DC Brewery Trail

EDITOR’S UPDATE: THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN IN 2013. THE LOCAL BEER SCENE HAS GROWN AND CHANGED CONSIDERABLY SINCE THAT TIME.

How does one justify a series of brewery visits within the subject matter of a geo-oddities blog? Good question. Author’s prerogative? Precedence? Ultimately I considered it a road trip; a very short and very specialized road trip. Certainly, numerous adventures from the road have been recounted on Twelve Mile Circle. I’ll also avoid any actual beer reviews. That’s how I’ll rationalize it.

North America has been experiencing its second microbrewery wave of the modern age. As an example, the Brewers Association reported “409 brewery openings in 2012”. Presently, “2,347 craft breweries operated for some or all of 2012.”

Washington, DC contributed to that happy trend too. There hadn’t been a single production brewery in the District of Columbia for more than half a century. The Heurich Brewery — on land now occupied by the Kennedy Center — closed in 1956. Another one didn’t come along until April 2011; DC Brau. There had been brewpubs (restaurants brewing their own beer for on-premise purposes) but no production breweries bottling, canning or kegging. Now the District counted three such breweries with more planned.


A Local Trifecta

Oddly enough, I hadn’t visited any of the new arrivals sprouting practically in my own backyard. I didn’t really have an excuse either. However, they seemed like easy opportunities as I approached my 300th brewery/brewpub visit. Best of all, the total distance between them was only 6-ish miles in easy alignment. So I thought it would be a noteworthy way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Alcohol laws vary between jurisdictions and they’re constantly changing. The District certainly has its own quirks. As of the time I write this, breweries can offer tastings to the public. They can also sell growlers (half-gallon glass jugs) for off-premise consumption. However, they cannot sell by the drink in their facilities. The breweries also had to shrink-wrap a plastic ribbon over the growler lid and heat it with a blow-dryer to seal the bottle. Weird. Nonetheless, we should be thankful because the City Counsel had to pass a new law to allow even that privilege.

These quirks make a brewery crawl to all three locations a little more interesting. Either way, modest tasting sizes did assure that nobody got impaired when driving between locations. We filled the car with growlers as we ambled along on our urban brewery trail and took them home.

I plotted a precise order as suggested by each brewery’s hours. We could get to all of them on a Saturday afternoon. One opened at 12:00, another at 12:30, and the third at 1:00.


DC Brau Brewing Company

DC Brau Brewing Company. Photo by howderfamily.com; (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

It’s funny to consider DC Brau the elder statesman of DC breweries. It opened barely two years ago! Nonetheless it took the lead and paved the way for the others. It successfully persuaded the DC City Council to update antiquated brewery laws that had been superfluous for nearly sixty years. DC Brau can take credit for tastings and growlers everywhere in the city.

We’d consulted their website before heading over, which turned out to be a good thing because we never would have found it otherwise (map). The brewery was located in a nondescript strip mall shopping center a stone’s throw from the Maryland border and historic Fort Lincoln. One has to drive down a narrow alley in a gap between different parts of the strip mall. It’s located down at the back of the building below the post office, and completely invisible from Bladensburg Road.

This was the busiest of the breweries we visited perhaps because it’s the most established. It’s also the only one that produced more than just kegs; they had a canning line. We enjoyed the tasting, filled a couple of growlers and moved on. We also noticed a few things that would be repeated throughout the trip:

  • The summer style switch had already taken place (primarily lagers, saisons, triples, IPA’s, DIPA’s and the like)
  • Parking was surprisingly tight
  • There was a food truck available for brewery patrons at each location.

I wish I’d known about the trucks before we left home and I wouldn’t have rushed through lunch before departing


Chocolate City Beer

Chocolate City Beer. Photo by howderfamily.com; (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

We pulled-up to Chocolate City Beer and noticed a group of about twenty bicyclists milling outside. It hadn’t dawned on me but the reason soon became apparent. Chocolate City (map) stood directly adjacent to the Metropolitan Branch Trail: “an 8-mile trail that runs from Union Station in the District of Columbia to Silver Spring in Maryland… Following the Metropolitan Branch Line of the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad”. So that would be a nine mile (14.5 km) bike ride from home. I could do that. Now how would I get a growler home? I’ll have to think about that some more.

