Washington - I started going to the Delaware beaches regularly with friends seven years ago. We all have a taste for microbrews — our trips involved an annual pilgrimage to Dogfish Head's Rehoboth Beach brewpub to taste the weird and (usually) delicious beer — but our beach house fridge at the time was stocked with cans of Corona and Miller High Life, the kind of beer more suited to drinking while barbecuing or a game of beer pong.
If you wanted a “local” beer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland or the lower half of Delaware in 2007, Dogfish Head was your only choice. But recently, that area has been undergoing a craft beer renaissance. Seven breweries have opened since April 2012, which is the same month that Evolution Craft Brewing Company moved from a tiny building in Delmar, Del., to a massive new facility in Salisbury, Md.
At least two more breweries will arrive this year: Ocean City Brewing Company should debut in June, while Dewey Beer and Food is shooting for a September or October opening.
Our memories of the beach will always be more about sun, sand and mini-golf than a growler of IPA picked up en route. But spending a week in Rehoboth or Ocean City no longer means you're consigned to drinking Corona or Bud Light Lime-A-Rita. (Save those for beer pong.)
BURLEY OAK
10016 Old Ocean City Blvd., Berlin, Md. 443-513-4647. www.burleyoak.com.
Best for: An unpredictable array of craft beers.
Beer to drink on your beach house porch: Wit It & Quit It, a zesty Belgian-style witbier made with lemon and lime peels.
Beer to impress your beer-snob friends: Sour Trip, a crisp, tart Berliner weisse, or the hop-forward Aboriginal Gangster.
Hours: Monday-Wednesday 11am to 11pm, Thursday-Saturday 11am to 2am, Sunday noon to 9pm. Tours are every Saturday at 3pm.
Events: Music performances at 9pm Friday and Saturday. Tuesday is bring-your-own-vinyl night, when anyone can DJ, and Wednesday is game night, with free table tennis, ring toss and board games.
The coolest bar in America's Coolest Small Town also makes some of the best beers in the Free State. Owner and brewer Bryan Brushmiller opened Burley Oak in a century-old cooperage in August 2011 and has been charging forward ever since. A wide variety of beers fly out of the brewery, from sour ales to super-hopped IPAs to barrel-aged red ales, each one more interesting than the last. I visited the brewery the week after it opened, I've gone back several times a year since and I'm hard-pressed to think of a beer I wouldn't order again.
Brushmiller enjoys putting fresh twists on his old recipes — he'll switch the hops in the Aboriginal Gangster IPA to an experimental variety to create a completely new beer, or toss Concord grapes into a cask of Berliner weisse for a different flavour profile. Burley Oak's terroir is especially intriguing: Brushmiller purchases grain from local farmers, and worked with a soil scientist to develop indigenous barley that is used in several brews.
I love getting growler fills, but I also enjoy hanging out at the bar on a weekend night. Local cover bands perform in the corner, a multi-generational crowd hoists pints at the bar and groups play ring toss or cards. The building itself, with barnlike ceilings, art by local painters on the walls and white fairy lights strung overhead, reminds me of a Midwestern beer hall. You're definitely not in Washington or, for that matter, Ocean City.
FIN CITY BREWING CO.
Inside Hooper's Crab House, 12913 Ocean Gateway, Ocean City, Md. 410-213-1771. www.fincitybrewing.com.
Best for: Sampling beers over all-you-can-eat crabs.
Beer to drink on your beach house porch: Jackspot Amber Ale.
Beer to impress your beer-snob friends: Blackfin Black IPA.
Hours: Open daily at 3pm
Fin City, which tapped its first keg in April 2012, bills itself as “Ocean City's Oldest Brewery.” Its evolution has been remarkable: Two years ago, homebrewer Vince Wright set up equipment in the loft over the bar at Hooper's Crab House. One of Fin City's first efforts was a thin lager named Fin Light, which a Hooper's bartender once described as “like Coors Light.” Now Fin City is making pale ales and black IPAs that are sold Maryland-wide.
