This company sold Google a quantum computer. Here’s how it works.

D-Wave officials with one of their computers. (Steve Jurvetson)
Last week I did an interview with Scott Aaronson, an MIT computer scientist and a leading expert on quantum computing. Aaronson had harsh words for D-Wave, a leading quantum computing vendor that Aaronson considers "the leaders on generating hype."
I thought it would be interesting to hear from D-Wave, a start-up that has raised more than $130 million in venture capital and employs over 100 people. So I interviewed Jeremy Hilton, D-Wave's vice president of processor development. He has been at the company since 2000. We spoke on the phone on Tuesday. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Timothy B. Lee: Let's start at the beginning. Can you explain what D-Wave's products do and why they're useful?
Jeremy Hilton: Let me give you a bit of history of why D-Wave ended up going down the path it went down. We were founded back in 1999. Up until 2005, we were really focused on surveying the field of quantum computing. We asked, "of all the different ways to realize a quantum computer, what was the best technology that would be able to scale up to a relevant computational scale?"
That was a fascinating exercise. It showed a lot of things. It showed some of the massive challenges in implementing the conventional model for building a quantum computer. That model is called Gate Model Quantum Computing. [Editor's note: Scott Aaronson explained that model in a recent Switch interview.] And when people typically describe quantum, they are thinking of this gate model approach. It's an intuitive way to describe quantum computing because it extends our current understanding of how computers work.
But in the early 2000s, some bright researchers from MIT published an alternative model called adiabatic quantum computing. There are a number of differences between gate and adiabatic QC. It's been proven in the literature—not by D-Wave—that those are equivalent models of quantum computation. That being said, what D-Wave built is not universal quantum computing.
So why did you decide to go with the adiabatic approach?
When the original models were proposed at MIT and this adiabatic approach was born, then there were some follow-on researchers at MIT who also extended that into a physical implementation in superconducting qubits. D-Wave at the time, 2004, in particular Geordie Rose, founder and now CTO, was looking at this stuff. They were trying to figure out how D-Wave could start building hardware and do something useful in a shorter time frame than is possible with this gate model approach. The [adiabatic] algorithms that have been published were strongly connected to [solving] optimization problems. That gets you into the space of solving a complexity class called NP-Hard.
There are a lot of things that differentiate gate model and adiabatic quantum computing (AQC). One of the key things is the role of decoherence. One of the criticism we often hear from the academic community is that basically you sink or swim based on your decoherence time. [i.e. the amount of time, typically a small fraction of a second, that a quantum computing device can maintain its quantum characteristics.] [Academics believe that] if your qubit doesn't pass a high threshold, you can't get started. That's why over the last 15 years, that community has focused on building better qubits. [They're still working with] two or three qubits, but decoherence times have really improved.
In 2005 when we were starting to think about this AQC model, we noticed something different. The states that you care about are always the ground state of your system of qubits. That means you have some inherent robustness and immunity from noise and things like decoherence. That means we could start building AQC processors and use it to solve these problems that have practical applications we care about [without building the more robust qubits needed for gate-model quantum computing].
Can you be more concrete about this? What kind of hardware is inside a D-Wave device and how does it work?
In concrete hardware terms, all of these models [of quantum computing] can be implemented in superconducting hardware, ion hardware, many other types of hardware. [There are] implementations of AQC in ion trap configurations. That's all possible.
D-Wave has focused on the superconducting side of things to benefit from the infrastructural advancement the semiconductor has made. The fabrication of superconductors is all [mature] semiconductor technology. We fabricate [our chips] at Cyprus Semiconductor. We don't have exotic tools to make those devices. That was an important aspect for D-Wave, we want to scale up to a high level. If all those problems have already been solved, we'll be able to take advantage more quickly. [If we had used] ion trap technology, new technologies would have needed to scale up.
D-Wave's processor is custom-designed to solve something called the Ising spin glass in a transverse magnetic field. That problem can be mapped to other problems that are very interesting. There are problems that are known in logistics and scheduling, things like  satisfiability. These are mathematical challenges that represent problems people have. The traveling salesman problem is the classic example of this type of optimization problem. From there, the spectrum of potential applications is quite a lot larger.
Google is one of your partners. How has Google put D-Wave's technology to use?
In 2009, we did some work with Google to develop a car classifying [system]. It did object identification in image search. The idea was to be able to use our 128 qubit processor to train an algorithm to be able to identify if a car was in a picture or not. These kinds of questions seem a bit odd to us, because as humans it's very easy to determine if there's a car in a picture. But a machine looks at it in terms of pixels rather than objects. A lot of machine learning is how do we get machines to think of pictures as the objects instead of the raw data.
So this work that we did with Google, and that was later published, was really about adapting their state-of-the-art conventional algorithms and adapting it and see how it would perform [with quantum hardware]. We ran the training [e.g. had the computer analyze example data] for a couple of weeks on the hardware. The outcome was a "trained" piece of software that no longer needed to be on the quantum processor. And it was quite good at identifying cars—comparable or slightly better than what they were able to do [with conventional computers]. It's a great illustration for us of the potential of the technology and how it could be used.
The algorithm looks for features of the image. The identification and evaluation of those features turns into an optimization type of problem. That optimization problem was adapted to run on our hardware. We had to change the problem around slightly so it can run on our hardware, cast it in a form that's actually a little harder for people to solve [with conventional computers].
Even the fact that it was in the ballpark of the conventional algorithms in the field was very exciting. We didn't really officially release the 128 qubit product until 2011. This was on a very early version of this technology
I thought the point of quantum computing was that it could solve problems dramatically faster than conventional computers. Why should people be impressed if your hardware only produced results that are "comparable or slightly better" than conventional methods?
An important element of D-Wave's technology is our roadmap. We're continuously improving and building bigger processors. Recently we released a 512 qubit processor. If we look at the performance roadmap of that hardware, where performance in solving these problems relative to the state of the art, we saw that between that 128 qubit and 512 qubit, a 300,000x improvement in performance. That kind of performance gain is really unprecedented.
With that 512 qubit processor, it was able to meet and match the state of the art in classical algorithms and computers. It's very exciting that we had achieved that. So when we look at that we say we continue to make these things bigger and more powerful.
Right now, we have a 1000 qubit processor in our lab. We plan to release it later in 2014. The major thing that's changing aside from some of the design details is the scale of the problem you can represent, going from a 500-variable graph to a 1000-variable graph. Complexity of that is growing tremendously. [It leads to an] unimaginable exponential blowup of the number of solutions. That scale of problems is getting that much harder for classical algorithms to solve.
[After that] we're planning to release a 2000-bit processor design. That's pushing into a scale of territory where we're tackling problems that are very difficult for people to solve [with conventional methods]. The community is working on getting a few qubits to work at the scale they're trying to work at.
We're at a point where we see that our current product is matching the performance of state-of-the-art classical computers. Over the next few years, we should surpass them. The ideal is to get into a space that is fundamentally intractable with classical machines. In the short term all we focus on is showing some scaling advantage and being able to pull away from that classical state of the art.
Can you help me gain an intuition for how this works under the hood? What does a D-Wave quantum computer do that makes it so much faster than a conventional one?
Let me give you a metaphor. An optimization problem can be represented by hills and valleys. The best answer is the lowest point in that energy landscape. The challenge in any algorithm is to explore that energy landscape in some way, to try to find that minimum. The reason these problems become so difficult is that the state space is enormous. Even at 512 qubits, with 512 variables, that 2512 states. Each one of those states is an energy in your problem. You're trying to find the one energy that is the lowest. The one bit state that represents the lowest energy in your algorithm. Classic algorithms drop themselves in that energy landscape and run downhill. More sophisticated algorithms have some way of running uphill. But you can boil it down to running downhill as fast as possible.
With quantum computing, you have the same energy landscape picture, but you start off in a superposition of all the possible states, effectively expanding the energy landscape. At any given point in time, you can use tunneling to explore different valleys. Entanglement, it's not known what the role would be. If you're in a superposition, entanglement allows those valleys to interact and interfere in a way that allows the system to find its lowest-energy optimization.
We're trying to expand the way nature works where nature is trying to find its lowest-energy configuration and bringing quantum mechanical effects to bear to help explore that energy landscape.
One of the most frequently mentioned quantum computing algorithms is Shor's algorithm, which provides an efficient way to factor large numbers. Can you implement Shor's algorithm on D-Wave's hardware?
D-Wave hasn't focused on factoring much. For very clear reasons, the general field of QC galvanized around Shor's algorithm. It's an application that captures the imagination. Talk about being able to crack public key cryptography gets peoples' attention.
There are algorithms related to the factoring problem that can be run on our hardware and we've done some basic work along those lines. It's simply not a particularly interesting market segment for a business. We've focused our energy more on problems that can connect to things like machine learning, financial modeling, logistics and scheduling. They clearly relate to major business challenges.
Why do you think some people have formed a perception that D-Wave is a secretive company?
That's a historic effect. In 2007 and really prior to 2009, we were working out a lot of the challenges associated with building a scalable technology and seeing if we could make this work. Our focus wasn't on publication. In 2009, once we got it working, we started publishing at an academic level. We had 22 scientific papers. [We released a] detailed blueprint of our technology. We've focused on having a level of transparency that's unprecedented. If people want to see our lab, we invite them and give them a tour. We make sure our scientists show them the technology.