All three breweries were located next to railroad tracks, either the Metropolitan Branch Line or the CSX Capital Subdivision Line. That was just a fun fact I discovered once I got home and checked my maps closer. I imagined it probably had something to do with zoning. One of the brewers mentioned how difficult it was to find a suitable location within the boundaries of the District. Apparently properties adjacent to railroad tracks fit some specified criteria for this type of business. Just keep them out of the neighborhoods, I guess.

The name of this brewery paid homage to Parliament’s landmark 1975 album and song of the same name. This, in turn was George Clinton’s P-Funk homage to Washington, DC. Taking this a step further, one of the specialty beers here was a dark wheat ale called the Mothership Connection, building on that same theme.

[UPDATE: Chocolate City closed December 31, 2014]


3 Stars Brewing Company

3 Stars Brewing Company. Photo by howderfamily.com; (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Finally we headed over to 3 Stars Brewing, (map), traveling through a lot of residential neighborhoods along the way. One sometimes forgets that Washington is a very residential city when one commutes solely to the Federal core. This was a nice reminder otherwise.

The 3 stars refer to the District of Columbia flag. You can see an example of the flag in the photo at the very top of the page. But I wonder if the brewers realized that stars used in heraldry — and this is heraldic as it was based on George Washington’s personal coat of arms — are called mullets? 3 Stars sounds like a much better name than 3 Mullets Brewing Company. It would appeal to a completely different clientele if it were Mullets.

3 Stars made use of another quirk of the District’s alcohol laws. In Washington, DC, one can sidestep the standard three-tier distribution system and self-distribute if no established distributor handles the product. There used to be (might still be) a liquor store in the District that would famously stuff a tractor-trailer full of beer in California and self-import rarities not normally available on the East Coast. 3 Stars used the same quirk to deliver their kegs directly to taverns and restaurants, bypassing the middleman. That allowed them to maintain quality while avoiding price markups.

[UPDATE: 3 Stars closed July 10, 2022]

We returned home with six growlers (our two favorites from each brewery). Then we invited some friends over, threw some sausages on the grill and enjoyed an unusually mild June afternoon.

Comments

4 responses to “DC Brewery Trail”

  1. Daniel Harper Avatar

    I like to buy growlers at breweries (and here in MI there are a lot of breweries to choose from) so I’ve seen a lot of different ways to handle growlers. While there may be some DC law that requires growlers to have some kind of seal to be sold (hence necessitating the plastic seal), I’ve seen breweries and other growler-selling establishments do it to help keep the beer fresh longer, helping to keep out oxygen through the threads. Some breweries use a piece of black tape for this purpose instead.

    Another possible reason for the seal: breweries that sell both on-premise and to-go beer sell those growlers at a much lower margin than their on-premise price. I’ve heard tales (although not locally, and not in person) of patrons buying a growler meant for off-premise consumption and sitting down at a table to get a cheap night at the bar. In this context, a broken seal on a growler in the bar is a clear sign of an unruly patron, and much more visible than if bartenders/servers had to keep an eye on all the fill levels of growlers in the bar.

    On a more personal note, I’ve not had access to anything from any breweries in DC, although I believe DC Brau collaborated with Epic Brewing out of Salt Lake City on their excellent pumpkin porter last year.

  2. Josh Avatar

    An article today in the Boston Globe made me think of 12MC (unfortunately behind a paywall, but there isn’t much there beyond this anyway):

    “Bishop and biker James Hazelwood is on a mission to personally visit all 184 Lutheran churches in New England.”

  3. Michael Avatar

    This must have been fun. I haven’t been in any DC breweries yet, but this needs to change next year when I already have a trip planned there. Do you know any additional ones to check out in the area?
    Thanks for the great post!

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