The pickin’s ripe for local fruits, including peaches, cherries and blackberries, at area orchards.
We’re halfway through June, which means fruit harvest season has begun, and that means now is the time to do our best impression of the very hungry caterpillar. You know the story: A tiny caterpillar eats through fruit after fruit (and a piece of cake, an ice cream cone, a pickle, etc.) on his journey to becoming a big, beautiful butterfly. But rather than nibble tiny holes in a series of tissue-paper fruit illustrations, we suggest you select your own very real, delicious fruits and berries from one of the many pick-your-own spots in the area. And savor every juicy bite.
Pick-your-own hours often change day to day, depending on the weather and the crop, so always call ahead before you make the drive.
Go for strawberries and peaches in June. Later in the summer, they’ll have apricots, plums and veggies picked and ready for buying. 1351 Greenwood Rd., Crozet. 823-1583.
Critzer Family Farm
Strawberries and cherries are ripe now; blackberries and raspberries will be ready mid-July. They also sell ice cream made with fruit from the farm. 9388 Critzers Shop Rd., Afton. (540) 465-4772.
Henley’s Orchard
Pluck nectarines and more than a dozen varieties of peaches. 2192 Holly Hill Farm, Crozet. 823-7848.
Hill Top Berry Farm and Winery
Blackberries galore—picking starts in July. 2800 Berry Hill Rd., Nellysford. 361-1266.
Market at Grelen
Pick your own blueberries, or buy pre-picked strawberries, cherries and peaches from other local farmers. 15091 Yager Rd., Somerset. (540) 672-7268.
Strawberries, cherries and blueberries…perfect for pie-making! 415 Dark Hollow Rd., Roseland. 277-8130.
Spring Valley Orchard
Act fast to pick sweet cherries—picking season ends in early July. 3526 Spring Valley Rd., Afton. 960-9443.
We’ll cheers to that
On Monday, June 5, the 2017 Virginia Craft Brewers Guild announced the winners of this year’s Virginia Craft Beer Cup: Among the 356 beers entered for judging in 24 categories, five local breweries earned accolades for their brews. South Street Brewery’s Virginia Lager took first place in the International Lager and Strong European Beer category; its Astrognomer brew took third in the IPA category. Three Notch’d Brewing Company’s Blackwall Porter placed second in the Scottish and Irish Ale category; its No Veto Brown placed third in the Brown British Ale category. Pro Re Nata Brewing Company took third place in the Historical, Alternative and American Wild Ale category with its Go Johnny Gose. Wild Wolf Brewing Company placed third in the Fruit Beer category with its Area 151. And Stable Craft Brewing’s Britchin Brown Ale took second in the Amber and Brown American Beer category.
Lu-Mei Chang opened Cardamom, an all-vegetarian spot in York Place that serves contemporary Asian cuisine, to show Charlottesville diners that meat-free meals can still be tasty. Photo by Tom McGovern
Lu-Mei Chang can’t stay away from the kitchen, and we’re all better off for it.
Chang, who grew up in Taipei, Taiwan, started cooking when she came to Charlottesville 28 years ago. She worked at Eastern Standard, one of Charlottesville’s first Asian restaurants (located where The Whiskey Jar is now) for years before she opened Monsoon in 1992.
She sold Monsoon (now Monsoon Siam) in 2011 with the intention of taking a few years off from cooking to rest and repair her body. During that time, Chang taught the occasional cooking class at The Happy Cook and at Charlottesville Albemarle Technical Education Center and kept a steady blog, Cooking with Lu-Mei: Asian Cooking Adventures in Charlottesville, full of recipes for healthy Asian dishes, and tips on where to find the best ingredients for those dishes.
While she found teaching to be very rewarding, she missed cooking, and she just opened Cardamom, which dishes up contemporary vegetarian Asian food in the spot most recently occupied by Mican in York Place on the Downtown Mall.
In addition to Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar and The Spot, which both serve vegetarian and vegan cuisine, Cardamom is one of just a few vegetarian-only restaurants in the city.
For now, the menu is small, offering noodle salads and dumplings, and dishes like eggplant tofu with holy basil, deep-fried crispy eggplant and tofu with ginger-garlic sauce and holy basil served with brown rice; tofu balls with coconut-lime sauce, a deep-fried mixture of tofu, potatoes, mushrooms, spinach and holy basil, served with brown rice; and creamy leek soup with yogurt dressed with crispy mochi rice crackers and walnut oil. Dishes cost about $10, though most are less, and diners can order Vietnamese coffee and pots of tea as well.