Discuss the commercial status of quantum computing in the US.

The US has made significant investments in quantum computing.  Describe the commercial aspects of this technology in the US to include what companies are involved and where the research and development is taking place.  Commercial use of quantum computing technology also is of interest. Quantum computing efforts outside the US are not relevant. US government funding and legislation is not relevant nor is any information related to US national security.

The US has made significant investments in quantum computing. Describe the commercial aspects of this technology in the US to include what companies are involved and where the research and development is taking place. Commercial use of quantum computing technology also is of interest. Quantum computing efforts outside the US are not relevant. US government funding and legislation is not relevant nor is any information related to US national security or any information mentioning universities.

Summarize commercial aspects of a technology in a specific region for this question.

Federal Faces: Jacob M. Taylor

Jacob M. Taylor Position: Physicist, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Best known for: Government work: Motivation for service: Biggest challenge: NIST physicist Jacob Taylor (Curt Suplee/NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY) Quote: “ — From the Partnership for Public Service For a full profile, go to The Fed Page at washingtonpost.com/politics/federal-government.

Federal Faces: Jacob M. Taylor

Jacob M. Taylor Best known for: Government work: Motivation for service: Biggest challenge: NIST physicist Jacob Taylor (Curt Suplee/NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY) Quote: “ — From the Partnership for Public Service For a full profile, go to The Fed Page at washingtonpost.com/politics/federal-government.


Can quantum computing change the world? This start-up is betting on it.

outperform a classical system, said Scott Aaronson, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Recent experimental progress has given some in the field hope that scalable quantum devices are within reach, he said. The team demonstrated a way to identify and detect arbitrary errors in a quantum computer simultaneously; until now, only one type of error could be detected at a time. They also showed that it was possible to detect errors on a design that could potentially be scaled up to create larger, more powerful quantum computers. For IBM, one commercial application of quantum computing lies in biochemistry. Theoretically, scientists could simulate natural molecules to gain a better understanding of their underlying chemistry by using quantum computing, said Jerry Chow, manager of IBM’s experimental quantum computing group. That could have the potential to improve drug design, he said. The research findings are a very important step forward, but scientists still have a long way to go toward building a stable and scalable system, said Daniel Lidar, a professor of electrical engineering and chemistry and the scientific director of the USC Lockheed Martin Quantum Computation Center. The advantage of a quantum computer over a classical computer lies in the way it performs big calculations. Traditional computers use bits — 0s and 1s — to perform calculations in a sequential manner. Quantum computers, on the other hand, use devices called “qubits” that can simultaneously exist as both 0s and 1s. Using this property, quantum computers can theoretically cut down the number of calculations required to solve a problem, quickly providing a potential solution or a set of probable solutions to a problem. This property is key to solving highly specialized problems such as codebreaking or crunching big data more efficiently than a classical computer. At QxBranch, Brett says he is confident that advances in quantum computing design are already paving the way for commercial applications. The company, which has four employees in Washington and 15 around the world, has raised capital from angel investors that it will spend to validate uses of quantum computing. A Series A financing round should follow at the end of the year, Brett said. Correction: An earlier photo caption with this report incorrectly stated that Michael Brett was a former senior vice president and chief technology officer at Lockheed Martin. Ray Johnson was the former Lockheed Martin executive.

Ray O. Johnson, left, board member of quantum computing start-up QxBranch and the former senior vice president and chief technology officer of defense giant Lockheed Martin, and Michael Brett, QxBranch’s chief executive. (Jeffrey MacMillan/For The Washington Post)
Imagine a computer that could sift through millions of financial transactions in real time to detect fraud or look for signs of insider trading, and do it exponentially faster than the most powerful computers in the world today.
A Washington start-up is betting that such a machine can be built in the not-too-distant future, using the mysterious principles of quantum computing.
QxBranch
QxBranch — a spinoff from Aerospace Concepts — was born out of that collaboration and develops and tests commercial applications for quantum computing. The company has Lockheed’s recently retired chief technology officer, Ray Johnson, on its board of directors.
The power of quantum computing lies in its ability to perform complex calculations much faster than traditional computing systems, Johnson said. It could help large organizations solve logistics and optimization problems or enhance machine learning used in artificial intelligence systems, he said.
How Does a Quantum Computer Work?
At Lockheed, Johnson led the defense giant’s foray into quantum computing. The contractor and the University of Southern California jointly own one of two commercially available quantum computers in the world, manufactured by Canadian firm D-Wave (The other one is owned by Google and NASA). Lockheed also established a quantum computing research center at the University of Maryland’s College Park campus last year.
For now, a machine that can solve such large-scale problems exists only in theory. That’s because quantum computers are highly unstable, delicate systems that can function only in protected environments to eliminate interference from other particles. They are usually kept in supercooled environments colder than outer space.
There are additional uncertainties. For example, quantum computers are known to be useful for certain types of calculations such as codebreaking, but for others, such as machine learning and optimization, scientists still don’t know for sure whether they will outperform a classical system, said Scott Aaronson, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Recent experimental progress has given some in the field hope that scalable quantum devices are within reach, he said.
Last week, IBM published a research paper describing two developments that could have significant implications for the future design of such computers. IBM’s research was funded in part by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, which has sponsored several such efforts in the past.
The team demonstrated a way to identify and detect arbitrary errors in a quantum computer simultaneously; until now, only one type of error could be detected at a time. They also showed that it was possible to detect errors on a design that could potentially be scaled up to create larger, more powerful quantum computers.
For IBM, one commercial application of quantum computing lies in biochemistry. Theoretically, scientists could simulate natural molecules to gain a better understanding of their underlying chemistry by using quantum computing, said Jerry Chow, manager of IBM’s experimental quantum computing group. That could have the potential to improve drug design, he said.
The research findings are a very important step forward, but scientists still have a long way to go toward building a stable and scalable system, said Daniel Lidar, a professor of electrical engineering and chemistry and the scientific director of the USC Lockheed Martin Quantum Computation Center.
The advantage of a quantum computer over a classical computer lies in the way it performs big calculations. Traditional computers use bits — 0s and 1s — to perform calculations in a sequential manner. Quantum computers, on the other hand, use devices called “qubits” that can simultaneously exist as both 0s and 1s. Using this property, quantum computers can theoretically cut down the number of calculations required to solve a problem, quickly providing a potential solution or a set of probable solutions to a problem.
This property is key to solving highly specialized problems such as codebreaking or crunching big data more efficiently than a classical computer.
That’s why quantum computing has long attracted the interest of government agencies including the National Security Agency, which had plans to design its own computer to break encryption, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which has a request for information out on the potential uses of quantum computing.
At QxBranch, Brett says he is confident that advances in quantum computing design are already paving the way for commercial applications. The company, which has four employees in Washington and 15 around the world, has raised capital from angel investors that it will spend to validate uses of quantum computing. A Series A financing round should follow at the end of the year, Brett said.
Correction: An earlier photo caption with this report incorrectly stated that Michael Brett was a former senior vice president and chief technology officer at Lockheed Martin. Ray Johnson was the former Lockheed Martin executive.


Google’s plan to keep your Web browsing safe from the cyberattacks of tomorrow

(Kacper Pempel/Reuters)
There's a huge threat looming over the way people's data are protected right now — and Google is testing out a way to guard against it.
The threat is a still-experimental technology called quantum computing, and Google announced Thursday that it was taking the first step toward protecting user's browsing data against it. The search giant is testing out a Web encryption method called "New Hope," which is designed to help fend off potential quantum attacks for a small number of Chrome browser users when they connect to Google's servers.
To understand why quantum computing could be such a big problem for encryption, we'll have to talk a little bit about how it works. Normal computers rely on bits, the smallest units of data, represented by either a zero or one, to store and process information. But quantum computer bits or "qubits" can encode more complex pieces of information.
That means that quantum computers have the potential to solve certain kinds of problems much, much faster than regular computers — including guessing the digital keys that are used to lock up the encryption techniques that are common today. Basically, that means quantum computing has the potential to turn into a kind of master lockpick that could help governments or cybercriminals open up everything from your email to your online banking account.
Luckily, that kind of attack would require much larger quantum computers than what exists today, so it's still a theoretical problem. But it's a problem Google wants to head off by figuring out how to deploy "post-quantum" encryption algorithms, those designed to be more difficult to crack with the type of processing quantum computing uses, sooner rather than later.
The algorithm they're testing now, New Hope — and yes, that is a Star Wars reference — was created by cryptography researchers Erdem Alkim, Léo Ducas, Thomas Pöppelmann and Peter Schwabe. In Google's experiment, the New Hope-based system is used alongside current industry standards to ensure that data remains protected for now, even if the test is unsuccessful.
If the experiment works, the information it protects will be safe from the prying eyes of hackers or governments who may deploy sophisticated quantum computers sometime down the line — and that future-proofing is one of the reasons Google is doing this now.
"A hypothetical, future quantum computer would be able to retrospectively decrypt any Internet communication that was recorded today, and many types of information need to remain confidential for decades," Google software engineer Matt Braithwaite wrote in a blog post revealing the experiment. "Thus even the possibility of a future quantum computer is something that we should be thinking about today."


