Brew pubs seek a market beyond their doorsteps

You can brew only so much beer in a restaurant, and you can shoehorn only so many fermentation vessels among the tables and chairs and deep-fryers.

With thirst outpacing output, several regional brew pubs have been building, buying or renting off-site breweries to keep their own taps flowing and to supply an off-premises market of grocery stores, liquor marts, bars and restaurants.

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Phil Bowers, owner of Brewer’s Alley, a 15-year-old brew pub in Frederick, just inaugurated a spinoff brewery about two miles up the road. The fledgling Monocacy Brewing occupies a former ice cream factory. “It could use some tender loving care, but it has everything a brewery needs,” including two walk-in freezers ideal for cold storage, Bowers says.

Brew master Tom Flores says Brewer’s Alley had maxed out at 800 to 900 barrels a year. The first order of business at Monocacy will be to fill demand at the brew pub for year-round labels such as Kolsch, IPA and 1634 Ale. That last is a throwback, incorporating rye, molasses and caraway: ingredients that would have been available to Maryland’s first colonists.

“Once we get ahead of demand, we’ll transition to a pilot brewery here at the pub,” says Flores, “experimenting with new raw materials.” He has been partnering with a farmer in Keymar, Md., in Carroll County, to grow and malt his own barley, and Flores seems anxious to convert his harvest of grain into beer. An English-style mild ale made from home-grown malt that’s on tap at Brewer’s Alley is unusually rich and full-bodied for its paltry 3 percent alcohol-by-volume content, he says.

Meanwhile, Monocacy Brewing will begin bottling and kegging Brewer’s Alley’s beers for distribution throughout Maryland and will also introduce its own brands, beginning with a rye IPA in early 2012.

A similar game plan is in effect at Devils Backbone Brewing in Roseland, Va., in Nelson County. After picking up nine medals in three years at the Great American Beer Festival, the brand will reach a wider audience after Dec. 1, when the owners fire up a 30-barrel brew kettle at a newly built brewery in Lexington, Va. The brewery had to be built 45 minutes away from the brew pub because Nelson County’s wastewater treatment system couldn’t handle the effluvia from the plant. Chief Operating Officer Hayes Humphreys says the new brewery will bottle and keg Vienna Lager, Eight Point IPA and 11 seasonal beers in 2012, shipping as far north as Manassas. The brew pub will act as “a research and development facility” for new recipes, he said.

Another satellite brewery has taken over the former Shenandoah Brewing in Alexandria. The facility opened in 1996 as a brew-on-premises, or BOP, a place where home-brewers could rent professional-grade equipment to make their own beer. Founder Anning Smith was about to shutter the business in June when a last-minute buyer emerged: a Center City Philadelphia restaurant called the Farmers’ Cabinet.

The Farmers’ Cabinet had intended to brew its own beer in a two-barrel nanobrewery, but it postponed those plans indefinitely when Shenandoah, with its five-barrel brew house, showed up in the for-sale ads.