Style: Helles Lager    
ABV: 4.5%    
IBU: 25    
Package: Draft Only

We revisited our Helles recipe to give it a cleaner finish, a breadier body, and touch more hop flavor and aroma. It still relies on a fairly simple and traditional recipe, producing a beer that presents as a classic example of the popular Southern German lager. It has a round body with a rich but mild malt character that leans toward fresh baked bread and raw dough, the hops deliver floral and subtlety spicy noble character and a restrained bitterness that aids the dry finish, making for an incredibly easy drinking beer.

Grains: Pilsner, Chit Malt, Honey Malt, Acid Malt
Hops: Hallertauer Mittelfrüh
Yeast: House Lager

Style: Hazy IPA    
ABV: 7.0%    
IBU: 7    
Package: Draft

This Hazy IPA was designed to showcase two newer hop varieties: Alora & Erebus. We only added hops in a chilled whirlpool and in a multi-stage dry hop, to minimize bitterness and maximize their aromatic potential. This was combined with a grain bill composed of Murphy & Rude’s malted red wheat, and tons of flaked oats, to produce a soft body. The result is a beer with predominant notes of candied orange, yuzu and pomelo, and more subtle tones of tropical fruit, dried blueberries and floral rose. It has a soft round mouthfeel, and a bittersweet, grapefruit pith like finish.

Grains: Pilsner, Murphy & Rude Soft Red Wheat, Flaked Oats, Acid Malt
Hops: Alora, Erebus
Yeast: Kveik

Style: American Stout    
ABV: 6.4%    
IBU: 50    
Package: Draft

Our American stout is built on a base of English Pale malt from Murphy & Rude Malting Co. out of Charlottesville VA. That malt produces a nutty and sweet backbone that we combined with a blend of their Crystal malts, as well as their Chocolate Wheat, to build up sweeter tones of whole grain bread, graham cracker, mocha, and roasty black coffee. The end result is a smooth, dark, ale with a medium, semi-sweet, body that is balanced by a subtle hop flavor and a drying bitterness.

Grains: Murphy & Rude English Pale, Murphy & Rude Crystal Malt, Murphy & Rude Chocolate Wheat, Roasted Barley
Hops: Nugget 
Yeast: House Ale

Style: Wheat Lager    
ABV: 4.8%    
IBU: ?    
Package: Draft & 500ml Bottles to-go!!

Virginia isn’t ideally suited for the cultivation of hops, so it is no small undertaking that we tend to a modest hop yard every year. Our climate, daylight hours, and soil aren’t quite right for them, but despite this we are able to get a reasonable harvest each season. This requires a significant investment of time and effort from many members of our team, and we are constantly learning and trying to improve our methods for cultivating them. On top of the difficulty of growing them, they also present a number of challenges to harvest and use. We pick them all by hand and work with them fresh from the field, meaning that we brew with them no more than 24 hours from when we pick them.    

Regardless of the work involved, we take pride in our hops, and the beers we brew with them. We feel that this process, like many of the ones we use in the production of our beers, helps to keep us firmly rooted in beer’s agricultural lineage, and it acts as a powerful reminder of the many hands that labor so that we are able to make beer. On top of all of this, we find that the Cascade that we grow has some unique nuances and is unlike Cascade grown anywhere else in the world.

This Farmhouse Lager was brewed as a celebration of these hops. We modeled it after a Wheat Lager and brewed it with Virginia grown barley and wheat, malted by our friends at Murphy & Rude, in Charlottesville. It has a floral aroma, leading with hydrangea and lilac, that is balanced against notes of bread dough and unripe pear. The flavor begins with a mild sweetness and displays freshly baked bread, citrus blossom, and sun-dried hay. Wheat is known for its contributions to the texture of beer, and that is no exception in this lager, where it contributes a round creamy mouthfeel that fades into a pleasantly dry finish with just a hint of refreshing bitterness.

Grains: Murphy & Rude Virginia Pils, Murphy & Rude Soft Red Wheat, Munich, Acid
Hops: Fine Creek Grown Fresh Cascade
Yeast: House Lager

Style: Saison    
ABV: 5%    
IBU: 30    
Package: Draft & 500ml Bottles to-go!!

Featuring Murphy & Rude malted spelt and German Saphir hops, our House Saison is a classic interpretation of the style. It has an aromatic bouquet that is floral and fruity with faint tones of white peppercorn and sundried hay. It is dry with a subtle bitterness that helps to elevate flavors of unripe pear and bread dough. The spelt contributes to a soft texture which is paired with a lively carbonation producing a round and refreshing beer.

Grains: Pilsner, Murphy & Rude Malted Spelt, Acid Malt  
Hops: Saphir, Nugget 
Yeast: House Saison

Style: Norwegian Farmhouse Ale  
ABV: 9.0%    
IBU: 20    
Package: Draft & 500ml Bottles to-go!!

This beer was inspired by the Farmhouse brewing traditions of Norway and brewed in collaboration with our friends at the Wish You Were Beer Show, a live weekly craft beer show that you can catch every Thursday on YouTube.

Vossaøl is an old Norwegian farmhouse style that is traditionally brewed with juniper and pale colored malt, but boiled for a prolonged period of time to produce a mild sweetness and unique smokey profile. We brewed ours with a combination of Murphy & Rude Alderwood Smoked Pale and Virginia Pils before boiling it for four hours. For flavor we also added freshly harvested juniper boughs, as well as Greenmont Mother hops from Greenmont Hopworks.

The result is a truly unique marriage of unlikely elements that provides layers of complexity. The aroma is a boisterous blend of fruity black currant, herbal juniper, and woody alderwood smoke. The flavor has waves of juniper boughs, roasted apples, and burning oak logs alongside a semi sweet malt profile of freshly baked bread. Despite some sweetness up front, the finish is dry with a lingering note that alternates between subtle smoke and juniper.  

Grains: Murphy & Rude Alderwood Smoked Pale, Murphy & Rude Virginia Pils
Hops: Greenmont Hopworks, Greenmont Mother
Yeast: Kveik
Other: Juniper Boughs (Juniperus virginiana) A note on this, some people call this Eastern Red Cedar, it is not actually cedar but instead is a variety of juniper native to our region.

Style: Bière de Vin  
ABV: 6.8%   
IBU: 7     
Package: Draft & 750ml Bottles to-go!!

This Bière de Vin is a blend of two Farmhouse Ale that we conditioned on Merlot and Pinot Noir grape skins from our friends at Blenheim Vineyards. One was fermented with a co-pitch of Saison yeast and our house wild culture, while the other was aged in wine barrels for two years. After blending they were both conditioned on the grape skins for six months before being packaged and naturally carbonated.

Conditioning on the Merlot and Pinot Noir pomace transformed the beer significantly, lending it a beautiful plum hue and a fruit-forward aroma of blackberry, sweet cherry, and red grape. The flavor has a pleasant subtle tartness and specific notes of cranberry, pomegranate, and dry red wine. At first sip, there is a smooth round body, but this is cut by natural carbonation, and an incredibly dry finish with noticeable wine-like tannins.   

Grains: Murphy & Rude 6-Row Pale, Murphy & Rude Virginia Pils, Epiphany Malted Triticale, Murphy & Rude Biscuit  
Hops: Nugget, House Aged Hersbrucker
Yeast: “Slashes” Wild Culture, House Saison, Kveik 
Other: Blenheim Vineyards Merlot & Pinot Noir Pomace

…full notes coming soon…