Not everyone knows that local beer is not necessarily made with local ingredients. While you may have a brewery down the block from you, there are no barley fields on M Street SE and there are no hop yards on T Street NW. In the words of Right Proper’s Josh Chapman, “Beer made locally isn’t necessarily local beer.”
One argument for why local brewers don’t use all local ingredients all the time is that they can’t. There is not enough malting barley in Virginia and Maryland to supply ALL of the breweries in the metro DC region (much less all of Virginia and Maryland). Moreover, some brewers favor Czech, English, and/or German malt over barleys grown and malted closer to DC than abroad.
But that doesn’t preclude creative brewers from using local ingredients. In the case of Right Proper Shaw Brewpub & Kitchen, Pen Druid Fermentation, and Wheatland Spring their ingredients came from their brewery yards or even their backyard.
Per Leah Cheston, owner of Right Proper Shaw, “Our brewer Josh Chapman has a magnificent magnolia tree growing in his backyard that he and his family call Mom-Mom.” The beer Chapman brewed, called Steel Magnolias, uses the magnolia tree and its leaves as an ingredient. “He pays homage to Mom-Mom with Steel Magnolias, a Tart Table Beer brewed with new growth magnolia leaves in the mash and dry-blossomed with magnolia blossoms,” Cheston tells us.
Right Proper isn’t done yet. “We’ll have another beer with hyper local ingredients coming later this summer. Our second edition of Beerjolais Nouveau will be brewed with grapes harvested from my and Thor’s [Cheston, owner of Right Proper Brookland) backyard. That is, as long as we can get the grapes before the birds do.”
In the case of Pen Druid’s brewer/vintner/cider maker Jennings Carney, his hyper local ingredient is honey.
He tells DC Beer:
The idea this year is to try and use either foraged (wild or otherwise) or hyper local … it puts an emphasis on being creative and not just sticking to what is easily bought.
We had honey from our hives so I thought what a great way to create complexity and character.
In this case after I had posted that [Pen Druid instagram story] I ended up just blending the raw honey into the spontaneous after I added the water. By the time I was done blending the water and honey the buckets had already started to ferment!!!
The goal of blending honey with his spontaneous beers is an amicable one, utilizing an ingredient from local hives. The honey spontaneous beer is back in barrels, which he plans to revisit in about six months. At that point he may add some fruit or spices or herbs. Or, if the beer is to his liking, he will package it as is. “We shall see” Carney tells us.
There are breweries that are on farms, and then there are farm breweries. Wheatland Spring is the latter. Their “Estate” series of beers includes grain grown on their farm, well water from below it, and yeast and bacteria from above it. “All of our Estate beer is 100% made with grains we grow next to the brewhouse, which are custom malted in small batch to specs we dial in with our maltster. Right off the bat, this malt doesn’t exist elsewhere. Our Piedmont Ales are fermented with yeast native to our farm that we wild-capture,” co-founder John Branding told us earlier in the year. As of our writing, the brewery offers no less than five Estate beers in cans, primarily saisons and lagers, and they ship to both DC and Virginia, with local delivery to Northern Virginia also available. Odd Provisions in the District may have cans as well. Large format bottles from the brewery also continue the hyper local theme.
Check out Steel Magnolias at Right Proper Brewpub Shaw on Saturday, June 30 and plan a day trip to Wheatland Spring soon, then go see Pen Druid in about six months.
Jake Berg assisted with this piece. The extreme heat and birds got to his backyard grapes before he could.
