The greatest party in Baltimore is also the hardest one to get invited to. And it’s always inconveniently scheduled on a Monday at 3:00 to ward off the casual weekend warriors.
It’s Legends’ Open House, a trade show of beers, wines and liqueurs from the only distributor in Maryland and DC who carries all of the things you love the most. Like the craft beer scene, the event gets a little bigger and a little better every year. In order to avoid legal troubles, we stuck with beer only this past Monday-in one ounce samples.
3 Stars Brewing co-founder Dave Coleman was on site at the event and summed up the collective goodwill of area brewers.
“We’re excited to be distributing in Maryland. We just did a collaboration with Charm City Mead Works. There’s a lot of creativity coming out of the Baltimore and Maryland area. It’s exciting watching the growth of craft beer being welcomed to town and the expansion everyone’s going through. Everyone’s constantly growing. There’s room for everybody. The more the merrier. Everybody’s doing their own thing and it’s what makes craft beer great.”
3 Stars newest offerings to Maryland includes Nectar of the Bogs, a balanced Cranberry Saison with a perfectly-timed release to Maryland palates for holiday season imbibing. It will be available on draft only at first before arriving in cans later in the season. Perhaps the rarest beer of all beers at Legends’ open house was the appropriately named Two-Headed Unicorn, the aforementioned collab with Charm City Meadworks. It’s a 6.5% ABV blonde sour ale conditioned in Bourbon barrels with honey, and frankly, tasted a hell of a lot better than I imagined. They produced just 70 cases of bottles. Good luck finding that one.
Right Proper Brewing of DC is finally ready to bring its beer to the Free State. They brew at two neighborhood brewpubs in Shaw and Brookland, and they’re known for primarily using wild yeasts in their products. I tried the Baron Corvo, a spicy, malty French-oaked Biere de Garde that was a palate awakener. Their offerings should start trickling out to area tap houses within a week.
DC’s beer scene has come so far so fast, it’s still hard for me to imagine a kind of hard-core District pride. As a guy who was born in Anacostia and raised in Anne Arundel County before attending high school in Alexandria, I’ve always held a regional DMV pride. When I mentioned to Coleman that his Takoma brewery is a only a long fly ball to Maryland, I told him that 3 Stars is practically a MD brewery. He emphatically shot back, “yeah, but we’re a DC Brewery!” Well-played and emblematic of DC’s proud brewing culture.
—S. Fogleman
