"He is always willing to go the extra mile for the customer and his team.”

Welcome Mikey!

Mike Jacoby hustles and works hard on and off the clock. As one of our new distribution specialists, he’s part of the growing team at Cape Beverage who helps make sure that everyone gets their beverages and orders in a timely, efficient manner.

We stopped by Cape Beverage to meet with him and check out some of the trucks and vehicles our drivers use daily.

“Mikey is a hard worker, a dedicated public servant, and a real asset to our team,” says Distribution Manager Robert Ritz. “He started out delivering beer in the vans and was very eager to move onto bigger trucks. He was trained by our Head Driver Anthony and now he’s able to drive whatever we need him to. He is always willing to go the extra mile for the customer and his team.”

Welcome Mike!

Mike was born in Galloway, NJ. He lived in Absecon for about four years before moving to Pomona, where he lived for some of his formative years.

He’s an only child, unless you count his somewhat spoiled dog, Princess.

“I named her when I was younger,” he says with a laugh.

Princess is 13 years old, diabetic, and slowly going blind, but she’s still a puppy at heart.

“She still has the energy of a four year old,” Mike shares. “She likes to bite me for no reason, and she gets steak for dinner sometimes. She’s gotta be a princess. She’s a miniature Irish Wolfhound mixed with a Pit Bull.”

Mike found out the hard way growing up that Princess has lockjaw as well.

“When I was younger, I used to take her Milk-Bones and mess with her,” he says. “I was an asshole of a child. She got to the point where she would bite me in retaliation and not let go. It wasn’t too bad luckily because she was still teething.”

“My mom was like, are you going to take her bones? After that happened, I was like nope,” he says with a grin.

“Now, I could take her bone from her and she’ll just look at me, like, can I have that back please?”

The two are very close, with Princess often looking to Mike for safety.

“She thinks of me like her protector. She hates thunderstorms and fireworks,” he says. “She always comes to me if something like that happens. Whenever we’re in the car or something bad is happening, she’s with me.”

“She’s my baby girl,” he says with a smile.

Mike has been in Northfield for about nine years. He went to high school at Mainland Regional High School, which houses students from Linwood, Northfield, and Somers Point. 

He immediately started working after high school, and he’s been grinding ever since.

We met with Mike just around the July 4th craziness, so everyone was getting a lot of beer out and available to thirsty folks looking to stock up for the holiday weekend.

Cape Beverage operates out of two facilities. The first houses the vehicles, and the second newest space has significantly more storage and cooler space, which is where distribution specialists go to pick up their orders for the day.

“The drivers come here, and they’ll come and clock in. They grab their manifests and the truck, and go to the warehouse to load up and go to our route. Then it’s the reverse order on the way back,” Mike says.

“As a distribution specialist, our job is to come in to grab the manifest, which is a list of the stops for the day, and then the invoices for each account,” he says. “If we get to a stop that has empty kegs or things to return, we pick those up as well. After we are done with all of our deliveries, we head back to the warehouse, empty the trucks out of pallets, wrap, empty kegs, or any trash from the day. We make sure the bays are closed and park the trucks back at the main office. And that’s our day,” he says with a smile.

To start off his day, Mike stocks up with two giant water bottles, Propel, and Sizzlis from Wawa.

His routes span the length of New Jersey. 

The farthest that he’s driven so far is up to the border of New York and New Jersey. “That’s a three and a half hour drive,” he says with a laugh.

Although for much of their days, drivers are by themselves, during training and particular routes or seasons, drivers will have another crew member with them. 

“I drove with the new guy, Kalib, yesterday. Mike Marchiano helped train me as well when I first started,” he says.

Mike likes to be able to both drive with another person and drive by himself as well.

“Being with someone else makes the day go by so much faster.”

For one particularly beer-heavy stop, Kalib and Mikey were able to unload and be on their way within 45 minutes, which would have otherwise taken over two hours for just one person.

Driving around the state can also offer some spectacular views.

“The route today, there’s this lake that I pass by all the time and it’s beautiful,” Mike shares. “There’s a mountain behind it, and it’s actually really nice.”

“It’s Lake Hopatcong,” he says. “It’s right near Mt. Arlington, NJ up north.” 

Although it’s a long time to be stuck in a vehicle, Mike gets a bit of a workout moving kegs and pallets throughout the day as well. 

“I’ve gotten to the point where I can pick up a half keg and walk with it,” he says. “I pick it up from the top and the bottom to carry it sideways so that the weight is distributed evenly.” 

When he’s not driving up and down the state, Mike enjoys playing airsoft, a competitive sport similar to paintball.

Some of the fields he plays in include Frontier Fortress in Sicklerville and SoftAir in New Egypt. 

Sometimes, folks modify their airsoft guns, but if the gun is running too hot, the hits can be really painful, and it’s not a fun experience for those involved.

“This one guy had a high run sniper. Snipers are my thing, too,” he says. “He was running a sniper, and I was on the enemy team for a game because it needed to be evened out. He shot at me while I was behind a metal barrier, and the BB shot through the metal and it hit someone’s fingernail, ripping it off,” he says.