Find information on homebrewing beer and its increasing popularity.

Homebrewing beer has been legal in the United States since the 1970's. It's popularity increases each year. Some brewers have been using locally grown ingredients and have increased their output so much that they have turned their former hobby into profitable businesses. The Capitol region is a thriving area for homebrewers and microbrewers.  Find information on the growth of homebrewing. Keep the results limited to American only, any mention of a non-American brewery/beer is irrelevant.

Research the expansion of a specific hobby into a business for this question.

Savor week: Beer events for Wednesday, May 7

This weekend's Savor craft beer festival brings brewers and beer fans from across the country to the National Building Museum for two nights of tastings and seminars. But the real fun takes place at local bars in the nights leading up to the festival, with happy hours, brewer meet-and-greets and rare-beer events. Every day this week, we'll publish a list of that night's must-do events, which don't require RSVPs. Just show up and pay for what you drink.
• Savor Week events you'll need tickets for
ChurchKey will be pouring 50 beers Wednesday night. Stick to four-ounce tasters to try more beer. (Astrid Riecken/The Washington Post)
Two of the finest breweries in Fort Collins, Colo., are bringing 10 drafts to Scion for an event cleverly called "Beer & Cheese: An Evening with Funkwerks, Odell, & Right Proper." The folks who run the cheese counter at D.C.'s own Right Proper Brewing Company will match Funkwerks' flavorful saisons and Belgian-style ales and Odell's brawny IPAs and malty Scotch ale with a variety of cheeses. (The private pairing class with the owners of Odell and Funkwerks is sold out, but cheese and beer pairings can be purchased a la carte at the bar while they last.) Scion has posted the full draft list on its site.
It would be easy to make "War Between the States" jokes about ChurchKey's "North vs. South" night, which pits the beers of Maine's Allagash and New York's Ithaca against those of Georgia's Terrapin and North Carolina's Foothills, but really, all that matters is that all 50 taps and five casks will be pouring some truly excellent beers. My pick-only-one choices would be Allagash Midnight Brett, Ithaca White Gold Belgian ale, Terrapin Maker’s Mark barrel-aged Big Hoppy Monster and Foothills IPA of the Month, and then the cask of Terrapin Maggie's Peach with hibiscus, green cardamom, cinnamon and peach in the cask. All beers are sold in four-ounce glasses are well as full pours to help with sampling. You can see the full list on ChurchKey's Facebook page.
Eugene, Ore.,'s Oakshire Brewing has been earning raves for its small-batch beers and aged seasonals, but since they distribute only within Oregon, most Washingtonians haven't been able to try them. Thank God for Savor, then: The brewery is taking over 10 taps on the roof of Jack Rose tonight, with local fixtures 3 Stars taking over the other 10. I'm most looking forward to tasting Oakshine, but 3 Stars is making sure they won't be overlooked: They're debuting a version of Southern Belle brown ale aged in a cask of Knob Creek rye whiskey, which Jack Rose boasts as "the only known Knob Creek Rye barrel to ever leave the distillery." All beers will be $5 between 6 and 9 p.m., and the draft list is posted here.


Craft beers crash the party at Maryland, Delaware beaches

• Jump to: On the way to Ocean City | In Ocean City | Near the Delaware Beaches • Beach bars and liquor stores with local beer on tap
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, much like the Washington region, 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.
• Gallery: Take a look inside three Eastern Shore brewpubs
To research this story, I spent two weekends brewery-hopping at the shore with friends, visiting every place at least once. (We skipped Dogfish Head, choosing to focus on the younger and lesser-known breweries.) We ordered samplers, swapped glasses and rated favorites. While I love a good barrel-aged stout as much as the next guy, we were looking for two types of beers in particular: something refreshing to sip on the porch of your beach house or condo, and something that would wow your beer-snob friends who always rave about the latest and rarest thing they found at ChurchKey.
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.)
Cambridge's RAR Brewing is a hip bar with live music, table shuffleboard and its own brewery. (Photo by Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
On the way to Ocean City

1. RAR Brewing
504 Poplar St., Cambridge, Md. 443-225-5664. www.realerevival.com.
Best for
Beer to drink on your beach house porch
Beer to impress your beer-snob friends
Hours
RAR Brewing has what you'd expect from a hip small-town bar: a friendly staff, a weekly shuffleboard league, performances by comedians and musicians, and food prepped right behind the bar counter. (But also try the sushi, which comes from the nearby Mantra restaurant.) Then you notice the brewing equipment through a window in the dining room.
Launched last August, RAR Brewing - an abbreviation of the clunky full name, ReAleRevival - is still getting its feet wet but shows plenty of promise. Only two of the eight beers on draft in early May were RAR's: the Nanticoke Nectar IPA, a zesty hop bomb that received universal approval from my group, and Bucktown Brown, which had rich roasted-coffee notes. The other taps included DC Brau's Everyday Junglist and Dogfish Head Namaste - a sign these guys like interesting beer.
I wanted to get a growler of "The Necta," as it's advertised on pint glasses, but because of the brewery's small size, the bartenders couldn't sell it to go until the next batch of kegs were ready a few days later. The brewery has plans to expand its offerings: A saison will be released this weekend.

2. Evolution Craft Brewing Company
201 E. Vine St., Salisbury, Md. 443-260-2337. www.evolutioncraftbrewing.com.
Best for
Beer to drink on your beach house porch
Beer to impress your beer-snob friends
Hours
Events
Outside of Dogfish Head, Evolution - Evo to its fans - should be the Delmarva brewery most familiar to Washington beer lovers: Its core line, including Lot 3 IPA and Lucky 7 Porter, is found all over the D.C. area. That growth was possible because of Evolution's 2012 relocation from a tiny building in Delmar to a former ice plant in Salisbury, which now boasts an acclaimed restaurant and bar-sized tasting room as well as a large-capacity brewery.
The tasting room usually has nine to 10 beers on tap for sampling. On weekends, there's often a cask-conditioned ale, too. The raw bar offers $1 local oysters at happy hour, which encourages lingering. (For something more substantial, the menu at the neighboring Public House is stocked with local seafood and produce.)
There frequently are one-off and collaboration beers available to sip, and those hoping for something outside Evo's familiar but stellar lineup should look beyond the taps: The bar sells 750 milliliter bottles of the seasonal Migration beers, which are aged for months in spirits or wine barrels.

3. 3rd Wave Brewing
501 N. Bi-State Blvd., Delmar, Del. 302-907-0423. www.3rdwavebrewingco.com.
Best for
Beer to drink on your beach house porch
Beer to impress your beer-snob friends
Hours
Events
The space occupied by 3rd Wave Brewing is a piece of brewing history: From 2009 to the spring of 2012, the former grocery store was the original home of Evolution. When Evo moved to larger premises in Salisbury, Md., Lori Clough and Suellen Vickers decided to make the leap from homebrewing to running a brewery. They opened 3rd Wave in the fall of 2012.
The one-room brewery doesn't contain much beyond a bar, a television and an area selling hats and T-shirts, but there are shaded picnic tables in the parking lot. With nine beers on tap, it's worth getting a flight (four 4-ounce pours for $6). Skip 3rd Wave's IPAs and double IPAs, which we've found to be thin and a bit unbalanced, and look for the sweeter, sunnier beers: The fruit-kissed BeachBreak Apricot Wheat is exactly the kind of smooth, quaffable beer you want on a hot day, and Dean B's Honey Saison isn't far behind.

4. Tall Tales Brewing Company
6929 Heron Grove Ct., Parsonsburg, Md. 410-543-2739. www.talltalesbrew.com.
Best for
Beer to drink on your beach house porch
Beer to impress your beer-snob friends
Hours
Events
The most interesting thing about the year-and-a-half-old Tall Tales Brewing Company is its outdoor bar. Owner Jason Hearn ran a landscaping company before becoming a brewer, and it shows in the spacious, well-manicured back patio, which has water features and planters in addition to an extensive bar with wood-burning pizza ovens. Dogs and kids can stretch their legs and adults can play cornhole and, later this summer, volleyball in a sandy area.
My friends and I tried flights of everything that was available, and most of the offerings were the kind of beers that elicited a shrug as we passed the glasses around. Some Beach Island Ale is a light, biscuity kolsch that would be nice to sip in the sun, but nothing else made us want to grab beers to go. The most popular beer, we were told, is Red Headed Step Child, an Irish red ale that came off as too sweet and malty.
The tap room at Burley Oak Brewery is a cool neighborhood bar with games, live music and some of the best craft beer in Maryland. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

5. Burley Oak
10016 Old Ocean City Blvd., Berlin, Md. 443-513-4647. www.burleyoak.com.
Best for
Beer to drink on your beach house porch
Beer to impress your beer-snob friends
Hours
Events
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 flavor 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.
In Ocean City

6. Fin City Brewing Co.
Inside Hooper's Crab House, 12913 Ocean Gateway, Ocean City, Md. 410-213-1771. www.fincitybrewing.com.
Best for
Beer to drink on your beach house porch
Beer to impress your beer-snob friends
Hours
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 flavors, and the Blackfin Black IPA, where the roasted malt gets some citrus flavor 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, 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.

