Starting in March, residents will be able to buy a bottle of beer made within the borders of Ewing Township.
River Horse Brewing Company announced plans to move their small brewery from its brick headquarters in Lambertville to a more spacious industrial park on Graphics Drive in Ewing. Company co-owner Chris Marsh said the move will allow the company, to brew more beer and in more varieties than ever before.
“The fermentation time is twice as long for a lager style beer,” he said. “We stopped doing our lager so we could produce two tanks of ale instead of one tank of lager. Our first move will be to bring back the River Horse lager. And the ability to do lagers opens up a whole basket of different beers we’ve never done before because of the space constraints.”
The new Ewing brewery, at 25,000 square feet, is more than twice the size of their old 10,000 square-foot low-ceilinged building.
The brewery, located in tourist-centric Lambertville, has always been known for its tours. Marsh said he hopes to continue that tradition in Ewing and that new statewide microbrewery laws passed in September allow them to expand their entertainment options beyond what they have done in the past.
“When we released our oatmeal milk stout, we had a release party for it,” he said. “We couldn’t do that before.”
The laws will also allow the brewery to sell take-home beer directly to customers who visit the brewery, and to pour pints of beer for brewery tour visitors.
Marsh said he hopes to find a way for the brewery to become a destination in its own right, whereas before, it was part of the Lambertville tourism scene.
“We’d have a lot of the, ‘my wife’s looking at antiques and I can’t take it anymore’ vistitors. Those kinds of guys would come and have samples. We’ll certainly lose all that … we’ll have to be more active and create the foot traffic ourselves,” he said.
Marsh said he believes River Horse will be able to keep its identity despite the move. He said all 10 employees who currently work at River Horse will keep their jobs, and that some of them will probably move to Ewing in order to have a shorter commute.
And although the brewery will now be farther from the river, Marsh said the “River Horse” name never actually referred to the Delaware.
“The whole thing behind the river horse is that in Egyptian hieroglyphics, when the brewing process is represented the hippo (river horse) is always around. The hippo is more about the brewing process.”
Marsh said he hopes the move will be complete by March or early April at latest and be set up in time to begin brewing their popular summer blonde beer.
And although many aspects of the move will be inconvenient— transporting huge tanks for one thing — another will be quite easy.
Marsh worried at first that changing the lettering on the bottles would be troublesome, since their graphic designer would have to come up with whole new letters to change “Lambertville” to “Ewing.” But then he realized that “Ewing” had been on the bottle all along, as part of the word, “brewing.”
Marsh said Ewing officials and residents have been very welcoming so far.
“I’m super pumped about the move,” he said. “Every town should have its own brewery, kind of like Belgium,” he said.
