Asbury Park Brewing - Asbury Park, NJ

Asbury Park, NJ, famous for being the birthplace of Bruce Springsteen, used to give Atlantic City a run for it's money as the premier vacation spot on the New Jersey shore. Similar to AC, it's fortunes have ebbed and flowed over the past Century, but Asbury Park never received the benefit of the major casino investment, and so it had fallen into a very decrepit state twenty years ago, which it is only now starting to recover from.

On Main St in Asbury Park there are two Taprooms only a few blocks apart. Just like I discovered the previous day in Bradley Beach, these two business represent the two extreme ends of this nascent industry.

Asbury Park Brewing occupies a large industrial unit, just behind a Family Dollar supermarket, in the ugly part of Main St.

In order to get to the Taproom, one has to walk through the Brewery itself, and this is a large scale production facility by most craft beer standards. It was a relief to find that the Taproom is in a sealed air-conditioned corner, and there was seating for maybe 40 people.

I was significantly disappointed to find just four draft beers on offer! I tasted them all and there was a couple of decent beers among them, but I find it difficult to understand why a Brewery of this size would offer such a limited choice in its taproom?