7. Backshore Brewing Co.
913 Atlantic Ave., Ocean City, Md. 443-373-1224. www.facebook.com/Backshore.
Best for
Beer to drink on your beach house porch
Beer to impress your beer-snob friends
Hours
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.
Lorrie Taylor of West Grove, Penn., and her husband Patrick (left) visit the Backshore Brewing Company on Ocean City's boardwalk whenever they're in town. (Photo by Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

8. Ocean City Brewing Co.
But you won't be able to taste Ocean City Brewing's beers right away: Because of the permitting delays, brewer Mark Fesche won't be making his own recipes until this week at the earliest. 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."
Near the Delaware beaches

9. 16 Mile Brewery
413 S. Bedford St., Georgetown, Del. 302-253-8816. www.16milebrewery.com.
Best for
Beer to drink on your beach house porch
Beer to impress your beer-snob friends
Hours
Events
The 16 Mile Brewery has been around since 2009, but visiting became a special experience when the spacious tasting room and tavern opened in January 2012. There are 11 beers on tap, televisions, tables inlaid with checkerboards and, incongruously, a fireplace, which was roaring away on a warm day in early May.
16 Mile's six core beers, such as the light Responders Ale and Amber Sun Ale, are often found at Delaware beach bars and liquor stores. They're fine English-influenced ales, but not particularly distinctive. Here's why you should visit the brewery, which is about a 30-minute drive from the Delaware beaches: There are always five draft-only beers, which may be originals or variations on existing brews, on the chalkboard menu. The crisp, malty Blues' Golden Ale, for instance, becomes a different (and more delicious) animal when orange, sage, basil and thyme are added; a version earlier this month was aged with lime, salt and tequila-soaked oak.
Bartenders - who sometimes are the brewers themselves - are generous with flights. Six 5-ounce pours cost $10, eight are $12 and you can sample all 11 for $16. (Individual 5-ounce pours are $2 each if you want to create a smaller flight.) When you find something you like, you can purchase a pint and watch a baseball game or, on Friday nights, listen to music. 16 Mile bottles its beers, somewhat of a rarity among Eastern Shore brewers, so six-packs and cases of the core beers are available to go, along with growlers.

10. Mispillion River
255 Mullett Run St., Milford, Del. 302-491-6623. www.mispillionriverbrewing.com.
Best for
Beer to drink on your beach house porch
Beer to impress your beer-snob friends
Hours
Events
Mispillion River, which opened in November 2013, needed only five months to make its mark on the national beer scene, claiming a silver medal at the World Beer Cup for Beach Bum Joe, a refreshing and fruity cross between a Belgian golden ale and a hoppy American pale ale. (Naturally, it placed in the American-Belgo-Style Ale category.)
Despite the award, you probably haven't heard of Mispillion River: Its beers are available only in Delaware, and only on draft. But it's worth seeking out.
Set in an anonymous business park, Mispillion doesn't look like much. The large tasting room, fitted with board games and a PA system for weekend shows, isn't that impressive. But what's coming out of the taps is downright exciting, thanks to brewer Jared Barnes and assistant brewer Ryan Maloney: A malty, heavily hopped imperial red ale called Holy Crap! has just the right amount of sweetness; a big, bold black IPA named Big Earl bursts with four kinds of citrusy and spicy hops; and a malty, deliciously on-style German Dopplebock is named Goat Island Thunder, after a nearby nature area. I brought a couple of friends along to sample the beers, and we kept passing glasses around asking, "Seriously? Have you tried this one yet?"
There's a blink-and-you-miss it element to the beer. Of the 10 beers we enjoyed in early May, I asked the bartender - assistant brewer Maloney - which ones might still be available when we came back Memorial Day weekend. He thought there might be three. (One of them, thankfully, was the Mosaic, a malty, aromatic pale ale made solely with Mosaic hops.) He said that Mispillion had made about 70 beers, though not all of them had made it to the taps.
All I call tell you to do is go in and start sampling: Four 5-ounce pours cost $10, and 10 go for $20. You're going to want to have a full glass ($5) of at least one when you're finished, and then it's time for the hard choice: Which ones do you take home?


Farm-based breweries are on tap in Loudoun

Beer lovers can look forward to the arrival of farm-based breweries across Loudoun County this spring, after the Board of Supervisors’ recent passage of an ordinance that allows brewery businesses and tasting rooms on land where ingredients for beer are grown. Last year, state lawmakers passed legislation that relaxed regulations for farm-based breweries across Virginia. The Board of Supervisors’ approval of the farm brewery ordinance at a Jan. 21 meeting made Loudoun the first county in Virginia to incorporate the new state law into local legislation. Jay DeCianno, a farmer who is preparing to open a brewery now that the ordinance has passed, said in a statement that Loudoun’s aspiring brewers were “thrilled” that the board had authorized farm breweries. “This demonstrates their support for entrepreneurs and small business owners like us,” DeCianno said. “We depend on this for our success.” Virginia is home to 93 craft breweries, according to the Virginia Craft Brewers Guild, eight of which are operating in Loudoun. The Brewers Association estimates that these businesses have a statewide economic value of more than $650 million. The ordinance will allow farmers outside Loudoun’s incorporated towns to begin farm brewery operations, county officials said in a statement. The county’s department of economic development is working with six new businesses that plan to begin production this year, officials said. “We have everything in Loudoun to make farm breweries an incredibly successful industry,” Loudoun Economic Development Director Buddy Rizer said in the statement. Within days of the governor’s announcement, the popular, Frederick, Md.-based Flying Dog brewery moved to set up shop in Loudoun, county officials said. “Every day we get calls from people who want to start breweries or grow hops or specialty grains,” Rizer said in the statement. Kellie Boles, the county’s agricultural business development officer, anticipates that the local brewery industry will follow the path of the county’s explosive winery scene. “Our winery industry has doubled in the last decade, and there’s a pent-up demand for farm breweries,” Boles said in the statement. “These businesses will make a big contribution to the Loudoun economy in a short time.” “Passing this legislation allows us to grow our brewery product offerings and extend our visitor experience into western Loudoun,” Beth Erickson, Visit Loudoun president and chief executive, said in an e-mail. “This paves the way for Loudoun to have a vibrant craft beer scene that has the potential to rival

Beer lovers can look forward to the arrival of farm-based breweries across Loudoun County this spring, after the Board of Supervisors’ recent passage of an ordinance that allows brewery businesses and tasting rooms on land where ingredients for beer are grown.
Last year, state lawmakers passed legislation that relaxed regulations for farm-based breweries across Virginia. The Board of Supervisors’ approval of the farm brewery ordinance at a Jan. 21 meeting made Loudoun the first county in Virginia to incorporate the new state law into local legislation.
Jay DeCianno, a farmer who is preparing to open a brewery now that the ordinance has passed, said in a statement that Loudoun’s aspiring brewers were “thrilled” that the board had authorized farm breweries.
“This demonstrates their support for entrepreneurs and small business owners like us,” DeCianno said. “We depend on this for our success.”
Virginia is home to 93 craft breweries, according to the Virginia Craft Brewers Guild, eight of which are operating in Loudoun. The Brewers Association estimates that these businesses have a statewide economic value of more than $650 million.
The ordinance will allow farmers outside Loudoun’s incorporated towns to begin farm brewery operations, county officials said in a statement. The county’s department of economic development is working with six new businesses that plan to begin production this year, officials said.
“We have everything in Loudoun to make farm breweries an incredibly successful industry,” Loudoun Economic Development Director Buddy Rizer said in the statement.
Loudoun’s increasingly popular craft brewery industry will also be fueled by the addition of the largest hops yard in the state — the first commercial-scale hops processing facility located in the mid-Atlantic region — at Black Hops Farm in Lucketts. The project, which will convert 15 acres of former pasture land into a sprawling hops yard, was announced in November by Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D.)
Within days of the governor’s announcement, the popular, Frederick, Md.-based Flying Dog brewery moved to set up shop in Loudoun, county officials said.
“Every day we get calls from people who want to start breweries or grow hops or specialty grains,” Rizer said in the statement.
Kellie Boles, the county’s agricultural business development officer, anticipates that the local brewery industry will follow the path of the county’s explosive winery scene.
“Our winery industry has doubled in the last decade, and there’s a pent-up demand for farm breweries,” Boles said in the statement. “These businesses will make a big contribution to the Loudoun economy in a short time.”
Officials with Visit Loudoun, the county’s tourism organization, said they plan to build on Loudoun’s prominence as a beer destination by creating a “craft beer trail,” similar to local wine trails that have lured visitors to the county’s 42 wineries. A “beer traveler” survey conducted by Visit Loudoun last year showed that the county’s breweries were already drawing visitors — most of whom were well educated and affluent — from across the region and beyond, adding to the $1 billion generated annually by Loudoun’s tourism industry.
“Passing this legislation allows us to grow our brewery product offerings and extend our visitor experience into western Loudoun,” Beth Erickson, Visit Loudoun president and chief executive, said in an e-mail. “This paves the way for Loudoun to have a vibrant craft beer scene that has the potential to rival similar brewery destinations in Virginia and across the country.”
Brian Jenkins, Visit Loudoun’s director of strategy and research, said the organization was aware of at least eight brewers that were waiting for the board’s vote before moving forward with plans to establish their businesses.
“The potential of tourism-generated economic impact is immense,” he said. “We expect the number of farm breweries to grow exponentially, now that the legislation is passed.”