The Fin City beers you find in bottles are produced at Baltimore's Peabody Heights Brewery, but the five on tap at Hooper's still come from the nanobrewery. Our favorites included the Jackspot, an amber ale with caramel and nutty flavours, and the Blackfin Black IPA, where the roasted malt gets some citrus flavour from the hops.
Hooper's has been a fixture in West Ocean City for more than three decades; its barnlike structure has an airplane hanging from the ceiling, an authentic NASCAR racecar in the dining room and life-size statues of the Blues Brothers on a platform above diners' heads. The all-you-can-eat crabs are a big draw, and this isn't really the sort of place to get a flight of beers.
But don't miss the “Stadium Cup Special”: Buy a 22-ounce plastic cup of Fin City beer for $6 (about R60, and subsequent refills are $2.50. That deal proves tough to beat at any bar, unless you're a big fan of the 75-cent Natty Light drafts at Fish Tales on Wednesday nights.
BACKSHORE BREWING CO.
913 Atlantic Ave., Ocean City, Md. 443-373-1224. www.shorebillybeer.com.
Best for: Hanging out on the boardwalk.
Beer to drink on your beach house porch: Boardwalk Blonde.
Beer to impress your beer-snob friends: They'll probably dig the flights, but not for the beer itself.
Hours: Open daily from 11am to 2am.
You're not going to beat the view from the patio at Backshore Brewing: Situated right on Ocean City's boardwalk, the place offers a broad expanse of umbrella-studded beach and the Atlantic Ocean. The most in-demand seats are in a booth fashioned from an old VW bus — it's a great Instagram photo-op that provides a prime vantage point for people-watching.
I enjoy the funky nature of this cramped storefront brewery: The half-dozen barstools are fashioned from old kegs, and the wooden boards on the bar top were once part of the boardwalk. Order a flight of four beers and you'll receive a vintage plastic skateboard with holes drilled into it to hold the glasses containing 5-ounce pours. Order all six of the rotating beers and the flight arrives in a wooden surfboard.
But Backshore's beer is wildly inconsistent. When friends and I stopped in last summer, shortly after its April 2013 opening, our assessment was that the beers were okay — inoffensive, not particularly memorable, but a step up from the ubiquitous Miller Lite or Landshark.
A trip in early May, though, was a disappointment. One of the six beers we tried was a Maerzen called Novemberfest, which tasted like it had been sitting in the tap lines all winter. The 410 Kolsch was fine for a summer beer, and the light, sweet Downtown Sugar Brown, one of the better beers last year, was just as I remembered. (It's worth noting that since my most recent visit, the brewpub has tapped a new IPA and a stout aged in bourbon barrels, which sound more interesting than anything I tried.)
Temper your expectations and enjoy the scenery, but don't go out of your way.
OCEAN CITY BREWING CO.
5509 Coastal Hwy., Ocean City, Md. www.ocbrewingcompany.com.
Planning to open June 1.
In a perfect world, the Ocean City Brewing Company would have been open May 1, with a dozen of its own beers on tap. But red tape and delays with licensing and permits have taken a toll, and the brewery now hopes to open June 1, says owner Josh Shores.
But you won't be able to taste Ocean City Brewing's beers right away: Because of the permitting delays, brewer Mark Fesche was delayed in making his own recipes. If all goes well, they'll be on tap in mid-June. In the meantime, Shores says the two dozen taps in the pub will be filled with local craft brews.
What's most impressive about Ocean City Brewing right now is its sheer scale: The 18 000-square-foot building, which formerly housed a lumber company, includes a 30-barrel brewing system, which is more than three times the size of Burley Oak's and six times the size of Fin City's. The restaurant area of the brewpub has 200 seats, and the bar will seat an additional 100 at long, Oktoberfest-style tables made from barrels.
“I saw plenty of places that were smaller, but I wanted to be a full production brewery,” Shores says. “We want to be the next Dogfish Head.” - Washington Post