Free Beer Here

Flying Fish offers free tours of its craft brewery in Cherry Hill—if you can find it.

The brewery is housed in a drab office complex with no big sign indicating its presence. If you go, look for a small Flying Fish emblem on a brick building across a parking lot from a shoe warehouse.

The trip is worth the hunt. Every Saturday from 1 to 4 pm, Flying Fish, an independent brewery founded in 1995, opens its doors for free guided tours. When I visited recently,  owner Gene Muller himself poured samples of about a half a dozen beers as our tour group waited to check out the brewery floor.

It’s not a long tour, and you won’t have a chance for a Laverne and Shirley put-the-glove-on-the-beer-bottle type moment. That’s because Flying Fish is still a small local brewery. The production line wasn’t running that Saturday, and they only have one bottler and one labeler.

The small size of the factory belies the brew’s large presence in the Philadelphia and South Jersey region. Flying Fish is served where the Eagles and the Phillies play and at corner bars throughout the area.

Make sure to check their website before they go. If Flying Fish is part of a weekend beer festival, they don’t run the tour. While you’re on the site, click over to the“13 years on the web” link. The Flying Fish folks were online even before they bottled their first beer. The timeline is a hoot.

Tags: Cherry Hill | South Jersey | Beer | Flying Fish Brewery