Following a national trend, farm-to-glass beers are growing in Md.

Manor Hill Farm in Ellicott City is home to Manor Hill Brewing, the newest "farm brewery" in Maryland. A state law approved in 2012 allows farmers to make beer as long as they use Maryland agricultural products. (Fritz Hahn/The Washington Post)
Randy Marriner and his wife, Mary, bought the Manor Hill Farm in Ellicott City in 2011, thinking the 54-acre expanse would be a nice place to live while raising angus beef and growing vegetables to use at their nearby restaurant, the Victoria Gastro Pub. They never imagined they would fill two acres with towering trellises for growing hops, or convert an old barn-cum-garage into a brew house filled with gleaming stainless-steel fermenters.
They hadn’t planned on hiring Ben Little, an award-winning brewer and veteran of Flying Dog, to help them create Sour Mojito, a sour blond ale brewed with key limes and dried wintergreen that became the highest-rated beer at the 2015 Maryland Craft Beer Festival.
And they certainly didn’t think they’d be sending their beers to bars as far afield as the District and Baltimore, which they’ll be doing as of July 6.
“I’d never made beer before,” Randy says, standing in his new brewery. “I’ve consumed a hell of a lot of it.”
The spur for the Marriners to move from farming to brewing — in line with a growing national trend — was a 2012 state law that created the farm brewery manufacturer’s license. Also known as a Class 8 license, it allows its holders to, among other things, brew up to 15,000 barrels of beer a year, as long as that beer is made with Maryland agricultural products, such as hops or barley.
Randy didn’t know anything about the farm brewery bill at the time: He was busy championing a law that would allow his craft-beer bar with 24 taps to sell refillable growlers of beer for customers to take home. The real impetus came when Mary read a magazine article about Colorado’s acclaimed Oskar Blues brewery and its 50-acre farm, which brews beer, raises animals and grows vegetables to supply a pair of restaurants. “She kept hitting me in the arm and saying, ‘This is us! This is us!’ ”
That’s when Manor Hill Brewing was born, with the slogan “Family-owned, farm-brewed.”
Anyone who has been to a trendy restaurant in the past five years has certainly been made aware of the virtues of “farm-to-table”: the idea that diners can and should know which farm their carrots or kale came from, or whether their free-range organic chicken had friends. It’s a valuable, if mockable, ideal. But as that label becomes passe, a growing number of brewers are trumpeting “farm-to-glass” beers, creating IPAs and sour ales with products grown in neighboring fields.
The Marriners’ story is one that’s becoming more common throughout the Free State, according to Kevin Atticks, executive director of the Brewers Association of Maryland. “It’s on the increase,” he says, adding that his office is fielding more calls about “taking a family farm and finding new ways to make use of it,” such as turning it into a farm brewery or farm distillery. “The state has a keen interest in using its alcohol laws as a means to preserve family farms. You’re not just helping a new industry; you’re preserving lands and creating jobs in the rural economy.”
A few small breweries sprang up in the wake of the 2012 legislation, including Milkhouse Brewery at Stillpoint Farm in Mount Airy and Ruhlman Brewing in Carroll County. But interest truly heated up last year, when the statehouse modified the Class 8 license to allow farm brewers to become wholesalers and sell their products directly to bars and restaurants rather than go through a distributor.
Beneficiaries of the new rules include Red Shedman Farm Brewery & Hop Yard, which opened at the Linganore Winecellars in Frederick County in November and now distributes to restaurants and liquor stores in seven counties, and Manor Hill Brewing, which poured its first beers at Victoria in March. Atticks knows of “at least four more in the planning stages,” including the Brookeville Beer Farm, the first farm brewery in Montgomery County, which aims to be brewing in September.
Virginia passed a similar law in 2014, easing the path for farm breweries to open on land zoned for agricultural purposes, because the act of brewing beer is considered manufacturing. Old 690 Brewing in Purcellville was one of the first breweries to take advantage of the new rules, with 300 hop plants in the ground before its opening last August. There are more in the works; the most prominent was to be Farmworks Brewery in Lucketts, run by Flying Dog, but the brewery canceled those plans last month.
Nationally, the number of farm breweries is “certainly growing, mostly buoyed by the increasing number of states offering farm brewery licenses,” says Bart Watson, chief economist for the Brewers Association, a nationwide craft-beer trade group. (The group does not yet break out farm breweries from other craft breweries and so does not have definitive statistics on their growth.)
An early adopter in the farm brewing category was Oregon’s Rogue Ales, which bought its first farm in 2008 and now owns two. At first, President Brett Joyce says, they bought farms to supply their own hops and avoid price fluctuations that were rife in the industry. “We loved it so much that, 12 months into it, we thought, ‘Why can’t we do barley? Why can’t we grow grain?’ Then we started planting other crops,” such as pumpkins, he says. Those crops allowed brewers to experiment with new products, such as pumpkin beer, and “we wouldn’t have done that before we had the farm,” Joyce says.
Usually eight or nine beers are brewed each year, using only products from the farm and sold under the Rogue Farms label. More important, the Rogue farms now supply about 15 percent of the barley and 40 to 45 percent of the hops for all beers in the Rogue Ales line. “It’s enough that we’re serious about it,” Joyce says, adding that “if there’s a disaster, we can still get the hops we need.”
That is an important point: While some people see “farm brewery” and assume that it means all the ingredients come from the same farm, that’s not the case with most Maryland breweries. “The difficulty of building that [one-farm] business model is weather, diseases and pests, which doesn’t always sync up with the reality of the craft beer market, especially when you get into the supply side with restaurants,” explains Atticks of the Brewer’s Association of Maryland. “We’ve had two very rough winters. The crops suffer.” Compounding the problem is a lack of malt houses, which prepare the grain for brewing. There’s only one in the state at the moment, in Frederick County, though more are planned.
At Manor Hill, the Marriners put in 2,800 Chinook, Cascade, Centennial and Nugget hop plants and will use those and vegetables and herbs from the Victoria Gastro Pub garden. (Brewer Ben Little is looking forward to making a sour beer with blackberries aged in a rye barrel with Brettanomyces yeast.) They’re negotiating with Maryland farmers to supply other ingredients, in order to keep their beers as local as possible. The water comes from a hand-dug 65-foot-deep well on the property. Randy Marriner says that Alda Hopkins Clark, the mother of longtime state Sen. James A. Clark Jr., who lived on a neighboring farm, claimed that the well’s water “makes the best iced tea in Howard County.”
For now, anyone looking to try the flagship Manor Hill IPA — well made, with a burst of tropical fruit in the nose and balanced by resiny pine notes in the finish — will have to head to the Victoria Gastro Pub in Columbia, where four of the two dozen taps will be dedicated to Manor Hill beers. Marriner does not plan to open a public tasting room or offer tours of Manor Hill Brewing, for reasons of access: The farm is at the end of a long, narrow road, and to have visitors frequently driving down “would destroy the character” of the rural area, he says. “And I live here. . . . We figure our restaurants will be our tasting rooms,” referring to Victoria Gastro Pub and Food Plenty, which is set to open in Clarksville in 2016.
That’s the biggest thing that sets Manor Hill apart from other farm breweries. Old 690 offers tours, food trucks, live music and weekly trivia nights. Ruhlman has a disc golf course adjacent to the tasting room. Rogue president Joyce boasts that “we’ve created a beer version of a winery: Come to our farm, see our hops, smell them, taste them.” Marriner says that he’s not opposed to the burgeoning field of what’s known as agri-tourism, but that it’s just not a good fit for Manor Hill. He does concede there that might be “very specific, controlled kinds of events” at the farm.
Manor Hill is on target to produce about 2,000 barrels of beer this year, which is an average amount for a new brewery and it’s slightly more than DC Brau produced in its first year. Next year, Marriner says, he plans to expand the number of fermenters and bring in a mobile canning unit to produce six-packs of the brewery’s flagships. By next month, a limited number of kegs will begin finding their way to bars throughout Maryland and in the District. A series of launch parties is in the works.
“It’s good for the local economy, it’s good for the environment,” Marriner says. “This is a family-owned, true-to-ourselves operation. We can do what we want to do.”
Manor Hill Brewing (not open to the public): www.manorhillbrewing.com.
Victoria Gastro Pub: 8201 Snowden River Pkwy., Columbia. 410-750-1880. victoriagastropub.com.
More:
How to have the most Maryland summer ever


