Here’s to National IPA Day

Nearly a year to the day before the inaugural National IPA Day, I tried my first Maryland-made IPA. It was a concoction called 7 Finger Farmer at the soon-to-be-opened Burley Oak Brewing Company. Although this blog is generally about the local beer culture, in honor of National IPA Day (celebrated on August 6 this year), […]

Brewing from the rafters at Fin City

When people told me Fin City was above Hooper’s Crab House, I didn’t take them literally. After all, Hooper’s is just on the Assawoman Bay and it would make sense to have a brewery just above it on the water. Imagine my surprise when I showed up to Hooper’s to meet some of the owners […]

It’s all about the execution

The executor’s song It was 10 a.m. on a Friday morning and the boardwalk mostly was empty, save for the exercises (bikers, joggers, etc.) and Adam Davis, the head brewer at Backshore Brewing Company. Inside the brewery, Davis was just finishing up his morning. He’d popped by to get some work done early and was […]

Eastern Shore Brewers are building a better beer community

Tipping is not a city in China. It also isn’t exclusively a way to reward excellent service. One of the lesser-used variants of the word suggests when something goes mainstream in a big way. Craft beer, if it hasn’t “tipped” already, certainly is in the midst of doing so among the general public. As few […]

Where’s the beer?

Recently I had the opportunity to speak with Jim Lutz, who runs Fordham/Old Dominion in Dover. Jim inherited a number of problems after the two beer companies merged (*shameless plug alert* which will mostly be enumerated in my forthcoming book on beer in Delaware), but one of them is common still among many of the […]