Chang wants to show Charlottesville diners that with fresh ingredients, well-crafted sauces and the right seasonings, vegetarian food can be both delicious and exciting.
New beginnings
“I’ve always had an appreciation for things that operate on the plane that borders the absurd and the meaningful, like watching one of the original ‘Star Trek’ episodes where it’s totally camp but there’s also substance if you’re looking for it,” says restaurateur Hamooda Shami.
Shami, who owns 11 Months, the space for extended restaurant/bar pop-ups in the former Yearbook Taco location on the Downtown Mall, will walk that fine line between absurdity and meaning with the first 11 Months concept: Sorry It’s Over.
Yes, Charlottesville, for 11 months, we’ll have a restaurant/bar with a breakup theme.
“It’s a sad subject, but we’re going to have some fun with it,” Shami says.
Shami worked with Richmond branding and interior design company Campfire & Co. on the branding and remodeling of the space (and on the restaurant’s Richmond location as well). He says we can expect “tacky neon” and actual breakup letters on the walls, plus some posters of sensitive-sad icons such as Al Green and The Smiths. Chef de cuisine Johnny Jackson and John Meiklejohn of The Whiskey Jar have developed a small, contemporary new American cuisine menu that Shami says will emphasize “quality over quantity.”
Bar manager David Faina will create the cocktail menu, and Shami says they’re in talks with Three Notch’d Brewing Company’s Collab House to craft a special beer that would play off the restaurant’s theme.
11 Months Presents…Sorry It’s Over will open in early February, so keep an eye out for the pale pink sign with a cartoon heart crying three fat tears.
Good eats
Three local craft food producers and the farmers who provide them with ingredients were honored last month at the 2017 annual Good Food Awards, which are organized by California sustainable food nonprofit Seedling Projects and “celebrate the kind of food we all want to eat: tasty, authentic and reasonably produced.” Both JM Stock Provisions and Timbercreek Market took home awards in the charcuterie category, for beef tongue pastrami and duck rillette, respectively. Red Rooster Coffee Roaster, based in Floyd, was honored for its Washed Hambela coffee. The 193 winners in 14 categories were chosen from 2,059 entries submitted by top-notch food producers from all over the U.S.
The Whiskey Jar’s Christmas cocktail menu includes drinks such as O the Weather Outside is Weather, Made in China and the Cotton-Headed Ninny Muggins, made with butter, bourbon and salted caramel whipped cream. Photo by Tom McGovern
Watering holes all over town are getting into the Christmas spirits—er, spirit—this week, decking the halls and pouring festive drinks galore.
The Whiskey Jar’s Christmas pop-up bar will feature an all-Christmas cocktail list created by bar director Leah Peeks and assistant bar manager Reid Dougherty. “We’re going to tacky the place up, play Christmas music, have Christmas food and go nuts,” Peeks says. Look for the Dancin’ In Your Head (moonshine punch, starfruit and sugar plum); I Don’t Give A Fig About All This (fig jelly, scotch, lemon and ginger); Cotton-Headed Ninny Muggins (butter, bourbon and salted caramel whipped cream); All I Want for Christmas is Booze (Tröegs Mad Elf Belgian-style strong dark ale and a shot of Angel’s Envy bourbon); and plenty of other heart- and belly-warmers.
Lost Saint, the bar below Tavern & Grocery on West Main, is also serving winter warmers such as an old-fashioned garnished with a cinnamon stick, homemade eggnog and mulled wine amidst snowflake and icicle lights hanging from the low ceiling.
The Alley Light will serve Micah Le-Mon’s homemade eggnog (sometimes with Virginia apple brandy); Tavola’s winter menu includes drinks such as the Pompeii, a savory/smoky sipper that includes single-malt whiskey, Oloroso sherry, tayberry and vegetable ash; and Three Notch’d Brewing Company has its Stocking Stuffer peppermint stout on tap.
If you need a bit of a caffeine kick to make it through last-minute shopping trips, Shenandoah Joe’s We 3 Beans holiday blend is back, this time with Costa Rica El Cidral, Guatemala Altos del Volcan and Ethiopia Sidamo ARDI, creating notes of chocolate, nougat, citrus and berry.
Bye, bye, Brookville
Brookville Restaurant served its final meal—brunch—last Sunday, December 18.