The best beer events to check out during Savor week

The taps at City Tap House will play host to out-of-town breweries during Savor week, including a night of Keystone State brews on June 1. (Photo by Dan Swartz/Courtesy of City Tap House)
Seventy-six breweries from across the United States will have their beers flowing at the Savor craft beer festival, June 3-4 at the National Building Museum. But it feels as if at least that many out-of-town brewers are being featured at Washington bars in the days leading up to Savor's showcase tastings. Here are the important beer events you should have on your calendar.
[Why one of the nation’s premier beer festivals seems to have lost its luster]
Monday, May 30
Tuesday, May 31
It's Taco Tuesday, and there are two beer-and-taco pairings taking place in Adams Morgan. At Jack Rose, Minnesota's acclaimed Surly is bringing 10 rare and barrel-aged beers, while Pennsylvania's Victory will also have 10 on draft. The rooftop grill menu includes tacos inspired by both states. 2007 18th St. NW. jackrosediningsaloon.com.
At Smoke and Barrel, you'll get three tacos and a side for $8, paired with beers from Michigan's Founders, including Kentucky Breakfast Stout, aged versions of Backwoods Bastard and PC Pils, which is only served at Founders' Michigan brewery. 2471 18th St. NW. smokeandbarreldc.com.
Wednesday, June 1
Thursday, June 2
Tomme Arthur is an elder statesman in the brewing world, winner of numerous gold medals in national and international competitions for his Belgian-style beers at Lost Abbey and Pizza Port in San Diego County. Arthur is in town for Savor and will host a tasting of 20 beers from those breweries and others, including a new project called the Hop Concept, at the Sovereign. Doors open at 6 p.m. 1206 Wisconsin Ave. NW. thesovereigndc.com.
Aging beer in wood is trendy, but it also can be complicated. At Pizzeria Paradiso's Fun With Foeders event, guests will try a dozen beers aged in the traditional wooden barrels, including selections from Perennial, New Belgium, Allagash, Right Proper and Bavik. Brewers Nathan Zeender of Right Proper and Phil Wymore of Perennial will talk about the process of using foeders with Paradiso beer director Josh Fernands. Tickets are $42 in advance and the event runs from 5 to 7 p.m. at the pizzeria's Georgetown location. 3282 M St. NW. eatyourpizza.com.
Friday, June 3
Saturday, June 4
Savor Afterparties
On Friday, Allagash, 21st Amendment and Uinta are taking over Lost and Found in Blagden Alley, while City Tap House hosts a late-night brunch, paired with Terrapin Wake-n-Bake, Evil Twin Imperial Donut Break and other "breakfast" beers. Lost and Found: 1240 Ninth St. NW. lostandfounddc.com. City Tap House: 901 Ninth St. NW. citytaphousedc.com.
Saturday is more of a locals' night, with two events in Chinatown. Flying Dog's appropriately named "The Unnecessary Drinks" brings a selection of brewhouse rarities to Jackpot, while DC Brau, Port City and special guests Melvin Brewing of Wyoming tap a selection of their beers - including the debut of a new barrel-aged Port City wit - at Bar Deco. Jackpot: 726 Seventh St. NW. jackpotdc.com. Bar Deco: 717 Sixth St. NW. bardecodc.com.


Savor week: Beer events for Friday-Saturday, May 9-10

The Black Squirrel features rare Florida beers and an appearance by Great Lakes' head brewer this weekend. (Photo by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post) The Savor craft beer festival finally begins tonight, and whether you have tickets or not, the happy hours and late-night "Savor after-parties" continue though the weekend. Friday Meridian Pint Saturday Stone

The Black Squirrel features rare Florida beers and an appearance by Great Lakes' head brewer this weekend. (Photo by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
The Savor craft beer festival finally begins tonight, and whether you have tickets or not, the happy hours and late-night "Savor after-parties" continue though the weekend.
Friday
Meridian Pint
Florida comes to Adams Morgan as Cigar City and Proof breweries take over 10 taps at the Black Squirrel, beginning at 4:45 p.m. Both breweries are promising to bring special brews that rarely leave their taphouses. On a more local note, the bar will also be pouring rare beers from Richmond's Strangeways brewery. All the beers from the three breweries are listed on the Black Squirrel's site.
Once the fun at the National Building Museum ends, breweries will head to nearby bars to continue the party. The most exciting one is the Colorado Brewers' Night at City Tap House, which features 40 taps from Odell, Funkwerks, Great Divide, Left Hand, Avery, Oskar Blues, New Belgium and Boulder Beer Company, for $5 to $10 each, beginning at 10 p.m. (Take a look at the pretty epic draft list.) The brewers and staff from Ommegang and Boulevard will be at R.F.D. with a selection of rare and popular beers, including the first keg of Boulevard ESB to come to Washington. The Brooklyn Brewery team will host a tap takeover at the Big Hunt, while Smuttynose sponsors a party featuring DJ Dredd and $5 drafts at the Black Cat.
Saturday
The most star-studded event of the day isn't in Washington but Fairfax, where Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione will preside over Belgium on the Beltway, a day of tasting Belgian-inspired beers from eight of America's biggest craft breweries, at the Dogfish Head Alehouse. Beer celebrities in attendance include Kim Jordan of New Belgium, Steve Hindy of Brooklyn, Rob Todd of Allagash and Dick Cantwell of Elysian. A $30 ticket, which can be purchased in advance or on site, includes tastes of all 16 beers and live music all day. (The party runs from 10 a.m. to midnight, but the brewers will only be there from noon to 2 p.m.)
Stone
Cleveland's Great Lakes Brewing has a huge following in Washington, which should make head brewer Luke Purcell's afternoon appearance at the Black Squirrel very popular. He's pouring some of the brewhouse rarities that rarely find their way outside of the taphouse, including Rally Drum Red Ale, Triple Dog Dare, Alberta Clipper Porter and Rye of the Tiger IPA, beginning at noon.
Once again, there will be parties after Savor officially wraps up for the night. Flying Dog and Firestone Walker, the breweries that collaborated on this year's official Savor beer, will take over taps at the nearby City Tap House. Try the Hydra Cuvee, a blend of black rye IPA and imperial porter, as well as other beers from the two brewers. ChurchKey is hosting an event with Bluejacket, Brooklyn and New Belgium, which will mark the debut of three new beers that brewers Greg Engert (Bluejacket), Garrett Oliver (Brooklyn) and Peter Bouckaert (New Belgium) worked on together at Bluejacket. Other beers from the three breweries will also be on tap during the event, which begins at 10 p.m.


It’s beer festival season, or how to spend your weekends for the next two months

This post has been updated. We're in the midst of peak Beer Festival Season. Through the end of June, it's tough to go more than two weeks without at least one event offering the chance to drink dozens of beers outdoors for one low(ish) price. Representatives from Baltimore's Brewer's Art brewpub pour their beers at the 2014 Maryland Craft Beer Festival, including brewer Victor Rini. (Photo by Nicholas Karlin/Courtesy of Brewers Association of Maryland) What follows is an analysis of the upcoming beer festivals, with criteria including the all-important level of Beer Geek Appeal. Maryland Craft Beer Festival Date: The annual Savor craft beer festival brings the biggest names in brewing to Washington for two nights of tastings and seminars. (Photo by Eddie Arrossi/Courtesy of Savor) Savor Date: The downside is that Savor sells out very quickly, though friends of mine have always managed to find a last-minute ticket on Craigslist or StubHub. Right now, tickets for Friday night range from $189 to $297 on StubHub, with more expensive tickets usually including access to a seminar. Summerfest DC Date: Northern Virginia Summer Brewfest Date: The following festivals have taken place since this post was first published on April 9. DC Beer Festival Date: Cherry Blossom Beer and Wine Festival Date: Mid-Atlantic Spring Beer Festival Date: Mad Fox Spring Bock Fest Date: D.C. Craft Beer Festival Date: D.C. Hopfest Date: ABV: D.C.'s Leading Libation Festival Date: Beer, Bacon, Music Date:

This post has been updated. We're in the midst of peak Beer Festival Season. Through the end of June, it's tough to go more than two weeks without at least one event offering the chance to drink dozens of beers outdoors for one low(ish) price. Representatives from Baltimore's Brewer's Art brewpub pour their beers at the 2014 Maryland Craft Beer Festival, including brewer Victor Rini. (Photo by Nicholas Karlin/Courtesy of Brewers Association of Maryland) What follows is an analysis of the upcoming beer festivals, with criteria including the all-important level of Beer Geek Appeal. Maryland Craft Beer Festival Date: The annual Savor craft beer festival brings the biggest names in brewing to Washington for two nights of tastings and seminars. (Photo by Eddie Arrossi/Courtesy of Savor) Savor Date: Summerfest DC Date: Northern Virginia Summer Brewfest Date: The following festivals have taken place since this post was first published on April 9. DC Beer Festival Date: Cherry Blossom Beer and Wine Festival Date: Mid-Atlantic Spring Beer Festival Date: Mad Fox Spring Bock Fest Date: D.C. Craft Beer Festival Date: D.C. Hopfest Date: ABV: D.C.'s Leading Libation Festival Date: Beer, Bacon, Music Date:


