craft breweries | 26 Months in DC

We’re quite old hands at visiting craft breweries now, so had an idea what to expect when we visited Dogfish Head brewery at Milton, DE. This is the brewery that makes a couple of my favourite beers out here – their 60 minute IPA and Indian brown ale are perfect after a long walk.

The brewery was surprisingly busy, so the first tour we could get on was rather later than we’d hoped. However, it was close to lunch time, so we figured we could enjoy a few tastings and grab some lunch before the tour. The brewery has a ‘beer-centric’ food menu available from ‘Bunyan’s Lunchbox’ – a sort of stationary food truck – just outside. Here they serve beer-dosed bratwursts, hop pickles (totally weird and amazing), and bowls of ‘hard-tack’ clam chowder, made with dark beer. You can also get a lot of this food at Dogfish’s brew pub ‘Dogfish Head Brewings and Eats’ in Rehoboth Beach. And they apparently stock the chowder and brats in some branches of Whole Foods and Harris Teeter.

This wide availability of Dogfish Head’s non-beer produce might give rise to a suspicion that the brewery is not quite as ‘off-centred’ as its slogan suggests. In fact, the brewery has a very established commercial arm, and its on-site shop was overflowing with merchandise.

The story of its founder was also slightly different from what we were used to – a graduate of a liberal arts college borrowed money from his parents to start this brewery. The story’s main tension revolves around the founder screwing up the courage to tell his father: thanks for all that expensive college education, but I think I want to brew beer for a living. The conversation happened while father and son were out jogging, and ended with the father suggesting the brewery’s name.

There was another obstacle to the founding of Dogfish Head. Thinking he saw a gap in the market in the fact that Delaware had no craft breweries, the founder happily went ahead with his plans, only to discover that the reason there were no craft breweries in Delaware was that it was illegal. He was undaunted though – for a very good reason: his wife was the daughter of one of the main guys who ran the state. So husband and wife lobbied for a change in the law and even got to help with drafting the legislation that made the enterprise possible.

Now I don’t want to suggest that any other craft brewery foundation story is that of a working class hero making good, but there is something a little more endearing about the story of the New Belgium founders making their start-up money through their jobs in industry, becoming successful and then handing over ownership of the brewery to their employees.

Despite all this, we still enjoyed our time at the brewery – and we still enjoy the beer.

One of the main highlights of the day though was the drive out across the Chesapeake Bridge. We saw it stretching out across the water before I drove out onto it…

… and I think I grinned for the entire time I was driving across it!

One of our ambitions since watching the Danish/Swedish detective series The Bridge has been to drive across the bridge between Denmark and Sweden. While the Chesapeake Bridge isn’t as long as that bridge, it did give us the feeling we’d imagined of being in the middle of the ocean, driving towards the horizon, part of a great feat of engineering. More than this, the sun came out, and we enjoyed flying across the water with the seabirds.

Finally we made it to our destination for the night – we were staying in a large hotel in off-season Ocean City. We weren’t alone – the hotel was pretty full of people avoiding Christmas – but the deserted, wind- and rain-swept beach certainly lived up to my standards of bleakness.

Perfect!

Read on in my next post…

Asheville is a great town in which to spend a weekend – especially if you have some weather like we had.

When people had told us about Asheville they had talked about the craft breweries, the arty/hipster vibe of the town and the Vanderbilts’ Biltmore House and Estate. Luckily it turned out that it was possible to experience all of these in just a few days, and in fact we fit most of our sightseeing and pub-crawling into just one day, as I was actually attending my conference the rest of the time(!)

So here’s a run down of where we ate and drank over the three days we had in Asheville.

Brews

Wicked Weed: Our first night in Asheville we managed to find the Wicked Weed Brewing pub/restaurant. They specialise in West Coast-style hoppy IPAs and they did not disappoint. This is my kind of beer, so I was pretty happy. Their burgers were also amazing, including one topped with pancetta and pork rinds and a bison burger with hoi sin sauce and blue cheese coleslaw. I liked the complimentary pretzels with mustard dip. Some of the beers are rather strong, and some are a bit experimental – mango guava gose anyone? – but I’d rather have a place that misses from time to time than one that isn’t interested in trying stuff out.The pub has a large garden area and is able to open most of its frontage to the open air, so you feel like you’re eating outside even when you’re inside. They also have a downstairs tasting room and a yard area that gets busy on a weekend evening, with long tables, loud music and games of corn hole. We ended up here for a late night drink the next night…

Lexington Avenue Brewery: On Friday we started here, closer in to the center of town. This place has a nice variety of beers, and I was able to find a nice session beer to start the evening with. No free snacks here, but we ordered some really great soft pretzels. Although this place does not have a garden, if you can get seats at the front you can lean on the large window ledges and enjoy the open air of the square outside. This was also a really friendly place – we got some good recommendations for other breweries from the other patrons here.

