What do you do on a Saturday when a county festival, two breweries, and a working seafood market are all running within a half mile of each other on the same stretch of Raritan Bay? In the Belford and Port Monmouth sections of Middletown Township, that question has an actual answer on September 19, 2026, when the Monmouth County Park System's Wind & Sea Festival takes over Bayshore Waterfront Park from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. But the festival is only the loudest thing happening on that block. The bay-front stretch of Main Street around it has been rebuilding itself for a decade, one owner-operator at a time, with no redevelopment authority or branding campaign behind it.
That's the part worth understanding if you spend any time on this side of town. Belford, like much of the Bayshore, took a direct hit from Superstorm Sandy in 2012, and Main Street lost businesses in the years that followed. Nobody drew up a plan to bring it back. It came back because a handful of people made separate bets, four and ten years apart, that happened to reinforce each other.
A Brewery Where The Lobster Pools Used To Be
Start with the building at 909 Main Street. Before it was a brewery, it belonged to Shoal Harbor Lobster Co., and owner John Ross Cocozza bought it in 2020 with three large lobster pools still inside. He spent two years gutting the space, and when the pools came out, he didn't scrap them. He donated them to the Belford Seafood Co-op, the working seafood market next door that has outlasted several eras of what this stretch of Main Street looked like.
What opened in their place on April 14, 2023, was Ross Brewing Co., a brewery built directly on a dock so boats can pull up to it, which makes it the only one of its kind on this part of the Jersey Shore. The beer garden looks across the water toward the New York skyline, and the brewery sits close enough to the Belford Ferry Terminal that you can walk from one to the other. Cocozza had originally planned to open in Red Bank, but permit delays pushed the project to Middletown instead. He's since said he feels like he found an undiscovered gem in Belford, and on opening weekend, cars lined up past the nearby Dunes condominiums as word spread through Port Monmouth. One resident who lives close enough to walk told a local reporter it was just nice to have a new place nearby.
Two Breweries, Ten Years Apart
Ross wasn't the first brewery to bet on this end of Middletown. Belford Brewing Co. opened in 2014 on Leonardville Road, a few minutes inland, and it was the business that brought craft beer to the township in the first place. When Ross Brewing arrived nine years later, the two could have treated each other as competition for the same weekend crowd. Instead, by most accounts, they've leaned the other way, going so far as to share hops with each other when one runs short.
| Ross Brewing Co. | Belford Brewing Co. | |
|---|---|---|
| Opened | 2023 | 2014 |
| Location | 909 Main St., Port Monmouth, on the water | Leonardville Road, Belford, inland |
| What sets it apart | The only brewery in the area boats can dock at directly | The one that started Middletown's craft beer scene |
| By law | Cannot serve food; food trucks rotate through | Operates as a standalone taproom |
The practical effect is that a Saturday in Belford now has two distinct brewery experiences within a five-minute drive of each other, one built around boat traffic and skyline views, the other built around being the original. Neither had to disappear for the other to succeed.
The Seafood Co-op Both Breweries Grew Up Next To
It's easy to treat the breweries as the story, but the Belford Seafood Co-op is the business that was there before either of them and the one that gives the whole corridor its working-waterfront character rather than a purely recreational one. It's still a functioning seafood market, not a tourist stand dressed up to look like one, and it's the reason Ross Brewing's donated lobster pools went somewhere useful instead of a dumpster. The co-op is also why this stretch of Main Street reads differently than a strip of bars would: you can buy dinner on the same block where you're drinking, and the person selling it to you has likely been doing it longer than the breweries have existed.
What The County Adds On September 19
Layer the Monmouth County Park System's programming on top of that, and the picture gets fuller. The Wind & Sea Festival is the county's own free event at Bayshore Waterfront Park, and it typically draws around 2,000 people over a single afternoon. Parking and shuttle service run out of the Belford Ferry Terminal, so festival traffic and the brewery's boat traffic share the same stretch of shoreline that day without much overlap in practice.
The festival's activity list changes slightly year to year, but it's consistently built around the bay itself rather than around vendors:
- Kayaking, fishing, and crabbing demonstrations
- Kite flying with the Wind Wolves Traveling Kite Show
- Sandcastle building and seining
- Tours of the Historic Seabrook-Wilson House, a colonial-era building on the park grounds that served as a tavern during the Revolutionary War and picked up its local nickname, the Spy House, from stories about British soldiers who talked too freely there
That last stop matters more than it looks. It's the one piece of the day that isn't about beer or seafood at all, and it's a reminder that this stretch of Middletown had a working identity long before craft beer showed up to add another layer to it.
The Ferry Runs On Weekdays Too
None of this works as a once-a-year curiosity if the infrastructure underneath it only shows up for the festival. It doesn't. The Belford Ferry Terminal runs regular morning and afternoon commuter service into New York City, which means the same dock that shuttles festival visitors on a September Saturday is moving residents to work on an ordinary Tuesday. Ross Brewing built its beer garden steps from that terminal on purpose, betting that commuters heading home in the evening would want a reason to stop before they got back in the car. That bet is part of why the brewery's presence feels less like a novelty and more like infrastructure that finally caught up to a community that was already using this waterfront every day.
One Saturday, Whole System Visible
None of the pieces here, the co-op, the two breweries, the ferry, the county's festival, were coordinated by a single plan. They're independent bets made by different people at different times who happened to end up on the same half mile of Main Street. What September 19 offers is the rare chance to see all of it running at once: boats at the dock, the ferry on schedule, the co-op doing brisk business, and a county festival drawing families a few hundred yards away. That's not a redevelopment story with a ribbon-cutting at the end. It's what a working waterfront looks like when enough small bets land in the same place over enough years.
If you're already living on this side of Middletown Township, none of this is news to you by October. But if you're weighing what makes one section of a township different from another, the Belford waterfront is a useful example of how a place builds its own character without anyone planning it that way.
I work Monmouth County full time, including this corridor, and I'm always glad to talk through what a specific block or section of town is actually like day to day, not just what a listing photo shows. If you're curious what your own home might be worth in today's market, you can start with a free valuation through Doreen DeMarco, and we can go from there.