“Every restaurant has a lifetime and Brookville has come to the end of its,” chef Harrison Keevil wrote in an e-mail shortly after making the announcement. He and his wife, Jennifer Keevil, opened Brookville, known for its farm-to-table comfort food—egg dishes, biscuits, chicken and waffles, chocolate chip cookies, bacon, bacon and more bacon—on the Downtown Mall in July 2010.
The Keevils will continue to serve local food at Keevil & Keevil Grocery and Kitchen at 703 Hinton Ave. in Belmont. They opened the shop in July of this year.
Going forward, Keevil says they’ll expand sandwich offerings at the shop and offer take-away hot dinners beginning in January.
A return to Duner’s
Laura Fonner is back in the kitchen at Duner’s Restaurant on Ivy Road. Fonner worked there for eight years—four as executive chef—before leaving after the birth of her second child in 2012. During that time, she did some catering and occasionally worked the front of the house at Duner’s. About a month ago, she accepted an offer to return to the kitchen after chef Doug McLeod’s departure.
Fonner enjoys the flexibility of Duner’s menu and the creative control it affords her. “I’m not restricted to one ethnicity or one cut of meat,” she says, noting that on Duner’s menu, Korean barbecued grilled tuna with handmade local mushroom and bok choy dumplings can be found right next to a classic gnocchi dish. “There’s no boundary!” she says.
Hunter Smith, founder of Champion Brewing Company, says the new city brewery regulation could “disincentivize someone from locating in Charlottesville in the first place if they are going to be hamstrung down the road.” Photo by Eze Amos
Breweries have been popping up around Charlottesville like mushrooms after a rain. About a dozen beer producers are now located within an easy drive from town. But curiously, only four breweries are actually located within the city’s limits: Champion, South Street, Three Notch’d and—the newest addition in September—Random Row.
In the middle of a regional beer boom, a new city regulation on breweries was slipped into a zoning regulation change last winter. Nobody seems to know whose idea it was, but it was would-be brewer Julie Harlan who first noticed that new microbreweries within Charlottesville will have to derive at least 25 percent of their revenue from on-site retail sales.
In August 2012, Harlan bought an almost 1,500-square-foot foreclosedhome on Forest Street for the shockingly low sum of $17,700, which allowed her to purchase the property with cash. Located a few blocks from Bodo’s Bagels on Preston Avenue, it is zoned B-3, which is a flexible zoning status that allows for use as either residential or commercial purposes.
“I was looking down the list of zoning options and microbrewing was on the list,” says Harlan. “My niece had gone to Piedmont and studied viticulture and she suggested brewing. …I would take care of the business and we could have a small, woman-owned nanobrewery. …It seemed like a good idea because everything I read about the Virginia laws seemed like they were going in the direction of less regulation.”
Three Notch’d Brewing Company President Scott Roth says the brewery is expanding its operations into a larger space at IX Art Park next year that will include an outdoor beer garden and an event space. The company will keep its Grady Avenue facility for production and storage. Photo by Eze Amos
The 25 percent requirement was tacked on to a change in law that Three Notch’d Brewing Company requested. Previously, breweries within Charlottesville were limitedto a 15,000-barrel annual cap for production. As Three Notch’d has won fans both locally and around the region for its inventive range of beers, demand has increased beyond the 15,000-barrel limit and the company was concerned about possibly having to relocate outside of the city. Its owners asked that the limit be raised to 30,000 barrels, and the city agreed.
Three Notch’d’s management team realized they would need the increase as they prepared to move into a new, larger space at the IX Art Park that will include an outdoor beer garden and an event area (they will maintain their existing space in the old Monticello Dairy on Grady Avenue for storage and production).
“When we were contemplating the move it was necessary to ensure that we wouldn’t be regulated in terms of the amount of barrels we can produce,” says Scott Roth, president of Three Notch’d Brewing Company. “The city was very understanding and took a good look at the code and understood the need for a few changes.”
“We have been busting at the seams in our current location and wanted to find a more permanent home where we could focus on maximizing our production facility without being so hindered by space constraints,” Roth says. Three Notch’d’s new presence at IX will include “food and beer in a relaxing atmosphere that is comfortable for everyone, including families.”
But the changes aren’t settling well with everyone seeking to become part of the beer industry. The new 25 percent requirement has given Harlan pause and may scuttle her plans to open Charlottesville’s fifth brewery (C’ville-ian Brewery closed in October after two years in business). To start, she doesn’t understand how it would be enforced.
