different intervals to extract aroma, flavor and bitterness. Different recipes dictate when hops are added, affecting the final result.
When the boil is completed the wort can head off into different directions. In most cases, for ales and lagers, it’s transferred through a heat exchanger that helps to rapidly cool the liquid before it’s pumped into a fermentation vessel where yeast will be added.
