Magazines » January/February 2009 Issue » Brewery Spotlight: Climax Brewing Co.
More than 20 years ago, Dave Hoffmann of Climax Brewing Co. started out as a machinist making parts for industrial equipment, including the kind used in the beer industry.
“We used to make the parts for inking machines that put labels on Budweiser cans,” he recalls. Now co-owner and head brewer of Roselle Park’s Climax Brewing Co., New Jersey’s oldest microbrewery, Hoffmann can’t deny it’s come full circle.
Climax began when Hoffmann tapped into his passion for homebrewing, which led to the opening of his own homebrew supply store in 1992. The store focused Hoffmann intensely on the art of beer making. “I figured if I’m going to teach people how to brew, I’ve got to know what everything tastes like so I can tell them,” he laughs.
The research paid off, and soon Hoffmann’s own clients were urging him to open a brewery. When a piece of property his father owned became vacant, Hoffmann suggested a brewery, and soon father and son, along with one of Hoffmann’s homebrew clients, were in business together.
Hoffmann built Climax from the ground up, converting the 4,000 square-foot space into a 2,400 square-foot brewery (with another 1,600 feet set aside for a future bottling line) with his own hands. “I poured the concrete for this room myself,” Hoffmann says, gesturing around the room where Climax thrives today. “Our idea when we opened was to make the highest quality beers from the highest quality ingredients. When you go to a stylebook, we make beers that fit their definitions exactly.”
That rule was painstakingly applied to Climax’s first beer, the Extra Special Bitter, which christened the brewery in 1996. Packaged like all Climax brews, in half-gallon re-sealable jugs, it went on to become the company’s flagship product. All that remained was picking a name. “Someone threw out the word ‘climax.’ The definition was the point of greatest excitement. For us, after all the hard work, that made sense,” Hoffmann recalls. “Though, some corporate environments are resistant to the name. To them it’s something sexual, but it’s not.”
The brewer solved the problem by listing his ales and lagers under two different labels: Hoffmann for lagers, Climax for ales. He also got involved in the community, hosting pub crawls and contributing brews to local dining events.
Ultimately, Climax has prevailed, and is now New Jersey’s oldest microbrewery. Its beers, including staples like Nut Brown Ale and seasonals like Helles, are distributed throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Brooklyn and New York City, and its apprentices have gone on to work for brewers like Dogfish Head and J.J. Bitting.
Meanwhile, the signature ESB has been hailed multiple times as a top American beer by publications from Stuff Magazine to Michael Jackson’s Ultimate Beer (out of more than 450 beers from around the world, only 58, including Climax’s, represented the United States). Hoffmann’s Cream Ale and IPA also garnered accolades from Jackson.
“As a homebrewer I used to say, ‘Man, if I ever open my own brewery it’d be amazing to get my beer into one of Jackson’s books,’” says Hoffmann. “He was a god to me in the beer world. And now to have done it, and all this? It’s just surreal.”
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This article originally appeared in the January/February 2009 Issue of DRAFT Magazine
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