Wander Back Beerworks is proud to announce their entry into the South Jersey craft beer scene. Founded by three veterans of the brewing industry – Christopher Henke, a founder of Cape May Brewing Company; Brian Hink, Cape May’s original Head Brewer; and Justin Vitti, CMBC’s former General Manager of Sales and Distribution –, the three are bringing their vast brewing experience to the heart of South Jersey in Vineland, NJ. With a combined 33 years of experience in brewing and distribution, the trio is poised to place Cumberland County as a premier brewing destination
by wandering back to basics.
In 2019, Henke was the first to strike out on his own after building Cape May Brewing Company into one of the largest independent breweries in the State of New Jersey. However, after it had been built, Henke began looking for new ventures to build.
“I’m a builder,” Henke says, “and I wanted to get back to building something new. Cape May was great, and I’m proud of what I helped build there, but it was built. It was time to move on.”
Vitti and Hink both left CMBC in 2022, Vitti in March and Hink in midsummer, after Vitti spent several years helming the brewery’s distribution arm, the now-defunct Cape Beverage. Since then, both have been working in the beer scene in
New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
“I never wanted to build a brewery from scratch,” Vitti says. “Instead, I was looking for something that I could move into and begin brewing right away. I looked at a million different places, but none of them seemed right. Chris was a second set of eyes on my turnkey-brewery business plan, helping me second-guess the numbers and providing overall advice and expertise on the matter, but there was never any real discussion about doing it together.”
“And we could do it ourselves,” Hink says, “but we wanted to do it with Chris. Justin and I would have casual conversations about starting something up, running some numbers and scenarios, but Chris taught me everything I know about brewing professionally. So, after talking with him about what his next steps were, and trying – without much luck – to get him back into the game, it only took a few hours of serious conversation for the two of us to convince
him to come on board.”
“I had no plans to go back to brewing,” Henke says, “it was never in my vision to open another brewery. But when these
guys came to me, it was like Doc and Marty asking me to the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance – you just don’t say
no.”
Once this group of brewing professionals came together, the next step was settling on a name, which is always the most
difficult prospect about opening any new venture.
“Part of our mentality is that we’re traditional brewers, but finding a way forward,” Henke says. “We were wandering
back to beer and wandering back to some of our first friends in brewing. It worked out.”
Once the name had been determined, it was time to find a place. Going into this venture, Hink knew he wanted to be in
Vineland.
“There are 144 breweries in New Jersey,” Hink says, “and if you look at the map on NewJerseyCraftBeer.com, there’s a
gigantic hole in Vineland. A few have tried – it seems like a logical place to open a brewery.”
With the only other offering in Cumberland County being Glasstown Brewery in Millville, the three are looking forward
to growing the craft beer scene in the region alongside an already established brewer.
“I actually grew up with Paul [Simmons; owner of Glasstown] and his sister, many summers in Rio Grande in Cape May
County,” Vitti says. “We’re not coming in to compete with them. We want to be complementary to Glasstown. They've
done all the work already to establish a local brewery in Cumberland County and we don't want another one to take
away from their hard work and dedication to the local beer scene. Hopefully it's the same big brother mentality that has
helped the local beer scenes boom throughout New Jersey.”
They reached out to Sandy Forosisky, the Director of Economic Development in Vineland, and, “in two phone calls, she
told us that we were moving to Vineland,” Henke says.
“Once I heard the guys that were from a very well-regarded craft brewing company were looking to start a brewery of
their own, we wanted to do all we could to make sure they came to Vineland,” Forosisky said. “Entrepreneurs and small
business owners are critical to the city’s economy and culture. Welcoming Christopher, Brian, Justin, and the legacy they
bring will be an important addition to downtown Vineland. It will offer residents a great craft brewery experience and
will certainly be an attraction for visitors as well. We are very excited to welcome them to Vineland.”
And Hink couldn’t be happier with the choice to locate in Vineland. He recognizes that it’s a city with a lot of potential.
“It’s a great little city,” he says. “Tons of history, good culture, good food out there. I mean, up and down Landis Avenue
in the center of town, you have everything you could ever want to eat, from great Mexican restaurants, Indian, Italian,
soul food.”
One benefit to Wander Back’s location in Vineland is the city’s vast agricultural resources. Founded as a farming
community of Italian grape growers in 1861, the city has never wavered from its agricultural roots. Thomas Bramwell
Welch and his son Charles founded Welch’s Grape Juice in Vineland in 1869, with the city becoming known as a poultry
center in the 1950s, and diversifying today into cold storage and food processing.
“Vineland is a huge agricultural hub,” Hink says. “We’ve got everything we could possibly want in Vineland.”
“We’re using all local grain,” Vitti says. “Thousands of pounds of locally grown and malted grains.”
Vineland is conveniently located very near Rabbit Hill Farms in Shiloh, which has made a name for itself over the past
few years as the premier source of local malted grain in South Jersey.