Loudoun news in brief

Pilot Malt House comes to Loudoun Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) announced Virginia’s first dedicated malting operation at a ceremony Dec. 10 at Black Hops Farm in Lucketts. Pilot Malt House will invest about $1 million to construct and operate the facility and create seven jobs. The company will purchase more than 2 million pounds of Virginia-grown barley, wheat and rye over the next three years. Pilot is an artisan malt house that uses locally grown grains and a mix of traditional and modern processing techniques to produce a variety of base, specialty and custom malts. “Pilot Malt House is a welcome resource for our farms and businesses,” said Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Chairman Scott K. York in a statement. “Pilot Malt House will allow more investment to stay in Loudoun and will ensure that Virginia’s craft beer industry is rooted in Loudoun’s rural economy,” said Loudoun Economic Development Director Buddy Rizer in a statement. For information, go to governor.virginia.gov. Hospital opening comes with address adjustments Thirty-nine Arcola-area property owners are getting new addresses this month. After a vote by the Loudoun Board of Supervisors, those residents will no longer live on Gum Spring Road. They will have Stone Springs Boulevard or Medical Drive addresses. The road name changes follow the opening of StoneSprings Hospital Center, and recognize new traffic patterns in the area. The changes affect the former Gum Spring Road between Route 50 and Evergreen Road. The portion of Gum Spring Road south of Route 50 is unchanged. Project Elf to provide assistance to needy families The Loudoun Department of Mental Health, Substance Abuse and Developmental Services Prevention/Intervention team is partnering with local Girl Scouts and the sheriff’s office to provide gifts and other resources to 100 families throughout the county. The Girl Scouts of Loudoun Service Unit 70 have adopted families that are receiving case management services. More than 100 troops are participating to provide gifts and clothing.. Prevention/Intervention Program staff members will deliver the gifts, clothing and food to families before the holidays. Sheriff’s deputies will assist staff delivering the gifts donated by the scouts. For information about Project Elf or the Loudoun Prevention/Intervention Program, call 703-777-0176. — Compiled by Sandy Mauck

Loudoun news in brief

Pilot Malt House comes to Loudoun Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) announced Virginia’s first dedicated malting operation at a ceremony Dec. 10 at Black Hops Farm in Lucketts. Pilot Malt House will invest about $1 million to construct and operate the facility and create seven jobs. The company will purchase more than 2 million pounds of Virginia-grown barley, wheat and rye over the next three years. Pilot is an artisan malt house that uses locally grown grains and a mix of traditional and modern processing techniques to produce a variety of base, specialty and custom malts. “Pilot Malt House is a welcome resource for our farms and businesses,” said Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Chairman Scott K. York in a statement. “Pilot Malt House will allow more investment to stay in Loudoun and will ensure that Virginia’s craft beer industry is rooted in Loudoun’s rural economy,” said Loudoun Economic Development Director Buddy Rizer in a statement. Hospital opening comes with address adjustments Thirty-nine Arcola-area property owners are getting new addresses this month. After a vote by the Loudoun Board of Supervisors, those residents will no longer live on Gum Spring Road. They will have Stone Springs Boulevard or Medical Drive addresses. The road name changes follow the opening of StoneSprings Hospital Center, and recognize new traffic patterns in the area. The changes affect the former Gum Spring Road between Route 50 and Evergreen Road. The portion of Gum Spring Road south of Route 50 is unchanged. Project Elf to provide assistance to needy families The Loudoun Department of Mental Health, Substance Abuse and Developmental Services Prevention/Intervention team is partnering with local Girl Scouts and the sheriff’s office to provide gifts and other resources to 100 families throughout the county. The Girl Scouts of Loudoun Service Unit 70 have adopted families that are receiving case management services. More than 100 troops are participating to provide gifts and clothing.. Prevention/Intervention Program staff members will deliver the gifts, clothing and food to families before the holidays. Sheriff’s deputies will assist staff delivering the gifts donated by the scouts. For information about Project Elf or the Loudoun Prevention/Intervention Program, call 703-777-0176. — Compiled by Sandy Mauck


How the Bible Belt got down with craft beer

Morgan Persky, a bartender at Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, pours a beer for a customer at the brewery's taproom in Mills River, N.C. (Jacob Biba/For The Washington Post)
Morgan Persky, a bartender at Sierra Nevada Brewing Company in Mills River, N.C., pours a beer for a customer at the brewery's taproom. (Jacob Biba/For The Washington Post)
ASHEVILLE, N.C. —
“It was a wasteland,” he says of North Carolina and surrounding states. “There was no good IPA in the Southeast.”
The reason the region wasn’t producing hoppy, piney, West Coast-style India pale ales, the type that dominate craft sales around the country? Stifling government regulation. Century-old laws made it nearly impossible to start a craft brewery across the South and Mid-Atlantic. And when lawmakers began to repeal those laws, starting with North Carolina in 2005, Dickinson and other enterprising brewers took advantage.
Dickinson and his brother, Luke, partnered with three family friends: Ryan, Rick and Denise Guthy. Together, they invested $3 million within six months, and in late 2012 they started Wicked Weed, a purveyor of IPAs, sour ales and other malted varieties that is now the fastest-growing homegrown brewery in Asheville. The Asheville area has at least 23 craft breweries and 90,000 residents, the densest concentration in the United States. North Carolina’s microbrew production has increased 600 percent, to 675,000 barrels in 2015, just in four years.
Similar stories are playing out in Virginia and South Carolina — opening a market for local entrepreneurs and, at a much larger scale, big craft players from the Western states where government hurdles were never a problem.
Ross Yates pours a beer. New Belgium Brewing Company, based in Colorado, is ramping up production in its new 500,000-barrel facility in downtown Asheville. (Jacob Biba/For The Washington Post)
The arrival of California brewery Sierra Nevada, which opened outside Asheville in 2014, and Colorado’s New Belgium, which will start offering tours on Monday, opens a final geographic frontier for one of the rare American industries where small business is booming. Their mammoth production facilities cement Asheville’s status as a power-player in the craft world — but also give their homegrown brewers some big new neighbors to worry about.
The proliferation of craft brewing on the East Coast is a case study in how government regulation can block entrepreneurship for decades — and leave entire regions playing catch-up when it is finally relaxed.
New business creation is slowing across the country and in most industries, but not in the world of beer. The industry is dominated by a few big players, led by the soon-to-be-merged SAB Miller and Anheuser-Busch InBev. But smaller competitors, peddling wide varieties of stronger and more flavorful beer, are popping up everywhere to steal market share.
There were 2,347 craft breweries in the United States in 2012, according to the Brewers Association, a trade group, and they combined for 12 percent of the country’s beer sales in dollar terms. The sales share grew to 21 percent in 2015. By year’s end, if trends hold, there will be 5,000 craft breweries nationwide.
Four Western states house more than a quarter of those breweries: California, Washington, Oregon and Colorado, which have long been havens for the hoppy India pale ales that form the liquid foundation of the craft industry. The Midwest and Northeast also boast strong craft scenes.
The Mid-Atlantic is finally on its way. From 2005 to 2012, North Carolina lawmakers steadily repealed laws — Bible Belt leftovers from the end of Prohibition nearly a century earlier — that had stifled brewers from making and selling craft beer.
They lifted restrictions on how much alcohol a beer could include by volume, which had effectively banned many of the most popular craft styles. They began allowing larger craft breweries to sell their products on site, opening the way for small-volume brew houses. And they made it easier for some smaller breweries to distribute beer to stores and bars.
Oscar Wong, founder and owner of Highland Brewing Company, inside his brewery's taproom in Asheville. (Jacob Biba/For The Washington Post)
Until the restrictions were lifted, it took enormous quantities of money and patience to start a brewery in the state. Oscar Wong had both, which was why he had no competition when he began selling beer from an Asheville basement two decades ago. He had plenty of critics, though. They wrote the local newspaper regularly, complaining that he was doing the devil’s work with his pale ale.
Wong had sold an engineering business in his 40s and was bored in retirement. He hired a brewmaster and was content to build Highland Brewing slowly, from a few converted dairy tanks in 1994 to a leafy campus with its own bottling plant today. He brewed Scottish ale that was low enough in alcohol content to avoid violating state law, and he waited eight years to finally turn a profit.
Sierra Nevada and New Belgium had no such problems in California and Colorado. They grew into two of the largest craft brewers in the nation, expanded their reach to the East Coast and looked for ways to ease their path to customers there.
This summer, New Belgium is ramping up production in its new 500,000-barrel facility that looms like a massive motorcycle (which the building is meant to evoke) parked along the French Broad River at the south end of downtown Asheville.
Its brew tanks are cooking up batches of Fat Tire, New Belgium’s signature amber ale, and Ranger, its IPA. Last month, its tasting room was packing in visitors to watch the Tour de France on a projector screen and sip varietals at reclaimed-wood tables fashioned from the remnants of the livestock yard that once occupied part of the 18-acre site. On a recent weekday, landscapers were tilling the grounds and blue masking tape held temporary paper signs on conference rooms.
Sierra Nevada’s facility is turning out hundreds of thousands of barrels of ale in a resort-style setting outside of Mills River, N.C. It is a working theme park of beer. (Jacob Biba/For The Washington Post)
Sierra Nevada’s facility is turning out hundreds of thousands of barrels of ale in a resort-style setting outside of town. It is a working theme park of beer, complete with a full restaurant, outdoor concert amphitheater and a gift shop, in what appears from the outside to be part overstuffed hunting lodge, part steel mill.
Brewing on the East Coast saves money for the Californians and the Coloradans, and it adds freshness to brews they would otherwise be shipping across the country.
“Beer is heavy,” said Brendan Beers, New Belgium’s business support manager in Asheville. “The closer you can get your production facility to the end customer, the better.”
Before construction began, New Belgium officials met with wary local brewers. They assured them that they weren’t trying to invade the Asheville craft scene — they were selling to the whole East Coast. Sierra Nevada officials say they told the locals that they would choose a different North Carolina location if there were objections to them moving to the outskirts of Asheville. Then they invited every brewer in town to an all-expenses-paid week of “beer camp” at their Northern California headquarters.
Many local brewers say the arrival of the Western craft giants has attracted more customers to their taprooms. They also say they can’t imagine trying to grow large enough, fast enough, to challenge them for East Coast craft supremacy.
“Why would I fight a battle with companies that are so well established with such a good product?” said Walt Dickinson, the Wicked Weed founder. “That’s not what we’re trying to be.”
Walt Dickinson, owner of Wicked Weed Brewing, says the arrival of the Western craft giants has attracted more customers to his taproom. (Jacob Biba/For The Washington Post)
A week after the Dickinsons announced plans for Wicked Weed, Sierra Nevada said it was coming to town. “I knew it was going to be great for us,” Walt Dickinson said, “bringing in more beer tourists.”
He was right. Wicked Weed has doubled its production every year and now is up to 22,000 barrels annually. Its main brewery and restaurant is packed in the afternoons and evenings.
None of that would have been possible under North Carolina’s old blue laws, Dickinson said. As similar laws fall around the South, in states such as Georgia and Tennessee, breweries like Wicked Weed could see growth opportunities — although the West Coast brewers will probably see more.
Policy changes in Virginia have unleashed a wave of homegrown breweries, but they have also attracted big new facilities from San Diego’s Stone Brewing (in Richmond) and Oregon’s Deschutes Brewery (in Roanoke).
“It’s a first-mover advantage” for the Western brewers, said Bart Watson, the chief economist for the Brewers Association. (Yes, that’s a real job.) “The window on being a truly national craft brewery has essentially closed already.”
For North Carolina pioneer Wong, who distributes to several states but has no national ambitions, the arrival of the Western giants in his back yard means more traffic to his brewery but also more competition for tap handles and more pressure to drop his six-pack prices.
“I would have preferred that they weren’t here,” Wong said on a recent morning, lounging in an upstairs bar at his brewery. “But what it has forced us to do is up our game.”
His is perhaps the only local brewery now large enough, at 40,000 barrels a year, to worry about going toe-to-toe with the larger Western players.
“We don’t have the efficiencies they do,” said Leah Wong Ashburn, the founder’s daughter, who is now Highland’s president. “We’ve seen 12-pack prices that I’ve never seen for craft beer.”
(Highland Brewing charges $16 for a 12-pack of its Early’s Hoppy Wheat beer. A 12-pack of Sierra Nevada sells for as little as $14.99 in grocery stores. And the mass market giant Budweiser might go for $11.50 for a 12-pack.)
Highland, though, is adapting. It recently put in a rooftop bar and is selling, with wide distribution, its first West Coast-style IPA. You can buy it at a gas station/brew emporium near the Asheville Airport.
It is displayed prominently, right next to stacked cases of Sierra Nevada.


