A Closed Brewery Just Sold in Woodbury, and the New Owners Are Keeping It a Brewery
Eight and Sand Beer Co. closed in June after a decade on North Evergreen Avenue. A Woodbury couple bought the building and the equipment to reopen it this month as Freckled Jawn Brewing.
Eight and Sand Beer Co. closed in June after ten years at 1003 North Evergreen Avenue in Woodbury, New Jersey. Woodbury residents John Wagner and Colleen Gibson bought the 4,300 square foot building in early August, a deal that included the brewery equipment and a vacant lot behind it. They're opening it back up this month as Freckled Jawn Brewing.
This is a second generation restaurant space play with the brewing equivalent of a hood and grease trap already in place. A working brewhouse, fermentation tanks and a taproom layout stay put through a change of ownership, cutting out the part of a brewery buildout that normally takes the longest and costs the most. Wagner and Gibson are putting money into renovations, not into replacing kettles.
Ten years is a real run for a neighborhood brewery, and the fact that it sold with the equipment intact rather than getting auctioned off piece by piece says something about how landlords and sellers in Gloucester County are handling closures right now: keep the use intact, sell to someone who wants to run the same business, and skip the vacancy. If you've got a shuttered brewery, distillery or commercial kitchen anywhere in the collar counties, this is the buyer profile to be marketing it to.
Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Sun Papers
Why it matters
A ten-year-old brewery just changed hands with its equipment intact instead of sitting vacant or getting stripped. Existing food and beverage infrastructure is worth marketing to the next operator before it's gutted.
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