Pictured above from left to right: Owner Dominick Mazzone, Owner/Brewer Chris Burke, Owner Chris Mazzone
We’re buddies from South Jersey that are fully devoted to quality craft beer brewed with patience, brewed with care, and brewed with our local community in mind. Our styles of beer incorporate the old (European styles) with the new (American ingredients). The majority of our beers are session-able, meaning lower in alcohol content, adhering to classic styles. We feature rotating taps in our tasting room, providing a different experience for every visit.
We at Eight & Sand have made a commitment to our community and ourselves to build a more sustainable brewery. Though small, we’ve opted to use environmentally friendly steam rather than direct fire burners to heat our 10-barrel brewhouse. We’re using high-efficiency cleaning devices and a system that can recover and reuse our cleaning and sanitizing solutions. This will save about 16,000 therms of natural gas and 170,000 gallons of water in our first five years. In addition, we’ve installed a 26-kW solar panel array, which generates about 35,000 kWh of clean electricity every year. Over the life of our solar array we will eliminate more than 700 tons of carbon dioxide which is equivalent to planting over 17,000 trees! Our sustainability plan also includes sending our spent grain to local farmers instead of the landfill.
Why trains? In the late 1800’s trains were the main source of transportation over long distances. Almost everywhere a train stopped, a community would grow exponentially around it. This was the case for Woodbury, which is where our brewery is located, and many other towns in Gloucester County as well. Woodbury had 3 rail lines merging into the center of town in the year 1887 and is one of the oldest train hubs in New Jersey. The brewery will be located a few buildings away from one of these old train lines. In the early 20th century, before prohibition, that same train line was used to bring beer ingredients, such as malted barley, to the now closed Camden County Beverage Co. to make their “Camden Beer” until the 1960’s.
The phrase, “Eight and Sand,” was used to wish train crews a quick and safe journey. Eight comes from Notch-8 which is the quickest setting on certain trains and sand was spread on tracks to prevent slippages.