“It’s 14.5 miles as the crow flies,” Hink says. “It’s as local as it gets. It’s in Cumberland County. It’s really a happy accident
that they’re that close.”
For years, the three have worked with the Bakker family at Rabbit Hill: Abe, his son Blair, and his daughter Hillary Barile.
“I’m super excited to be working with them again,” Barile says. “These three were Rabbit Hill’s first customers, so it’s
wonderful to have them come back as customers, as their own brewers. Cape May grew to a size that we couldn’t
possibly have fulfilled their malt needs. I never like to lose a customer, so it’s like getting a customer back.”
Further, Barile loves the fact that Wander Back is opening in Vineland.
“I love that they’re doing this in Vineland,” she says. “I’m excited to see more breweries opening in Cumberland County
– Glasstown is great, but I’m eager to see a real brewing culture spring up here.”
Barile also likes the chance to reconnect with Henke and talk about “nerdy malt stuff.”
“He gets into it,” she says. “Everyone at Wander Back is so, so smart, but my conversations with Chris will start out light
and airy, talking about this, that, and the other, then we’re talking about protein content on barley, and how we achieve
that in the field, and what the impact is in the malt house, and soon the whole conversation has taken a left turn into
barley geekiness. It’s why we got into malting and find it so fulfilling: to have this deep understanding of our crop and
what we can make with it. We get excited when brewers get into that and get excited about it, too.”
“We’re insistent on tapping into the agricultural side of beer,” Henke says. “We’re dedicated to using local malt: it’s very
important to us to have our own local flavor. The styles that we plan to bring to market are going to show off local malts:
local wheat, barley, spelt, rye, corn, et cetera. The trend has been to use, you know, German malts to make a German
Pilsner, but the original brewers used German malts because they were in Germany. We’ll have a Cumberland County
Pilsner.”
While they continue to work with the city of Vineland to secure a downtown location, the trio have been brewing out of
Hidden Sands in Egg Harbor Township, NJ.
“They have a beautiful four-vessel, automated, twenty-barrel DME brewhouse,” Henke says. “It’s a nice system. The
system makes it easy to fine tune the liquid as it progresses. We’re lucky they’ve been so good to us.”
Hink agrees.
& quot;In the craft beer industry, most brewers utilize what's known as ‘single-infusion mashing’, where you mix the grain and
water at a single temperature,” he explains. “This is great for certain styles of beer: IPA, stouts, English Ales, but for a
delicate lagerbier, where we're looking for subtle nuances to the finished beer, this isn't the best approach. With a
brewhouse like the one at Hidden Sands, with complete controls over our mashing regime, we're able to do multi-step
infusions, decoctions, multiple decoctions, and so on, which allows us complete and precise control over the malt
complexity of our beer.
“It’s definitely the best system locally available. We worked closely with them to learn the system, and they feel
comfortable with us in the brewhouse. We know we’re cooking in someone else’s kitchen, but we’ve got a good
relationship with Hidden Sands. They have trust in us to use their very expensive brewhouse.”
Currently, Wander Back is planning to release two beers at launch, with a third following closely behind: Wander Back
Lager and Perfectly Cromulent IPA, with Future Proof Pils following.
“We gave our place in a crowded market a lot of thought,” Vitti says. “There’s so much overly sweet, overly juicy, overly
hoppy beer out there, and, at the end of the day, we wanted our beer to be appreciated by everyone, not just one
segment or group of beer drinkers. We wanted to make it stand out on the shelf and be technically sound but also
enjoyable and approachable. We just want drinkability: beer that tastes like beer.”
Wander Back’s mission is simple: We share with our community. We share with our team. And we always put Beer First.
“And you’ll see the spirit of that statement on all of our cans,” Vitti says. “‘Beer to Share.’ To share with family, with
friends, at your favorite watering hole, wherever, and with whomever.”
Wander Back plans to begin distributing first, through Atlantic, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, and Gloucester
Counties, prior to having a tasting room or brewery of their own.
“We want to get this out to the consumer first,” Vitti says. “Let them figure out what our brand is and what we’re doing.
We know we’re taking a different approach: we’re a brewery – not a nanobrewery, not a microbrewery, not a craft
brewery. We’re going into this with an old-school mentality, guerilla marketing approach to our launch, looking back to a
time when breweries brewed beer and sold it wholesale well before they opened a tasting room. We’ll get the beer into
the bars and restaurants for folks to try and then go to find it on the shelf, and vice-versa, then, once they know who we
are and what we’re about, we’ll open our tasting room.”
Ultimately, Vitti says, what differentiates Wander Back from a lot of new breweries is that they’re not hobby brewers:
they’ve been doing this for decades.
“We’re not just going to market with some cool homebrew,” Vitti says. “We’ve had years of being successful at this, we
love doing it, now we want to do it for ourselves.”
Wander Back plans to begin self-distributing their brews in late May, close to Memorial Day. Until then, readers may
follow their social media for updates: on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/wanderbackbeer) and Instagram
(@wanderbackbeer).
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