Opening Soon: Invertase Brewing Company
Lambertville: are you ready for a family-friendly, dog-friendly meeting place where you can enjoy really good craft beer?
Beer There, (Almost) Done That
Invertase Brewing Company is owned by Steve Zolnay, Karen Zolnay, and their son Stephen Zolnay. Their family-owned brewery is coming to Lambertville. How soon? That’s difficult to answer, because the people who run the business are the same folks who are constructing the business, DIY-style.
Peek in the window of their Lambert Lane location, and you’ll likely see Karen, Steve, or Stephen working inside. They’re currently building out the space by hand, themselves. Soon that will change, and then they’ll be busy brewing beer and serving it to the public like they do at their Phillipsburg, NJ location.
How It Began
When Stephen was 14, he gave Steve a beer kit for father’s day. According to Steve, the first beer they made together was a “really really nasty pale ale.”
Stephen continued brewing through high school. At one point he entered the Keystone brewing competition with the confident expectation that he would win gold. Although his beer was well received, he didn’t win any awards.
“After that,” Steve said, “he studied for three months straight.”
Stephen’s determination ended up producing a beer that turned out to be quite good. In fact, it became the basis for their flagship 1954 hazy New England.
Going Pro
Stephen kept brewing while he was in college, where he majored in engineering. After graduating, he got a job as a design engineer. One day he looked down the line of cubicles and thought, “I could be manager... when I’m 59.”
Stephen called Steve and pitched the idea that they start a brewery together. It didn’t take much convincing to get his parents to hop on board.
“We sat down and ran the numbers, and it looked feasible,” Stephen said.
Using his mechanical engineering skills, Stephen built his own brewing system, which saved thousands of dollars in startup costs. Then the whole family took a commercial brewing course in Vermont, which is where they learned about the value of consistency. Ever since, Stephen keeps detailed brewer logs so that their various beers come out identical no matter when they get made.
Now in his mid-thirties, Stephen is the brewmaster at Invertase. With a decade of beer brewing under his belt—and almost an equal amount of operational experience—he wakes up every day at 5am, because he’s happy to make beer.
Inverstase’s Phillipsburg location has brewing and packaging capabilities. In October, it will turn six years old. They have live music, trivia, and other events there. The Zolnay family expects to host events in Lambertville, but they have to open first before they figure out how they’ll serve our local community.
They Care About Beer
“We’re a brewery,” Stephen declared, “so beer has to be the most important thing. We don’t do food. We don’t do mixed drinks. I don’t want to make cheeseburgers, I want to make beer.”
“But we encourage people to bring in food,” Karen said.
Karen and Steve live nearby, just up the river from Lambertville. Karen is a microbiologist. She manages the yeast program and the sterility program. She also handles social media, and coordinates servers, events, and activities.
Steve is a biochemist who spent years working in biotech business development. He is clearly the unofficial ambassador at Invertase.
“If you come in, the first question I’m going to ask is where are you from and what do you do, and then we have conversations,” he explained.
“If you sit quietly in a corner, I will come and pull somebody over and say ‘hey, this guy does this and this.’ It’s a community.”
“It’s not just ‘sit in a corner and drink your beer quietly,’” Stephen added.
“There is some of that, and that's important too—you might want to really analyze this beer—but the rest of the story is it’s a community. It’s a family. It’s ‘bring everybody together and have a great time together.’ We try to be inclusive to everybody. Even bring your dog.”
Karen agreed, “We’re family. We want you to feel like family too.”
Invertase plans to gather menus from local restaurants so people can order and have food delivered. They also do community-oriented activities such as collecting donations for Morris Animal Foundation K9 cancer research.
“We had two guys come to our place in Phillipsburg,” Steve explained. “They were pilots for Swiss Air and they came to check out our brewery when they had a few days off. They said, ‘You could put this pilsner into any German brew house and nobody would be the wiser.’”
Karen smiled, “You don’t come in and just get a beer. You come in and hear a bunch of Steve’s stories, maybe meet the brew dogs, or meet new people.”
Steve knows people, so he has lots of stories to share. Ask him to tell you about how they source their chocolate... or about the time Sir Paul McCartney almost called their house... or about Meatloaf... or about musicians and goat poop.
Something Is Brewing
Although the Lambertville operation will be smaller than the one in Phillipsburg, it will still be a proper brewery. They’ll bring sterile wort from Phillipsburg to finish in the fermentor in Lambertville. (Lambertville-themed beer, perhaps?)
“We’re scientists,” Karen said, “It’s called Invertase, because invertase is the first enzyme in the brewing process. It actually splits the sugars so that the yeast can make alcohol.”
Sterile wort is basically sugar water with hops. It goes into the fermenter, which is a stainless steel tank. Yeast gets pitched (added) and then it “chews up the sugar molecules, imploring the invertase yeast enzyme, which is the first enzyme that the yeast uses to split up long chain and short chain sugars...”
Invertase makes a variety of beers—pale ales, stouts, wheat beers, Belgian beers, German lagers, and more. Their core lineup is an American pale ale, a Belgian triple, their flagship New England IPA, an imperial breakfast stout, a bohemian style pilsner, and a Belgian wheat beer. They anticipate having 12 taps in Lambertville to start, with the rest of the tap list being seasonal offerings.
In the fall they do a pumpkin beer, and then a Christmas stout with chocolate and peppermint. They make rotational IPAs and a line of fruited wheat beers that includes raspberry, mango, peach, and blueberry—all with actual fruit.
Their late-summer peanut butter and jelly sour beer also uses real ingredients.
“No syrups. No goops,” Stephen confirmed.
"He’s a purist," Karen said about her son, “so he does everything real.”
The Zolnay family’s focus on community includes a house root beer (Stephen makes it using a super-secret recipe) so that there is something to drink even if you’re a kid, if you’re pregnant, or if you’re acting as a designated driver.
“The vast majority of our products we package. If you love something in our tap room, I want you to be able to take it home too,” Stephen said.
The Lambertville location will have canned beer (and root beer) available for purchase from their walk-in refrigerator, which will be installed soon.
They plan to open as quickly as possible, but they’re not completely sure when that will be, because they still have to finish the build out and pass inspections.
Once they are up and running, they’ll be open Wednesdays through Sundays.
Visit Invertase Brewing Company at 80 Lambert Lane in Lambertville NJ.
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