Oysterhouse Brewing Company:

We stopped here for a mid-afternoon snack after going round Biltmore. On first sight it looks just like a nice cafe-bar on a corner. There’s a few tables out front, the frontage opens to the street, and there’s a nice bar with oyster shells embedded in the top. If you go to the bathroom though, you come across the brewery! We had a really great stout here, along with some excellent oysters. I didn’t expect to find good seafood in the mountains, but these were fresh from New England, and delicious.

The Wedge:

This was probably our favourite brewery in Asheville. Based in a few old buildings by the railway, in the Asheville Arts District, this place has a large amount of outside space for people to enjoy, and free mini-pretzels and a Korean barbecue food truck in case you get hungry. We sat in the sunshine, at a picnic table which we ended up sharing with a group of hikers who had just finished a hike in the mountains. They were interested to find out how we’d found the Wedge, and what people had told us about Asheville, and were very happy to give us some recommendations for where else to drink, and eat, and hear some music. As can happen when you find that perfect beer and a sunny place to enjoy it in, time rather got away from us at this brewery, and we ended up heading back to the hotel sunburnt and sleepy.

The Thirsty Monk: We came here for a beer while we waited for a table at Tupelo Honey. It was a cool pub, decorated with signs from breweries from around the US, and the beer was good, Belgian style beer.

Food

Tupelo Honey: Although this is a chain, we decided it was worth eating here while we were in Asheville. And it was good. First came pickled and fried vegetables with ranch dressing, and fried green tomatoes with grits. I must admit, I just don’t get fried green tomatoes. The grits were great, but the tomatoes were just acidic. For mains we decided to go with the meals that included a choice of two sides, as a Southerner once told us that Southern-style food is all about the sides. I had the Carolina pan-seared trout along with mac and cheese and basil fried green beans, which was just perfect, while R went the whole hog and had fried chicken with gravy, sweet potatoes and okra – very Southern!

Biscuit Head:

We discovered these at Biscuit Head, Asheville, NC

Cathead biscuits with bacon, eggs and red-eye gravy

I cannot recommend this place highly enough. We went here on the way out to Biltmore for breakfast/brunch and it was a revelation in biscuits. Here we were introduced to the Cat head biscuit – biscuits literally as big as a cat’s head – smothered in various breakfasty toppings and sauces. This is probably the only place in the world you can get a flight of gravies to go with your biscuit. We had a go at sharing both the pulled pork biscuit (which comes with maple syrup, pimento, bacon and a poached egg) and the country ham biscuit (which comes with cheese, scrambled egg, fried green tomato and espresso gravy). It’s a lovely place too, with space in and out, and friendly staff. You queue to order and then find somewhere to sit – it doesn’t take as long as you might fear from the length of the queue, and while we were queuing they brought out refreshing testers of iced chai. You also get unmatched proper mugs for your coffee, which I thought was a nice touch.

Getting Around

While Asheville has a nice and compact downtown area, and you can just about walk to the downtown arts district – which is around where the Wedge is – we found that it was helpful to have a car, especially to get to Biscuit Head and the Oysterhouse.

Locals’ Recommendations

We didn’t manage to check these places out, but we were told good things about them. One thing we noticed about Asheville was that its restaurants offer a wide variety of cuisines – if we hadn’t been so looking forward to Southern food and Brew-pub snacks, we would have been spoiled for choice. (Some of these might require reservations)

Zambra: tapas restaurant
Table: modern American restaurant
Limones: Californian/Mexican restaurant
Early Girl Eatery: brunch place
Catawba: brewery
Green Man: brewery
The Moth Light: music venue
Asheville Music Hall/One Stop Deli and Bar: food, drink and music