Virginia is for beer lovers: Study highlights rapid growth of craft breweries

Loudoun County has long branded itself “D.C.’s wine country,” home to a thriving community of vineyards and tasting rooms. But a new tourism study projects that its burgeoning craft beer industry could soon make the county just as popular for its ales and lagers as it is for varietal wines.
The 2014 Virginia Craft Beer Visitor Profile Study — conducted by Visit Loudoun, the county’s tourism agency, as well as the Virginia Tourism Corporation and Nelson County’s economic development office — surveyed nearly 700 visitors at breweries across Virginia, including Lost Rhino Brewing in Loudoun. By learning more about the state’s beer tourists, officials hope to capitalize on a market that has already shown potential for explosive growth.
“There’s just not a lot of information out there on beer travelers,” said Brian Jenkins, director of business strategy and research at Visit Loudoun. “We wanted to get our heads around what the value [of the industry] is, particularly with all these permits being filed.”
About eight craft breweries have opened their doors in Loudoun, officials said, and others are in the works, a rate of growth that outpaces even the county’s rapidly expanding winery scene. Sixteen brewery permits were filed in Loudoun last year, whereas the county took more than a decade to establish that many wineries, tourism officials said.
The survey results offered a more detailed look at the visitors driving the trend. About 66 percent of the respondents were men, according to the study, and the average age was 39, younger than the usual Loudoun wine visitor and leisure traveler. The typical craft beer drinker is a highly educated professional, the survey found, and many respondents said they worked in the technology, education and health-care fields.
Many of the surveyed beer drinkers indicated that they regularly participate in tastings and sometimes make an overnight trip of their visit, driving several hours to get to specific breweries, Jenkins said. Nearly 75 percent of the survey respondents said they visit two to three breweries per trip, Jenkins said, which supports the creation of a brewery trail, comparable to several popular winery trails in Loudoun.
About 80 percent of those surveyed indicated that they also visited local restaurants, historical sites and wineries, a crossover that is especially encouraging to Loudoun officials, Jenkins said, because it highlights a broader tourism benefit.
“This gets the attention of our Board of Supervisors because it’s not just that people are coming out for the breweries, but they’re getting out to all the destinations here,” he said.
Visitors who tour multiple breweries and stay overnight tend to spend about $365 per trip, the study found.
“They don’t spend quite as much as the wine visitors, but just in terms of sheer numbers, this market is much larger,” Jenkins said. Beer drinkers make up 49 percent of the nation’s beverage alcohol market; wine drinkers account for 17 percent, officials said.
The growth of Virginia’s craft beer industry mirrors a national trend. The number of craft breweries across the country has soared in recent years, rising from about 1,800 breweries in 2010 to more than 2,500 this year, according to the Brewers Association.
In Virginia, craft brewers have benefited from recent changes to state laws.
In 2012, new regulations allowed for the sale of pints at tasting rooms, making brewery businesses more profitable. This year, state lawmakers passed legislation to relax regulations for farm-based breweries — provided that the operation grows and uses its own agricultural product, such as hops or barley, in its brews.
After the passage of the new state law in July, county officials are now considering local zoning amendments governing farm-based breweries, evaluating whether to impose any additional regulations.
Once that process is complete, tourism officials said, they anticipate a wave of new brewery permits.
“We want to get all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed,” Jenkins said. “We want to get the economic impact of this tourism going as fast as we can.”


Savor week: Beer events for Monday, May 5

This weekend's Savor craft beer festival brings brewers and beer fans from across the country to the National Building Museum for two nights of tastings and seminars. But the real fun takes place at local bars the nights leading up to the festival, with happy hours, brewer meet-and-greets and rare-beer events. Every day this week, we'll publish a list of that night's must-do events that don't require RSVPs: Just show up and pay for what you drink. • Savor week events you'll need tickets for Monday's event lineup is slow, perfect for easing into the madness of Savor week. The 20 taps on Jack Rose's rooftop deck will be taken over by Flying Dog and DC Brau tonight. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post) DC Brau Bell's Brewery Savor week involves drinking a lot of strong beer. Might as well tune up your liver at Bier Baron, which is focusing on draft beers around 5 percent ABV or less. Highlights include Smuttynose's new Bouncy House IPA (4.5 percent), Victory Hop Ticket IPA (4.5 percent) and Peak Organic's Fresh Cut dry-hopped pilsner (4.6 percent). Doors open at 4 p.m.

This weekend's Savor craft beer festival brings brewers and beer fans from across the country to the National Building Museum for two nights of tastings and seminars. But the real fun takes place at local bars the nights leading up to the festival, with happy hours, brewer meet-and-greets and rare-beer events. Every day this week, we'll publish a list of that night's must-do events that don't require RSVPs: Just show up and pay for what you drink. Monday's event lineup is slow, perfect for easing into the madness of Savor week. The 20 taps on Jack Rose's rooftop deck will be taken over by Flying Dog and DC Brau tonight. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post) DC Brau Bell's Brewery