“Are the sales net or gross?” she asks. “I’m also worried, would we be pushing beer to make the 25 percent? Like, we’d be looking at the clock thinking we would like to close now but we haven’t made our 25 percent. …There’s no clear guidelines. How do you report it? What if you don’t make your 25 percent quota? Is there a penalty? Is it a zoning violation? Do they shut you down? …I couldn’t find anyone who could give me any reason behind the 25 percent, which would help me understand where they were going with it.”
Julie Harlan had planned to open a microbrewery on her Rose Hill property, until she learned a city code added last winter requires 25 percent of her revenue to come from on-site retail sales. Photo by Eze Amos
Brian Haluska, principal planner for the City of Charlottesville, has a few answers.
“The rationale for the 25 percent requirement is that if we are permitting these facilities in our commercial and mixed-use districts, they need to incorporate a ‘front door’ that contributes to the activity on the street,” says Haluska. “Our commercial and mixed-use districts are intended to have activity at the street level. The fear was that without some sort of on-site sale requirement, a microproducer could locate in the commercial or mixed-use zone, have no on-site sales, and have all of their beverages leaving on trucks out of the back. That is a bottling facility—which we allow, just not in the commercial and mixed-use zones.”
Andrew Sneathern, former assistant commonwealth’s attorney in Albemarle County who is now in private practice specializing in alcohol-related law, says the likelihood of a company being a bottling-only facility is small.
“The costs of being in the city of Charlottesville versus, say, Waynesboro, for example, would be completely disparate,” he says. “I think you could probably pick up for about $3 a square foot in Waynesboro for a bottling facility. In Charlottesville you couldn’t come anywhere near that, so the chance of that happening is extremely small.”
Nor does Haluska’s concern make a lot of sense to Hunter Smith, owner of Charlottesville’s Champion Brewery and co-chair of the Government Affairs Committee for the Virginia Craft Brewers Guild.
“Any brewer would tell you that you would be nuts not to have the retail component,” says Smith. “If you’re going to have some retail component, chances are it will be a large portion of your sales early on. It’s as you grow that it becomes of concern.”
Real estate and rent in Charlottesville are so expensive that it would not typically make economic sense for someone to open a facility that only brews and bottles without selling retail. Such a facility could easily be opened in another county with cheaper land and closer access to a highway, like Devils Backbone’s outpost in Rockbridge County.
Breweries have a special legal status under Virginia state law. Most businesses that serve alcohol are required to sell a certain amount of food as well. You can’t legally open a business that is only a bar in Virginia—it also has to be a restaurant. But breweries can sell their own beer at the same site where they brew without being required to offer food.
And those on-site sales are something that small to mid-sized breweries value. A beer sold directly from the brewery keeps all of the profit in-house. All beer sold to other restaurants or retailers is required under state law to pass through a third-party distributor and then to the point of sale. Each business needs to make a profit and marks up the beer along the way. Normally, a small Virginia brewery will sell as much beer as possible through its own pub and distribute the rest for a lower profit per pint. According to Smith, a pint of beer sold to a thirsty brewpub patron typically provides about five times more profit to the brewer than the same pint sold through a distributor.
“The reason to have a business in Charlottesville is the great retail potential,” says Smith. “So this is solving a problem that doesn’t exist.”
Smith agrees with Harlan that the 25 percent requirement could scare new breweries away from Charlottesville, but he disagrees about the point in a brewery’s development that this would happen. Champion has grown from producing 500 barrels per year when it opened in December 2012 to 10,000 barrels per year in 2016. In fact, they opened the Missile Factory, a 7,000-square-foot facility with a 15,000-barrel capacity, in Woolen Mills in 2014 to keep up with distribution demand.
“Here we are in year four and [Champion is] opening multiple extra states for wholesale distribution. It’s going to be hard for my 1,500-square-foot taproom to keep up with my multimillion-dollar wholesale business,” Smith says. “The long-term situation is that it could disincentivize someone from locating in Charlottesville in the first place if they are going to be hamstrung down the road.”
While a quality product and good marketing can dramatically expand the distribution of a brewery’s products, the brewpub located at the brewery can’t make more people walk in to have a drink. In fact, it is illegal under state law for them to try.
“It is illegal to advertise specifically alcohol or prices on alcohol because of the ABC [Alcoholic Beverage Control],” says Smith. ABC regulations, some of which date back to the era immediately following Prohibition, prevent businesses that retail alcohol from promoting their prices or doing certain other things that could encourage people to drink beer.
