Drive Main Street in Belford this month and the dock at 909 Main is dark. No string lights, no line of cars, no dinghies tied up out back. Three years ago that address was the loudest thing happening in this corner of Middletown, a waterfront tasting room where you could pull a boat right up to the bar. Now it's quiet. Keep driving another few hundred feet toward Campbell's Junction and you'll find the opposite problem: a brewery that's bigger and busier than it's ever been, running out of a building most people who followed the "two breweries in Belford" story never even visited.
That reversal is the actual news here, and it didn't get covered anywhere in real time because it happened in two separate, quiet moves over two years. Put together, they tell you something about which businesses in this section of Middletown actually stick.
The Waterfront Brewery Was Supposed To Be The One That Lasted
Ross Brewing opened in Port Monmouth in April 2023, four years after owner John Ross Cocozza first started planning it, and it arrived with more buzz than any bar Belford had seen. It sat on a working dock next to the Belford Seafood Co-op, with an outdoor beer garden looking straight across Raritan Bay at the New York City skyline. Cocozza billed it as New Jersey's only boat-up brewery, the kind of place you could tie off and walk straight into for a pint.
The opening weekend backed that up. Cocozza told a local reporter he was shocked to find people lining up outside at 9 a.m. for a business that didn't open until noon. Two food trucks worked the lot all weekend, live music ran on the dock Friday through Sunday, and a Middletown-based florist, Full Sun Floral, had already called about booking engagement shoots at sunset. For a stretch of Belford that took a hard hit during Superstorm Sandy, a packed waterfront brewery felt like proof the neighborhood was fully back.
Then The Same Waterfront Turned Into A Liability
Fourteen months later, on June 2, 2024, Ross Brewing closed its tasting room for good. The announcement came over Instagram and cited what the brewery called current economics. Cocozza was more specific when he talked to a reporter that week: the outdoor beer garden and open dock that made the place feel special in the summer worked against it in the dead of winter. A particularly slow cold season, layered on top of what he described as pandemic-era supply chain costs and rising interest rates, made the math stop working for a seasonal, weather-exposed model.
The brewery didn't disappear. Ross beer is still brewed and distributed to bars and shops across Monmouth County. What ended was the public-facing tasting room, the part of the business that had generated all the local attention in the first place. On Untappd, the app craft beer fans use to log what they're drinking, people are still posting "R.I.P. Ross" check-ins well into 2026, which tells you the closure has settled into local memory as a known fact, not breaking news that residents are still catching up on.
The Plain Nanobrewery Down The Street Quietly Won
Belford Brewing Company has none of Ross's waterfront drama. Brothers Michael and Kevin Enny, both Belford natives, incorporated the business in 2013 and opened as a one-barrel operation in a converted space at Campbell's Junction, the intersection of Leonardville Road and Main Street that functions as the crossroads of northern Middletown. They upgraded their brewhouse in stages, from one barrel to two to five, adding fermentation tanks and eventually an expansion they call the Beer Hall, with community tables and a dozen more taps.
In the early summer of 2025, a landlord dispute forced them out of their original storefront. Instead of treating it as a setback, they used it to move about 300 feet away into a larger space at 888-890 Main Street, with room for a game room and a proper office that the old location never had. According to the brewery's own account of the move, they brought over the original furniture and decor specifically to keep the same feel for regulars who'd been coming for a decade.
Here's the side-by-side of what actually happened to each business:
| Ross Brewing | Belford Brewing | |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2019 (brewing began), tasting room opened April 2023 | 2013 |
| Signature feature | Boat-up dock, waterfront beer garden, NYC skyline views | Neighborhood nanobrewery, five-barrel brewhouse |
| What changed | Tasting room closed June 2, 2024 | Relocated ~300 feet within Campbell's Junction, summer 2025 |
| Status today | Wholesale distribution only, no public taproom | Open at 888-890 Main Street, expanded taproom and Beer Hall |
The pattern is worth sitting with. The business built around a destination feature, one that photographed beautifully and drew people from outside Belford, folded within a year and a half. The business built around being a Tuesday-night, walk-in-from-the-neighborhood kind of place not only survived a forced relocation but came out of it bigger.
What's Actually Around The Corner This Fall
Belford's brewery scene isn't the only thing that's shifted this year, and none of it requires a special trip to notice if you're already local. Zoni's, the pizza spot on Route 35, is running a promotion through October 12 where anyone who walks in gets a free large margherita pizza, no purchase required. Further down Route 35, in the space that used to be a Sears Auto Center, a Just Salad has taken over with indoor seating and a small patio, giving that stretch of road a fast-casual option it didn't have before.
The township calendar picks up from here too. On September 18, 2026, Kunkel Park's skate park in Leonardo hosts a free Skate Party with punk rock over the sound system and free pizza for the first hundred people who show up. A week later, on September 25, Lincroft Village Green screens Shrek as a free outdoor movie night. And the township's biggest annual gathering, Middletown Day, lands on Sunday, October 4, 2026, from 1 to 7 p.m. in Leonardo, with a food court, first responder touch-a-trucks, live music and fireworks. Organizers are expecting more than 12,000 people, which makes it the one weekend where the entire township, not just one section of it, shows up in the same place.
None of these are dramatic on their own. Taken together with the brewery turnover at Campbell's Junction, they describe a neighborhood that keeps moving even when nobody's writing about it in real time. The places that stay tend to be the ones woven into a weekly routine rather than the ones built to be a destination.
The Actual Lesson From Belford's Brewery Swap
If you're the kind of resident who tracked both breweries when they were both open, the takeaway isn't that Ross Brewing failed and Belford Brewing succeeded in some simple sense. It's that a business tied to foot traffic that only shows up in warm weather is playing a harder game than one that's been serving the same few blocks for over a decade. Belford didn't lose a brewery and gain one. It lost the flashier of the two and kept the one that was always built to last.
Next time you're heading toward Middletown Day or just want a Saturday pint, the address to remember is 888-890 Main Street, not 909. The dock is still there. Nobody's pouring beer off it anymore.
Middletown keeps changing in ways that only show up if you're paying attention block by block, which is exactly how The Tully Group tracks this market. If you're weighing what your own corner of Monmouth County is actually worth right now, get your free home valuation & market plan and talk to someone who watches these neighborhoods as closely as you live in them.
