The Best Brewery Hops in Richmond (Part 1)
October 9, 2018
Richmond is the ultimate craft beer destination in Southeast America– and it has a realistic argument for the best craft beer city east of the Mississippi. They not only have a rich number of breweries, but also boast some of the elite breweries in the country within their city limits. Any serious beer trader has a few Richmond breweries on his or her “In Search Of” list. One could easily spend a weekend in Richmond doing nothing but drink craft beer and *still* feel like there wasn’t enough time to get everything done.
Which is why we’ll refer to this article as a Part 1. We spent as much time as we could on our East Coast expedition in Richmond, but spending a good twelve hours in Richmond is like spending a weekend in San Diego or Portland– you can cover some serious ground, but you won’t sniff completing your list of places you’d love to go. For instance, Triple Crossing, Champion Brewing, and Lickinghole Creek Craft Brewery are within a mile and a half of one another in downtown Richmond. Hardywood Park and Castleburg Brewery are a couple of buildings apart near Virginia Union. So we have our destinations picked for our next visit… but we drank so much incredible beer during our stay that we felt we couldn’t keep our experience to ourselves. Check out our list of Richmond’s top breweries before planning your trip, but if any of these sound like they’re up your alley, we give these destinations four big thumbs up.
3. Final Gravity Brewing Company
On the way down to Richmond, a few minutes off I-95 in a town called Henrico, you can find Final Gravity Brewing Company. This isn’t part of a multi-brewery hop, but it’s a must-stop destination for IPA fans visiting the area. It’s a terrific hang-out, with plenty of seating inside and out, games and pinball at your disposal, and a home brewing supply store next door for hardcore home brewers to get in some shopping or for the casual craft beer aficionado to peruse.
But most of you aren’t going to Henrico for brew kettles and wort chillers. You’re going because, in a city known for world-class IPAs, Final Gravity can compete with the best of them. Our recommendations: The Doppler Effect is renowned across the country– it ranked #12 out of 324 IPAs in a recent Paste.com blind taste test— and its reputation is earned. It’s a bright, crisp hazy IPA with bountiful Mosaic hop bite and billowing citrusy flavor. The Foggy Notion, their hazy DIPA, also draws similar accolades from us, as it’s juicy and dangerously crushable for a double. Finally, for those who need a break from the IPAs, their Irish Goodbye is one of the best dry Irish stouts we’ve had in our travels in some time.
2. The Answer
If the question is “where can you find some of the best beer in the country?”, the answer is… well, The Answer. It’s one of those breweries with such a deep and stacked tap list, you don’t even need to hop afterward; there’s more than enough top-shelf craft beer and delicious pub food here to leave you stuffed to the brim. (Though, worth noting, Strangeways has its Richmond location a mile and a half from The Answer– you can read our thoughts on their beer in our Fredericksburg article.) The outside is tremendously unassuming, but the inside boasts everything you’d need to get lost here and drink beer forever: board and card games, TVs for sports, pinball machines, a couple of arcade games. Their Banh Mi sandwiches are sublime, and those trying to start their day early should absolutely order the Wake N’ Bacon, a bacon fried rice meal topped with a sunny side egg that would make any mouth water.
As for their beer, let’s put it this way. They are in the Top 15 breweries in America according to Untappd, with an otherworldly 4.33 on Untappd. There are only six breweries in the country with 100,000 or more check-ins above a 4.3– The Answer ranks up there with titans in the craft game such as Tree House, The Alchemist, Hill Farmstead, and Side Project. You can’t go wrong with anything you order here. Our recommendations: start with any of the IPAs. Warrant Served is a wonderful, balanced, triple dry hopped hazy, and Work Release is a dry melony double, both of which could stake a claim as the best IPA in the city. The 3 Scoops sour series has a number of mildly tart and intensely juicy options– our favorite was the Imperial 3 Scoops Passionfruit Mango Peach. Finally, for as strong as the reputation of The Answer’s IPAs are, their stouts may be inexplicably even better. Chewbacca is one of the thickest stouts we’ve ever had, fudgey, coconutty, and absurdly delicious. For anyone who loves cinnamon beer, the Cinnamon Toast Crunch is one of the stronger cinnamon stouts in memory. Finally, readers of this blog know how much we love coffee stouts, so we’re insanely pleased to report that the I Am CM Bryant, a coffee stout infused with bourbon barrel aged honey, is one of the best, if not the best, in the country. As Russell wrote in his notes, “Legendary.” So yeah, forget hopping when you go to The Answer. Post up all day, open your wallets, and enjoy.
