CRABS farm brewery tour 2017

Saturday April 8, 2017

About 10 CRABSters plus a few significant others spent the day visiting three farm breweries. What is a farm brewery? It is a brewery that grows at least one of the ingredients it puts in its beer. There is no legal minimum percentage of the ingredient that must be produced at the farm. Also, a farm brewery may not produce more than 15,000 barrels per year. This sort of brewery operates under a Class 8 farm brewery license, which is just for farmers and is especially useful because it allows for on-site consumption of beer, not just sale. Any farmer with a Class 8 farm brewery license may also sell and deliver beer from the farm brewery to a wholesale company or directly to an individual consumer.

Our first stop was Manor Hill Brewing, a family-owned place in Ellicott City. Like the other breweries we would visit later in the day, it has a nice rustic wood interior. There were more than a dozen selections on tap. We all got paddles. I sampled:

Hop trellises.


Next we drove down to Brookeville Beer Farm. The place was busy. Kids and dogs played outside and lots of people were inside ordering beer and great pizza that's made in a small brick pizza oven. A farmer's market was inside the building as well. The beers I sampled were:

Hop trellises(?)
Yurt-like ceiling.


It was just minutes to our final stop, Waredaca Brewing Company in Laytonsville. The name Waredaca stands for Washington Recreational Day Camp. It opened in December 2015. It has lots of land with horses; in fact the location is mostly horse pasture with the farm brewery being only a small part of it. Like the other breweries we visited, it grows hops, which they planned to start growing on strings by May 1st. There were lots of people including kids outside, and lots of adults inside. We sampled their beer and then got a brewery tour. I tried: