Alternate Ending Beer Co. founder Scott Novick’s dreams of working in craft beer developed in the same place they did for many other brewers and brewery owners today: waiting to get his hands on a hyped hazy release at a boldface-name brewery.
“I was standing on line with my parents at Tree House’s original location, where we waited an hour and a half for 12 beers,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘this is a business I want to get into.’”
These were the salad days of craft beer, when it seemed like the lines would never end. But lest anyone think it was all fame and fortune that enticed Novick, his actual path to opening his own brewery is a study in dogged dedication to the love of beer. Having been a craft beer enthusiast since living in New Orleans in the early aughts, he began homebrewing after moving to New Jersey and while working in on-air marketing for VH1. When he decided to go pro, he enrolled in courses at the American Brewers Guild and apprenticed at the now-closed Jughandle Brewing Co. A friend then helped him score an interview to wash kegs at Other Half.
“I was 35, married with kids and spending more money on tolls and gas to get to the brewery than I made flipping kegs,” Novick says. But just working in the brewhouse responsible for some of the beer that inspired him to pursue this career path was a motivator. Novick challenged himself to wash more kegs each day, and his hard work got him noticed; within a few weeks, he was on the brewing team working on the centrifuge and dry-hopping.
Another “aha” moment at another storied brewery prompted Novick’s progression in craft beer. Visiting his brother in San Diego, he dropped in on Stone Brewing. “It blew my mind,” he remembers of the brewery still in its glory days. Sitting in an Adirondack chair taking it all in with a beer, Novick knew he wanted his own brewery.
The term “labor of love” gets tossed around a lot, but Alternate Ending Beer Co. in Aberdeen, New Jersey can’t be defined as anything else. Between the initial ideation phase and its official opening in October 2020, its focus shifted from those clamored-for East Coast hazies more toward lagers — head brewer Brendan Arnold calls Alternate Ending “a lager brewery that makes great IPA.” It was just a step ahead of the entire craft beer industry’s own similar shift, and it could be argued Alternate Ending is one of the breweries that helped push that shift with such notably exceptional lagers. But that willingness to pivot plus a relentless interest in trying new things and learning ever more about beer speaks volumes about Novick and why his brewery is special.
Alternate Endings for Brewers and Their Beer
The name “Alternate Ending” plays on the fact that the brewery sits in an old movie theater. But Arnold notes the resonance for both Novick and himself, too — a native New Jerseyan, he’d moved to Kansas for college and had been playing with and managing bands before starting to bartend and then managing a brewpub. The opportunity to take that brewpub over prompted Arnold to attend the Siebel Institute for a full brewing education, after which his beer began scoring medals at the Great American Beer Festival. Right as Arnold and his wife planned a move back to New Jersey at the beginning of the pandemic, he spotted Novick’s listing for brewers.
“This became our own ‘alternate endings,’” Arnold says. “It’s Scott’s ‘alternate ending’ opening a brewery after having been working in the corporate world, and mine after relocating to the East Coast.”
There were more alternate endings in store for this brewery-to-be. Novick’s plan was to start a production brewery centered largely around East Coast IPAs. The combination of big distribution ambitions and hazy IPA focus defined the craft beer industry for years — who could have seen the current pendulum swing back to taproom-concentrated business and lager enthusiasm coming, or at least when it would arrive? Luckily, circumstances nudged Alternate Ending into a position better suited for today’s industry; Novick’s lack of preciousness over his original plans and Arnold’s brewing expertise really set the brewery up for success.
Novick’s friend Neilly Robinson, who owns New Jersey’s Heirloom Kitchen, heard Novick was planning a brewery and suggested his father’s movie theater in Aberdeen that he was trying to sell. Once securing the unique space, Novick then got the tip on a liquor license nearly $900,000 less than the most recent licenses to sell in New Jersey. Securing that meant shifting gears toward being a brewpub. Novick and Arnold didn’t abandon their distribution plans, and their beer is strong enough that their distribution has been growing when other breweries’ footprints are shrinking. But now, Arnold says, Alternate Ending is a “production brewpub. It’s a regional distribution production brewery with a brewpub space and good food.”
Leaning Into Lager
Because of his original brewery plans, Novick initially passed on the suggestion from a consultant to install a pricey decoction mash system. Decoction mashing is a more time- and labor-intensive process that tends to separate the more serious lager brewers from the herd — it produces über-traditional German and Czech lagers with greater malt complexity. Then, Novick visited the revered Bierstadt Lagerhaus in Denver and realized a new goal of making such authentic lagers. His consultant told him, “You’ll never make lager like Bierstadt without a decoction system,” and Novick pulled the trigger on the investment.