“So if you find yourself in a pinch on that regulation, it is hard to go out and drum up more business,” says Smith. “I can’t just go make more people to drink beer here.”
A local business might actually have to turn down orders for its beer if it is unable to increase on-site sales to 25 percent of the new total in revenue. This is deliberate.
“One of the chief concerns from the Planning Commission was how much truck traffic would these uses generate, especially with some of our commercial zones being close to residential neighborhoods,” says Haluska. “So, in addition to the desire to see retail sales in the microproducers, the 25 percent on-site sales rule would limit the volume of shipments.”
Haluska does not know who initially requested that a 25 percent minimum retail sales requirement be added to the city’s zoning regulations along with the production increase to 30,000 barrels annually. Smith, heavily involved with the Craft Brewers Guild, says he had not been consulted on or made aware of the proposal. The craft brewing industry currently provides about 8,900 jobs in Virginia, according to the guild.
Sneathern thinks there might be some unintended consequences of the 25 percent requirement. “It may be that a real microbrewery might have to extend its hours in order to meet that requirement,” he says. “If they had to stay open later [in order to raise their on-site sales to 25 percent of sales] and they’re in a neighborhood like Belmont where there are residential neighbors, it would probably impact those neighbors. When I practiced law in Belmont I was on Douglas Avenue, and I remember distinctly a number of neighbors being bothered by what was going on after the zoning changes happened in Belmont. Noise issues and people being out intoxicated late at night and everything that goes along with that.”
Harlan wouldn’t want her imagined brewery to stay open late.
“I could foresee doing a tasting room as part of the brewery, but if we got busy we might just want to do contract brewing,” she says. “Our goal is not to get bigger and bigger. We were not looking for the requirement for the hours to be open to the public. Staying open at night is not something we want to do.”
Breweries that distribute their beer to local restaurants have to walk a fine line by selling beer through a tap room but not appearing to compete with their customers.
“You don’t want to be open till 2am like they are,” Smith says about bars, “trying to steal their alcohol business and competing with them. We are in the tourism and tasting business, not in the bar or restaurant business.”
But Smith is actually planning to make that leap. At the November 5 Top of the Hops beer festival, Smith announced plans to open the first-ever brewery on the Downtown Mall.
“We intend to sell all the beer produced there, right there,” says Smith. “The business model is to sell 100 percent of the beer retail. We’ll be opening the first brewery on the Downtown Mall. It will be a new category for us to get into.”
Smith’s new brewery will offer different varieties of beer that are currently unavailable at Champion and it will be combined with a restaurant, a joint venture with Wilson Richey. Under Charlottesville’s new 25 percent rule for microbreweries, Champion can get to the 25 percent by selling anything retail, including food. But the restaurant/brewery combination is a risk that most brewers aren’t comfortable taking.
“The inherent risk of the restaurant business is higher,” says Smith. “In a restaurant you are being judged on so many other criteria. You’re getting out of your wheelhouse so you can grow the business you are good at. It’s like you would have to get better at hockey so you can play basketball. It just doesn’t make sense.”
Three Notch’d’s Roth isn’t worried about the 25 percent minimum.
“They are focused on providing a healthy combination of retail and interactive space for the city of Charlottesville,” he says, “while also providing the breweries with what they need in terms of barrel limits to succeed. …If you really dive into the numbers, the 25 percent requirement should not prove to be overly daunting.”
Harlan plans to tear down the single-family house currently on her lot and replace it with a new building that she designed herself. Right now she’s considering erecting a duplex on the site, and says parking requirements for a brewery also factored into her decision to table that business venture.
“The rules are pretty clear for anyone looking to open a facility in the city,” says Haluska. “If the sales to distributors start to rise, then those businesses need to consider how to accommodate that expansion in production—if a second site is necessary in a zone that permits a standalone bottling plant or whether to relocate to a zone that permits small breweries.”
What neither Harlan, Sneathern nor Smith understand is exactly why the city would need to limit breweries in a situation where the price of real estate already seems to be doing that. Is there something undesirable about having a brewing industry in Charlottesville?
“You have the idea of some old Guinness building with rats and the spent grain and labor strikes and things like that,” says Smith, invoking the images of American breweries from the gilded age of the late 1800s. “In 2016 it’s an irrelevant concern.”
Barbie Brannock’s love of Southern California-style Mexican cooking comes from her mother. The menu at Barbie’s Burrito Barn includes burritos, tacos, bowls and tortilla strips instead of chips. Photo by Amy Jackson
For more than 20 years, every time Barbie Brannock cooked California-style Mexican food for her friends, they’d ask, “When are you going to open a restaurant?”
