Despite her new venture as the owner of Eclipse Brewing, Megan Hilbert said she had never really been a big fan of beer personally
“I did not like beer at all,” Hilbert said. “You couldn’t even get me to drink out of a keg at a college party at Rowan.”
The 2018 Rowan grad said she had experience with the alcohol business, previously working as a bartender and bar manager during college, but drinking beer was just not for her.
But a casual conversation she had one day while out jogging led to her taking over the popular brewery in her hometown and giving it a glow-up she hopes will make it appeal to a younger and more female crowd.
Hilbert was already the owner of a fleet of food trucks operating under the brand Red’s Rolling Restaurant. She said she came to know Eclipse’s previous owners Chris and Beth Mattern, from operating her trucks at events held in the nearby Merchantville “triangle” municipal parking lot.
“I also live in town, so I would jog on the bike path, and Chris is a big gardener, so he would be out there gardening. One day we just started talking. He was like, ‘you know, I’m getting old. I think I want to retire soon,’” Hilbert said.
That chance encounter got Hilbert thinking about her next project.
She said she was already looking for a location to use as a venue for event space, and realized the brewery, after a little updating, could be the perfect fit.
Hilbert soon bought the brewery and decided to keep the name in an effort to retain the existing customer base, while tweaking and updating the decor and layout of the brewery to expand its appeal.
“I just kept everything that was working and then improved on things that needed to be improved upon,” she said.
Hilbert said she and her dad started on the renovations back in August of last year and were pretty much finished by the end of October. After that it was just a waiting game to get everything in order with licensing from the State, and the refreshed Eclipse opened officially early last month.
Hilbert said she was able to retain much of the staff who were at the brewery prior to the changeover, which has kept their existing products consistent, while helping her learn about brewing. She might even come to enjoy it a little more
“It’s a really cool process,” Hilbert said of beer making. “I’ve come to appreciate that. I’ve tried a ton more and they actually make me like beer. They made this raspberry chocolate cream ale that was really good.”
Hilbert said that she went to school for advertising and communication studies, and wrote her senior thesis paper on the genderization of alcohol. Now that she finds herself as a young female owner of a brewery, she said she’s putting that education to use, and developing theories on how she can make some changes to the industry.
“The beer world is very heavily male-dominated. It’s even branded towards males,” she said. “But I felt like there was a huge untapped market for a female to come into a brewery and really market that part of it.”