As Novick built a brewhouse capable of producing top-notch, nuanced lagers, Arnold joined him as head brewer with, fortuitously, an expertise especially geared toward lagers. He credits where he got started brewing for this — a strong German tradition in Kansas called for a lot of lager.
Over time, Arnold’s lager skill set has continued to evolve alongside his and Novick’s own curiosity. They started out with conical fermenters and now have three 20-barrel horizontal tanks for their widely distributed core brands, plus two more 10-barrel horizontal tanks for smaller releases and a 12-barrel horizontal foeder, all of which help them produce true-to-form lagers. But while their lagers are master classes in traditional brewing technique, Novick and Arnold make sure to set them apart as unmistakable Alternate Ending beers. Part of this comes from their branding — their German and Czech styles stand out on shelves with more graphics-driven, modern cans compared to their counterparts with more classic labels. But even more so, it comes from experimentation within the seemingly tight restraints of lager.
“I like to challenge Brendan,” Novick says. He recalls visiting Spain in the lead-up to helping open Lita, an Iberian restaurant where he is a partner. “I was trying to think of a great house beer for the restaurant and I thought of rice lagers, then paella…I texted Brendan, ‘What do you think of doing a cereal mash with paella?’”
Arnold rose to the challenge and created Bomba, an Iberian lager with paella rice and saffron. It proved so popular at Lita and then in Alternate Ending’s own taproom that the brewery made it a core brand. This encouraged Novick and Arnold to keep tinkering with everything from jasmine rice and basmati to koji rice for a collaboration with Parleaux Beer Lab in New Orleans. This experimentation has resulted in such a wide expression of what lagers can be: Thai rice lager with basil, barrel-aged rauchbier, foedered Italian-style pilsner, jasmine rice lager with jasmine green tea, a table lager with chamomile, and more. All the while, Alternate Ending still crafts saisons, stouts and IPAs that more than hold their own. There are hazies for every kind of hop fan, and their Vaya Con Dios West Coast IPA will make you think you’re sipping something straight from San Diego.
Brewing Up a Focus on Hospitality
Novick and Arnold don’t stop at traditional brewing methods for their beer, either. They were among the first — along with Inside Hook’s best brewery of 2024, Wild East — to travel to Pilsen in the Czech Republic to become certified to pour on Czech Lukr faucets. It’s an art they take seriously, only allowing Alternate Ending employees who have undergone the training to pour any beers on their Lukr faucets.
Service and hospitality in the taproom in general are serious business at Alternate Ending right alongside the beer program. Novick cites Danny Meyer’s book Setting the Table as a formative resource when he was learning the hospitality side of opening and running a brewery. Unrivaled service is top of mind for the brewery owner especially during such a rocky time in the craft beer industry.
“It’s been a challenge,” Novick says. “We opened during COVID and then coming out of it, we were able to serve at 100 percent capacity but couldn’t find enough staff to make that happen with the hiring shortage. 2023 was an amazing year, it seemed like everyone wanted to come out and spend. Since then, it’s been a year-over-year decline.” However, Alternate Ending is enjoying a bright spot many other breweries aren’t: growth in distribution. Even while they struggle alongside bars and restaurants to lure people out of their homes, their footprint has grown regionally.
The brewery’s beer is strong enough to garner a following far beyond its backyard, but Novick and Arnold are still committed to fostering the community they’ve begun building in their taproom. That’s taken the form of happy hours for locals plenty of events. They play into their movie-theater digs with movie nights and even recently organized a “Brewers’ Derby,” for which they bought beer from 25 other breweries they know (having a brewpub license allows this) and threw a big 1990s grunge-themed rager. This emphasized another community vital to the founder and brewer, too: the rest of the beer industry. Even as many breweries pull back on once ubiquitous collaborations under the strain of tighter budgets and production schedules, Novick and Arnold make sure to prioritize the valuable exchange of knowledge collaborations enable whenever realistic.
Sharing education is a core tenet of Alternate Ending’s ethos, with both Arnold and Novick acknowledging the people they learned from and wanting to pass that on. The same curiosity that has fueled their never-ending beer education and resulted in such noteworthy beer has also been a motivation to keep their ties to the brewing community strong and the open pathways for ideas and inspiration open. Seeing proof of this community at the Brewers’ Derby was a milestone in Alternate Ending’s run so far.
“We work so hard to make the highest quality beer possible, and to see your peers here enjoying your beer is so valuable,” Arnold says. “It’s like, ‘wow, we did it. What we did worked.’”
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