They weren’t so much asking as they were insisting, says Brannock, who learned to cook in her mother’s Southern California kitchen, and was a Peace Corps worker, an artist and a preschool art teacher before finally opening her CaliMex takeout joint, Barbie’s Burrito Barn, three weeks ago in a stone cottage under the Belmont Bridge.
“I think it was meant to be in this weird little spot,” Brannock says, adding that she opened her modest eatery to cook and share the food she loves.
Brannock loves the texture of CaliMex food, how melted cheese, chewy tortilla, crisp cabbage, soft cilantro and creamy avocado mix together in a single bite of guacamole tostada. “It really plays with your mouth,” she says.
She wears brightly colored aprons while preparing everything herself, from soaking and cooking the beans to slicing, salting and frying the tortilla strips, all in a tiny kitchen with bright floor tiles.
Everything at Barbie’s Burrito Barn is made to order and wrapped to-go. Customers can stop in and order from Brannock herself, or they can call in their order to pick up later. Brannock’s menu of vegetarian and meat burritos, tacos, tostadas, chopped bowls and strips (her take on chips) with salsa and guac is simple, and with the most expensive item ringing up at around $7, it’s affordable. And it’s healthy to boot: Add-on side dishes include jicama slaw and chili-lime cucumbers.
Customers can eat at one of the small tables inside or out, or many take their burrito barn bounty around the corner to the Champion Brewing Company patio. Barbie’s doesn’t serve alcohol, but it does offer bottled water and soft drinks, including sweet Jarritos.
“It’s like I’m feeding people from my heart, or my mother’s,” Brannock says. “It’s not fancy food, but it’s yummy food.”
Farm to brewery
Woodridge Farm in Lovingston has grown and supplied grain for Virginia breweries such as Blue Mountain, Champion, Devils Backbone and Lickinghole Creek for several years. But now they’re getting into the beer-brewing game themselves, as Wood Ridge Farm Brewery.
This will be the fifth brewery and first farm brewery in Nelson County, which, for the record, still has just one traffic light.
Wood Ridge Farm Brewery is unique in that it grows, malts and roasts 100 percent of the grains—rye, wheat, barley and oat—used in its beers. Clay Hysell, the brewery’s general manger, says they grow their own hops, too, but often have to outsource them because the Virginia climate is not ideal for most varieties.
“It’s a great feeling to drink a beer while overlooking the land it came from,” Hysell says. “To an extent, it’s like terroir with wine” or food. Farm owner Barry Wood tapped Nicholas Payson, formerly of Winnetou Brauerei in Mount Airy, North Carolina, as head brewer. In advance of the brewery’s September 10 opening, Payson has created a kolsch, IPA, pale ale, porter, blonde ale and a shandy.
When pressed to name a favorite, Payson says he’s partial to the porter. “I love this beer because I use no additives to achieve the flavor.” The creamy, mocha coffee notes come from the grain, he says.
But all of this is just to start, says Hysell, noting the farm will continue providing grain to other breweries, as well. “We’ll have even more fun later on.”
They’re all winners
The Olympics wasn’t the only fierce competition going on this summer. While athletes from around the world were winning medals, local food and drink purveyors racked up some major accolades of their own.
Castle Hill Cidery’s port-like 1764 cider won Double Gold and Best of Category-Fortified in the inaugural Drink Outside the Grape competition held in town earlier this month.
At the 2016 Virginia Craft Brewers Guild Virginia Craft Beer Cup Awards last weekend, Scottsville’s James River Brewery took home first place, Best of Show, and first place, British Bitter for its River Runner ESB, a take on a traditional English bitter brewed with pale and crystal malts and British hops. Many other local brews received nods as well, including Pro Re Nata’s Old Trail Pale Ale American pale ale; Starr Hill’s Jomo Vienna lager, The Love German hefeweisen and Sublime Belgian wit; South Street’s My Personal Helles lager and Peanut Butter Cup Barrel-Aged Soft Serve American porter; and Three Notch’d’s No Veto brown ale and Ghost of the 43rd pale ale.
To top off the wins, Hudson Henry Baking Co.’s cashew and coconut granola, made by Hope Lawrence in Palmyra, was a 2016 Sofi finalist in the Breads, Muffins, Granola or Cereal category at the Specialty Food Association’s Summer Fancy Food Show in New York City in June.