1. SCOTT’S ADDITION: The Veil –> Vasen Brewing –> Ardent Craft Ales –> Isley Brewing –> Black Heath Meadery –> Three Notch’d Brewing
Russell has several friends and former students who live in Richmond. When he asked them where they go to drink craft beer, they all had the same answer: Scott’s Addition. In this area, if you walk about a mile, you can hit five breweries and a meadery without breaking a sweat. And considering that two of these have above a 4 on Untappd and three more have above a 3.7, you’d be hard-pressed to find an area *this* walkable with *this* many terrific breweries anywhere in the country. Obviously, since we’re passionate about brewery hops, this had been near the top of our brewery hop wish list for some time.
Start at The Veil. The Veil is the best brewery in the Scott’s Addition area, and while normally we’d recommend saving the best for last, when we’re talking about trying to hit six breweries/meaderies in a single hop, we realize many people may have to drop out early, in which case you need to make sure you got to drink plenty at The Veil while sober enough to enjoy it. The Veil stays busy, but the lines move quickly– both the line to get more beer and the line to take a photo with the large stuffed bear in their taproom. The indoor is spacious, and there’s a huge outdoor space with screens stretched out over shipping containers to provide some shelter from that southern sun.
Those looking to enjoy a quiet drink won’t find it at The Veil, but they will find world-class beer– the brewery has a 4.17 on Untappd, placing it just outside of the Top 50 breweries in the country. Their popularity is built on their hazy IPAs, but they’ve mastered a variety of styles. Our recommendations: the whiteferrari is an incredibly juicy and pillowy double, and the Buried Buried Alive Alive is an absurdly crushable double dry hopped triple IPA that, at 11% ABV, could certainly bury your brewery hop early if you crush it too quickly. The Veil also checks the boxes for any lover of stouts and sours as well. The Double Peanut Butter Hornswoggler is the most peanut buttery stout we’ve ever had– and, most importantly, it tastes like fresh peanuts instead of like some peanut-flavored chemical, which is what you get with many breweries’ peanut butter stout attempts. Finally, we had multiple terrific sours, but the Longoven: Chapter One deserves a special shout out for being the only oyster sour we’ve ever had. Yes, you read that correctly.
From there, head to Väsen Brewing Company a couple of blocks away. If you couldn’t guess from the name, Väsen has a very clean and simple Scandinavian vibe: minimalist decor, the odd funky wall mural, and high ceilings, making the taproom feel even larger than it already is. They run a barrel-aging program that cranks out farmhouse and sour ales, so sour aficionados will find themselves at home here. Playing outdoor cornhole while sipping a barrel-aged sour: the American Dream. Our recommendations: the Everything Floats on Passionfruit is a juicy dry-hopped sour concoction, and for those who prefer their sours more straight-forwardly fruity, the Raspberry Sour Saison gives you exactly what you’d expect with its fresh raspberry flavor and its notable-but-not-overwhelming pucker.
Ardent Craft Ales is next, and if it’s a nice day and/or you’re with a lot of people, this is the place to be. The inside has considerable room if weather isn’t permitting, but its patio is absolutely huge– no brewery in Richmond can top Ardent’s outdoor seating area. Even when tons of people are around, you’re still unlikely to struggle to find a nice table in the sun where you can sip a crisp beer and pet the many dogs that come through. Their beer may not have the IPA hype of The Veil or the sour pedigree of Väsen, but when sitting on a patio in Virginia, nothing beats a nice pilsner, and Ardent has the best pilsner in the city. Better than just in the city, even: the Ardent Pilsner just took home the Bronze Medal at Great American Beer Fest! Our recommendations: grab a Pilsner with one hand, of course… and because you’re in Richmond, where IPAs reign supreme, go ahead and grab yourself an IPA X with the other, a clean and juicy double-dry hopped drink which also suits the patio beautifully.
