Jersey Girl Brewing Offers Hometown Beers in Mount Olive

Mount Olive’s Jersey Girl Brewing celebrated their sixth anniversary on April 15, 2022, and co-founder and co-owner, Chuck Aaron, certainly wouldn’t turn back the clock.

He’s doing what he loves.

“I love craft beer, I think it starts there,” Aaron, 53, says. “If you're doing something, you’ve got to really love what you do. I learned that a long time ago. And I love what craft beer can be, and the variety of flavors the craft beer can be. Those are the exciting things, and I have a lot of fun with that.”

Aaron, who prior to Jersey Girl Brewing built his career up the corporate ladder, traveled internationally often. “I didn't mind initially, but then it became all encompassing,” he recalls. “Everything I did was travel, and that wears a person down. Also, I was working for a lot of companies in ever increasing roles of responsibility, and decided to get more grounded. Either I'd keep to the corporate route, or I’d diverge off of it, find a passion project that I’d really love doing. That’s ultimately what I did. I just decided this is what I wanted to do. We just put our eggs in this basket.”

Jersey Girl Brewing is in all 21 Garden State counties, and as of March is also in Philadelphia.

Aaron, who also is in his third year as Mount Olive Area Chamber of Commerce President, indeed has his eyes continuously forward. He and his partner, Mike Bigger, now start goal planning for the upcoming year in August and September. “There’s a number of reasons for that,” Aaron says about the sit-downs the duo has. “One is just to have an effective way of how we're going to attack the year. What are we going to do in the coming year to make sure we don't plan to do things that are going to be under supply constraints or material constraints, especially with COVID and supply chain issues going on? Two, it gives us a chance to partner with our distributors and let them see what the year looks like, so when their team is out on the road, they talk in a very positive way about how we're doing. What is it that we're putting together? What's going to be unique and different about Jersey Girl in the coming year? I think that's an important element, to be sure that our partner distributors are on the same page that we’re on. We all want to be pushing in the same direction. That's a big part of it as well.”

 Jersey Girl Brewing operates from a 10,000 square foot facility, with a tasting room, and separately a private event space that can hold about 75 to 100 people. “The biggest thing is we're trying to continue to build for the community a destination for people to come and hang out and have a good time - to get out of their house and have fun,” Aaron says. “We’ve added more entertainment, we've added more events, we've become a very strong destination for people who want to hold their event in the community or locally. It could be any number of things. Many of them are fundraisers, where we get together and help nonprofits to run an event where they can raise money and build their brand.” Jersey Girl Brewing also does more of its own volunteer charity work as well. Aaron adds, “Right now, we're doing Autism Awareness Month, and the proceeds of a special release beer sales are going to a local school that works heavily with autistic kids, and we also do a golf outing every year, and the proceeds of that go to St. Jude's.”

“There are a lot of positive things we do,” Aaron says. “Hopefully we might bring a little light fun to everybody's life through the different beers we do and the interesting things we do with beer. Hopefully most people really gravitate to Jersey Girl Brewing because of that.”

 Jersey Girl Brewing, located at 426 Sand Shore Road in Mount Olive will be holding a variety of summer events. For more information, visit the Jersey Girl Brewing Facebook page, or their website, www.jerseygirlbrewing.com.