(Ed. note: Uhh….we’ll stick to pwning noobs on Call of Duty: Warzone, thanks….)

“I chronoed his gun, which is the way of telling how much joules and FPS it’s putting out. It was almost five joules of energy and 500 FPS. That’s way too hot,” he says.

For reference, over three joules and over 550 FPS is considered unacceptable for most competitive airsoft benchmarks. 

There are different ways you can modify your gun that allow them to run within acceptable ranges, however. 

“You can upgrade the internals of a gun,” Mike says. “Like my sniper has an upgraded spring hop up chamber and stuff like that, and an inner barrel. There are different types of springs you can get. I have an M150 in my gun, which increases the tension and the length of it. So, the more you pull it back, the more pressure will be against the BB when you release it.”

Normally, airsoft fields, especially those that host competitions, have referees on the field to monitor games, and require an assessment or chrono of guns to make sure things are running at acceptable levels before it starts.

“If your gun is running too high, you don’t go on the field,” Mike says.

“I don’t know why I do it,” he says with a laugh. “But it’s fun.”

When he’s not on the clock at Cape Beverage, Mike is a volunteer firefighter in Somers Point. 

“I try to make every single call I can,” he shares. 

“That takes up a lot of my time right now, too, especially my weekdays. My weekends, I try to reserve for airsoft and my girlfriend,” he says.

His girlfriend Alexius’s dad is Mike’s lieutenant at the fire station, and he sometimes gets to see her during the week as well. Luckily, he’s pretty tight with her dad, even to the extent that he’s driven his souped up Subaru.

“When a call comes in, and I’m not at work, I go to the station,” he says. “Recently we’ve been getting calls that are just out of nowhere. Two days ago at 1AM, we had a fully involved car fire on the parkway. Yesterday, we had a mulch fire.”

Mike often gets those middle-of-the-night calls as well.

“I’ll get called at 2AM sometimes. My pager will go off and I’ll get out of bed and go,” he says. 

More people and traffic at the shore in the summer means the increased likelihood of car accidents and other calls that firefighters respond to. 

“We had an extrication this morning at like 3AM,” he says. “I was up for that, and I got back at around 5:30AM, went to bed for an hour, then came here.”

When our eyes grow wide, Mike just shrugs.

“I’m used to long hours,” he says. “Before COVID, I did a lot of part-time work in casinos for the entertainment industry. When I first started here, I had just finished doing overnights at Home Depot as well,” he says.

He worked for both Home Depot and 1-800-JUNK. “I did those together for a while. At Home Depot, I operated the forklifts at night. I did garden recovery, so I restocked the garden every night.” 

As a former employee, Mike knows the ins and outs of Home Depot and where everything is in case he needs to stop in for something, which, as anyone who has attempted a DIY or home project knows, is highly valuable knowledge!

“I did get called back to Borgata recently,” he shares. “I got my part-time badge back there. During the weekends, I can take work there. They call you and offer you different jobs you can take.”

Working in the entertainment sector meant Mike had access to some pretty sweet perks.

“I set up power, audio, and lighting for concerts and conventions,” he says. “I got to go to Warped Tour for free. I used to get concert tickets all the time for my dad, too.”

One of the coolest concerts he experienced as part of this gig was Il Divo. 

“It’s like an Italian band. I speak Italian, so I understood what they were saying. It was actually a pretty funny concert. Their style is reggae-pop, and they’re weird, but in a good way,” he says with a grin. “Their setup was great, and the show was awesome. That was by far my favorite concert.”

(Ed. note: Wait, did he just say he speaks Italian?)

“I took Italian in high school, then expanded on it. I speak Spanish, French, Italian, and a little bit of Japanese,” he shares.

To flex some of his Japanese skills, Mike watches anime. “I’m just now caught up with Naruto,” he says.

Mike is a bit of a car guy who works on them as well. 

“I had a Mazda CX-7 before the car I have now,” he says. “I traded it in to get a 2016 Hyundai Veloster.” 

However, he also has his eye on one of the new Toyota Supras at some point. 

“It’s between that or a new Challenger. I really want a Hellcat. Maybe a nice marble blue color with a black hood,” he says, thinking for a minute. 

“My mom would drive that car 24/7 because she loves blue, but that’s why I’d get it in stick shift because she can’t drive stick,” he says with a laugh.

“I haven’t worked on the Veloster yet, although I’m tempted to. My buddy has a 1970’s Charger, and I rebuilt that for him. I rebuilt his ‘68 Chevelle as well. He and I have a project going on with a Mazda RX-7 that we’re trying to put together for a drift car,” he says.

“I just put a tune on my buddy’s car. It’s a 2004 Nissan 350Z. It shoots flames like no tomorrow. We were driving down the road and I was like, dude, your car is shooting flames,” he says with a laugh.

Mike is looking forward to saving up enough to have a place by himself, which he should be able to achieve by the end of the summer. 

“My girlfriend lives right around the corner from the place I have picked out, too,” he says.

You might spot Mike around Cape Beverage or out picking up kegs or dropping off beer at one of our many accounts throughout the state. 

Next time you spot him, make sure to say hi!