OUR BUSINESS
The Czigler family’s passion for beer and the brewing process started when Matthew Czigler began to home brew as a hobby.
Family and friends would always look forward to Matt bringing a variety of delicious beers to every get together. After all the positive feedback, Matt decided to have a career change that the whole family supported.
OUR BUILDING
Our building is a piece of Hackettstown history. It was originally built around 1900 as a carriage house during Hackettstown’s Flourishing horse-drawn carriage industry, then as automobiles overtook carriages for travel and transportation, the building became a Ford dealership repair shop. The building was the perfect space for a brewery, but it took a lot of elbow grease to uncover its old-fashioned charm.
Family and friends worked together to restore the building to its full potential. The goal was to re-purpose as much of the original building as possible, so we made sure to use the existing material, including black-iron piping, red bricks, and wood planks.
While remodeling the building, we noticed that the painted walls of the tasting room were made of beautiful, old-fashioned red bricks. We uncovering those bricks by painstakingly scraping the paint off the walls, all by hand. To match that look and feel, we salvaged similar vintage bricks from the recently-demolished Bergen Tool factory building across the street to build-out our testing room bar.
All of the furniture in the tasting room was designed and built by hand. We made the tasting room bar top out of 150-year-old reclaimed New Jersey barn wood, and the foot-rail of our bar was made from repurposed compressed air piping. Slowly, the building was transformed and revitalized, from the tasting room to the German-style outdoor biergarten.
All of the hard work was worth it. After two years of securing the proper permits and designing and building the space by hand, Czig Meister opened in 2016.
