What does it actually take to get a beer on Main Street in Moorestown? The short answer: about 110 years, three failed elections, and a nonprofit that needed a tenant more than it needed a taproom.
If you've walked past 16 East Main Street this year and noticed the new King's Road Brewing Co. sign out front of the Community House, you've seen the end of that story. What most people driving down Main Street don't know is why that particular building took over a century to pour its first legal pint. The beer is the visible part. The real story is what the brewery is doing for a 99-year-old building that residents have been getting married in for generations.
Three Times Moorestown Said No
Moorestown has restricted alcohol sales since 1915. Ballot measures to lift the ban failed in 1935, in 1953, and again in 2007. It took until 2011 for voters to approve sales in and around the Moorestown Mall, and even then, Main Street itself stayed dry. The township council didn't pass an ordinance allowing breweries, distilleries, and tasting rooms downtown until 2021, a full decade after the mall carve-out and 106 years after the original ban.
That timeline matters because it explains why King's Road Brewing Co. choosing Moorestown for its third location, after Haddonfield and Medford, was treated as genuine downtown news rather than a routine business opening. Haddonfield had been dry since 1873 before King's Road opened there in 2017. Moorestown's Main Street corridor was dry even longer. When the brewery's co-owner Bob Hochgertel talked about Main Street being "a physical continuation of the historic 'King's Road,'" he was describing a street that had never legally sold him a drink until now.
The Building Beneath the Books
The space King's Road took over isn't a storefront. It's the library room inside the Community House of Moorestown, the nonprofit event venue built in 1926 with a $250,000 donation from Moorestown resident Eldridge Reeves Johnson, founder of Camden's Victor Talking Machine Company. That library room used to host wedding receptions and private events. Now it's a tasting room capped at 90 customers, according to the plans King's Road submitted to the township planning board.
The project actually started as a plan to convert a different part of the building, the Community House's long-dormant indoor pool, which had been a summer gathering spot for the town before it closed in 2017. Costs and timelines shifted along the way, and the plan that finally got built put the taproom upstairs in the library and the brewing operation in the basement directly below it, with stainless steel fermentation tanks running as part of a partnership with Rowan College at Burlington County. That partnership makes it the first education-based microbrewery in New Jersey, with an RCBC certificate program in craft brewing that launched its first classes in fall 2025. Students in the program get hands-on experience brewing beer that gets served one floor above them.
The brewery held its soft opening the week before Christmas 2025, according to a firsthand account posted to Yelp that December. By the time you're reading this, it's been running for roughly eight months.
What the Lease Actually Buys
Here's the part that doesn't show up on the tap list. The Community House is privately run and funded entirely by rental fees and donations, with no tax dollars behind it. For a building that's nearly a century old, that's a precarious way to keep the lights on. What King's Road actually gave the Community House wasn't foot traffic. It was a long-term lease.
"We are excited that we are going to be having a full-time tenant. One of the goals of this was to have financial certainty in having a long-term lease agreement with King's Road."
That's Haynes Hendrickson, vice president of the Community House board, explaining the deal in plain terms. The brewery isn't a novelty tenant. It's the thing that gives a beloved, self-funded landmark a predictable income stream for the first time in years, at the exact moment the building's other big draws, weddings and private rentals, aren't guaranteed month to month.
Hendrickson also put a number on what he hoped it would do for the block: "I am starting to feel very optimistic about the vibe of people realizing this is actually going to be open on Main Street and what that's going to do for restaurants and shops and foot traffic on Main Street." Whether that foot-traffic bump shows up in this year's other Main Street business openings is worth watching, but the mechanism itself is straightforward. A brewery with regular hours, unlike a rental hall that only fills up on weekends with weddings booked a year out, keeps a building occupied on a Tuesday night in February.
The Fall Calendar That Now Runs Through One Address
The brewery's first real test as a community fixture came last September, when it sponsored a beer stein-holding competition at the inaugural Moorestown Bluegrass Festival. That event, organized by Homegrown Moorestown and the Moorestown Music Collective, drew six regional bands to Memorial Field for a free, all-ages afternoon of live music. It's back this year, bigger, and it's the first of three fall events that show how quickly King's Road has folded itself into the town's calendar rather than sitting apart from it.
| Event | Date | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Moorestown Bluegrass Festival (2nd annual) | September 19, 2026 | Memorial Field |
| Autumn in Moorestown | October 10, 2026 | Main Street |
| Main Street Holiday Kickoff | November 21, 2026 | Main Street |
The Bluegrass Festival benefits Kisses for Kyle, a Delaware Valley nonprofit now in its 23rd year of supporting families affected by childhood cancer, and it stays free and open to the public. Autumn in Moorestown, run by the Moorestown Business Association, leans into the season with arts and crafts vendors, artisan food, and what the association describes as a wide variety of craft beers alongside live entertainment. The Main Street holiday event in November strings luminarias down the block while shops and restaurants put out seasonal offerings, a smaller, sponsor-driven evening rather than an open vendor fair.
None of these events depend on King's Road to exist. But a Main Street that couldn't legally sell a beer until 2021 now has a brewery sponsoring festival games and a business association planning a craft beer lineup into its biggest fall event. That's a downtown behaving differently than it did five years ago, and it's worth noticing even if you have no plans to buy a pint.
If You're Headed to Memorial Field
A few practical notes for anyone planning around the Bluegrass Festival on September 19:
- Parking at Memorial Field is first come, first served. If the lot fills, there's municipal parking on Main Street, about a 0.3-mile walk, plus additional parking at the Strawbridge Lake lot.
- Two playgrounds sit within a short walk of the field, one at Roberts Elementary and one at Strawbridge Lake, both useful if you've got kids who need a break from the music.
- Leashed dogs are welcome on the grassy, non-field areas and the track surrounding the event space, though they aren't permitted on the playing fields themselves.
- The festival includes a kid zone tent with lawn games, face painting, and building blocks, and it runs rain or shine.
The Real Story Isn't the Beer
It's easy to read "Moorestown got a brewery" as one more line in a running list of new businesses on Main Street. The more accurate version is that a nonprofit landmark old enough to have hosted your grandparents' wedding reception found a way to keep its doors open by finally saying yes to something the town had voted against three separate times. The beer just happens to be how it's paying the bills.
If you're the kind of person who tracks these small shifts in how a town actually functions, you already know that's the version worth knowing. And if a year of watching Main Street change from the sidelines ever turns into a real conversation about buying or selling here, Stephany Schlitz has spent her career paying attention to exactly this kind of detail in Burlington and Camden County towns. Let's Connect, whenever you're ready.
