Pouring beer at Port 44 in Newark

Port 44 Brew Pub is pouring beer at 44 Commerce Street in Newark.

The long-awaited brewpub, whose name is derived from its address amid Newark's bustling professional offices district, opened to patrons at 4 p.m. today with catered food and a range of guest taps that included New Jersey brewer Cricket Hill's Nocturne, a dark lager that the nearby Fairfield brewery also recently released in 22-ounce bomber bottles.

Although New Jersey's newest brewpub is open, it's not serving house-brewed beer yet. Port 44 brewmaster Chris Sheehan says there's still some finishing touches to be done (namely electrical wiring) to the pub's own brewing system and the awarding of a state brewers license. Those items are expected to be taken care of very soon. And Sheehan expects to strike a mash on Port 44's inaugural brew, Gold Finch Ale, about mid-May. When that happens, Newark will have its first craft brewery and another brewery besides Budweiser for the first time in ages.

"We have six or seven folks drinking right now. We're literally starting this puppy up. We're actually open right now for the first time ever, filling the draft lines with beers from Peerless (Beverage Distributors)," Sheehan said by phone about a half-hour after Port 44 threw open its doors.

Besides Nocturne, one more Cricket Hill brew, Colonel Blides Ale, will go on tap tomorrow. Rounding out the guest taps is a lineup that includes Ommegang Abbey Ale, Blue Point Toasted Lager, Franzikaner Hefeweizen, Yuengling Lager, Spaten Lager and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

The latter brew was the choice of bar patron Jim, who says he heard today was Port 44's opening day and managed to be the first person through the door at 4:05 p.m. "This place is beautiful, absolutely beautiful. This is gonna be novel for this city. The whole downtown is coming back," said Jim (who declined to give his last name).

Port 44 owner John Feeley said the brewpub's kitchen awaits a final inspection but is expected to begin serving food next week. So, today's patrons were welcomed with a catered spread. All in all, Feeley sounded relieved, if not a little bit rushed, to be open after more than a year's worth of effort to see the brewpub to realization.

And Sheehan, who came over to Port 44 from Chelsea Brewing at New York City's piers under an open-ended arrangement that would have allowed him to help launch Port 44 and return to Manhattan, says he'll be staying on in Newark.

Gold Finch Ale, Sheehan added, will be a golden session ale (about 4.5 percent ABV) named for New Jersey's state bird and created with the idea of "introducing people to beer with a little more character, beer that is fresh and pure."

A look at Newark's Port 44

Newark is in line to soon get its first craft brewery, an alehouse brewpub under construction within a five-minute walk from the New Jersey Devils' home ice at Prudential Center Arena and NJ Transit's trains at Penn Station.

Port 44 Brew Pub will celebrate Newark's heritage as a onetime beer industry giant whose glory shriveled to a lone producer, mega brewer Budweiser.

Greg Gilhooly, who owns the Venetian facade building at 44 Commerce Street that houses Port 44, says old photos and memorabilia will pay homage to the likes Newark's heyday names of Krueger, Pabst, Feigenspan and Ballantine, and set the ambiance for Port 44's planned eight taps at street-level and second-floor bars.

"We're so excited to bring beer back to Newark. Most of the people we talk to that come in have a relative that worked in the brewery business," says Gilhooly.

And that's just people passing by who are curious about the renovations to turn the former site of Europa restaurant into a brewpub. Just wait until there's beer pouring.

"If there's 10 people at the bar, I can rest assured five of them – at least half of them – will have a grandfather or uncle who worked in the (city's) brewing business," Gilhooly says.

Gilhooly, 50, a longtime Newark cop, hopes to buy into the brewpub side of the business when he retires this summer from the police force that's been a part of his family for four generations. John Feeley, a retired deputy fire chief in nearby Orange, is the actual owner of the brewery and restaurant.

The pair hopes hockey and concerts at the Rock – the Prudential Center Arena – will bring in crowds before and after shows and games. But Port 44 is also smack in Newark's office district, with the gleaming Gateway Center, home to powerhouse law firms and lobbyists, within walking distance. The people who populate those offices are likely to have a taste for craft brews, Gilhooly says. The same goes for students from Rutgers and Seton Hall law schools.

So when will Port 44 fling open its doors? Gilhooly says they hope to be pouring beer by the end of the month, mostly likely a brand on a guest tap, since it would be too soon for house-brewed beers to be ready. If luck is on the side of two Irish guys hoping to be part of the better beer scene, those guest taps will flow for St. Patrick's Day festivities. That, however, is a wait-and-see scenario.

Meanwhile, renovation work continues at Port 44. Gilhooly says license applications are all filed, but a date for state and federal regulators to check out the establishment remains to be set. When Port 44 opens with its American bistro menu, it will be the second Garden State brewpub to open in as many years (Iron Hill opened last year in Maple Shade) and will take its place as the state's 12th brewpub.

Last month, as interior work continued throughout the building, brewmaster Chris Sheehan, on loan from Manhattan's Chelsea Brewery, was overseeing the installation of the second-floor brewhouse, four 15-barrel fermenters and five 15-barrel serving tanks. (Sheehan has the option to stay with Port 44 or return to Chelsea. He's pictured in the bottom of the image at left; Gilhooly is in the gray shirt.)

Given the limitations of the building, Sheehan says the beers brewed on site will be exclusively ales, including a light ale, an amber or red, an IPA, and stouts. The latter, especially robust ones, is a style on which Sheehan has staked his 18-year brewing career.

"We'll be serving some kick-ass stouts," says Sheehan, who got his start in the brewing business at Triple Rock Brewery & Alehouse in Berkeley, California, and also worked at San Francisco's 20 Tank Brewery.

The same goes for hoppy beers. Sheehan says the beers will be made with whole flower hops and a hopback to boost that signature flavor. "We'll definitely not be lacking hop character in these beers," he says.

Plans call for a single house yeast to ferment the beers. But special strains will also be used on occasion to stir some Belgian styles into the lineup. Gilhooly says Port 44 will dedicate its guest taps to beers made by fellow Garden State craft brewers. Cricket Hill, in nearby Fairfield, has been a big supporter of Port 44 and is a logical pick for a guest brew.

"Always a Jersey beer on the guest taps," Gilhooly says. "We really want to do more than anyone else has done ... extend an olive branch and get Jersey beer. We want to promote Jersey beer."

Newark was once home to dozens of breweries, but Prohibition and industry consolidation following the resumption of legal beer became their undoing. The Pabst brewery, with its landmark beer bottle water tower, closed in the mid-1980s, leaving Anheuser-Busch the sole brewer in the city. (The 55,000-gallon Pabst water tower came down four years ago; a year ago, it sat cut into several sections in a junkyard in Newark, off the New Jersey Turnpike.)

Friend of the blog and beer scribe John Holl, who has written occasionally about New Jersey's beer history and is now working on a book about Indiana's breweries and brewpubs, says brewing was once the fourth-largest industry in Newark.

Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, the city's beer barons oversaw a $20 million industry. That amounts to roughly $430 million in today's money.