Hop a few blocks over to Isley Brewing Company from there. Isley is an old-school, no-frills, friendly tap room, ideal for bringing the family, playing games, and sipping some beer. Several rooms of seating, plenty of games to play, and the usual Virginia patio are all present. Isley is the only brewery in Scott’s Addition whose flagship beer is a porter, so those less enthused about hazy IPAs and sours may head straight here to get to the dark stuff. Our recommendations: The Bribe is their standard, but its derivations are even better. The Up All Night is their coffee porter, and the Choosy Mother is their all-star, yet another beer in the Scott’s Addition area that packs a potent peanut butter punch.
You’ve had plenty of beer so far on this hop, so why not switch to mead for a stop? Even if you’ve never had mead before, pop in to Black Heath Meadery and support the local Virginian beekeepers. It’s a funky and small little tasting room, perhaps an ideal location to end your brewery hop on a quiet, more reflective note. The mead is also quite potent, so if you’ve been drinking all afternoon and you start guzzling mead, you will feel a considerable buzz (bad bee joke, sorry). Our recommendation: the Blue Angel won a Gold Medal at the 2017 Mazer Cup, the largest mead competition in the world, so it has pedigree behind it. It’s an apple mead, but more important than the fruit flavor is the sweetness– often times meads (and ciders as well) run too sweet, where they feel like your teeth might rot out of your head. Blue Angel, along with other Black Heath meads, strike the perfect balance between sweetness and complexity.
To those intrepid souls who have another stop left in them, tell your liver to quit screaming and head to Three Notch’d Brewing Company. Three Notch’d, based in Charlottesville, opened its collab house in Richmond two years ago. They run a sour beer-specific room in Central Virginia, so as you’d expect, they have a number of tart options on tap here. It has a big warehouse vibe with all types of games inside and out you could imagine: board games, darts, foosball, cornhole, etc. Our recommendations: their sour options were a tad limited on our visit– our favorite was the Watermelon Gose– but they more than made up for it with tasty darker options. The Boston Creme was a sweet and silky smooth stout, but the winner of the night was the Lush-ious, a maple pecan brown ale that was delectably sweet without overdoing it on the syrup.
We realize that we still have more breweries to hit in Richmond– we’ll hopefully return in 2019! For now, here are our award winners from the places mentioned in this post.
BEST PLACE FOR IPAS:
The Veil (Runners-up: The Answer, Final Gravity)
BEST PLACE FOR SOURS:
The Veil (Runners-up: Väsen Brewing, The Answer)
BEST PLACE FOR STOUTS:
The Answer (Runners-up: The Veil, Isley Brewing)
BEST PLACE TO PLAY GAMES:
The Answer (Runners-up: Final Gravity, Three Notch’d)
BEST PLACE FOR A LARGE GROUP:
Ardent Craft Ales (Runners-up: Väsen Brewing, The Answer)
BEST PLACE FOR A SMALL, QUIET DRINK:
Black Heath Meadery (Runner-up: Final Gravity)
BEST PLACE TO EAT:
The Answer
Which is your favorite of these brewery hops? Are there any you love that we neglected to mention? Please shout them out in the comments below! Also, please check out our other beer travel guides in the greater northern Virginia area, including guides to Fredericksburg, Loudoun County, and Washington, D.C.!
Not sure how you can write about Richmond breweries and not even mention Triple Crossing. They are certainly among the top 3.
#GlaringOmission
Hey Michael! Thanks for commenting. If you didn’t notice, we mentioned Triple Crossing in the second paragraph— it’s at the top of our list for our return visit and we’ll definitely cover it in Part 2! Thanks for reading!
If you want some really well balanced brews and a really diverse list of offerings, you need to check out Garden Grove Brewing & Urban Winery. They have something for everyone, tons of different beer styles, Wine, Cider and Mead. Not to mention they grow a lot of the ingredients that go into their beverages!