Beer in the City of Magnificent Intentions

A record-breaking influx of young settlers is bringing an unprecedented number of breweries, brewpubs, Belgian bars, and beer brunches to the nation’s capital and its suburbs.

PRESIDENT OBAMA IS NO

stranger to criticism, including the time in 2009 when he laughed off jabs for drinking Bud Light at his widely publicized Rose Garden “beer summit” on race relations. Politics aside, the craft-beer crowd should probably forgive the president for picking a seemingly “inoffensive” (and, oops, un-american) brew that I imagine most readers of this magazine consider quite offensive indeed. Under ideal conditions, I trust the commander-in-chief would have tried to show some local pride. But at the time, there wasn’t a single brewery in Washington, D.C. (which Charles Dickens once called a “city of magnificent intentions”), and President Obama could have literally counted its good beer bars on his executive order-signing hand.

Fast forward to 2016. Washington, D.C., is enjoying an unprecedented in-migration of twenty- and thirty-somethings. Construction cranes tower on the skyline, half a dozen neighborhoods are gentrifying all at once, and not only do beer-centric bars and restaurants appear in almost all of them, many are opening second, third, fourth, and even fifth locations.

“You could get the sense that food and beverage in D.C. is only a steakhouse… scene, but you can totally carve out twelve hours in the district by getting Bohemian hip with street tacos or a fine-dining meal and the best, newest styles of beer in a really cool environment,” says Bill Debaun, editor of Dcbeer.com.

Beer Bars Break Out

If you ask ten semi-savvy beer nerds to name a beer bar in D.C., eight will blurt out Churchkey. It’s true that Churchkey and its exquisitely polished ground-floor restaurant, Birch & Barley, pretty much set the standard for beer service with menus that note the glass and serving temperature for all 500 of their draughts, cans, and bottles of the best beers available in the district.

But the Neighborhood Restaurant Group (NRC) that owns them is far more than a two-trick pony. Of the company’s three-dozen local restaurant holdings, six elevate beer above other drinks. The Bluejacket brewpub brought sour and funky recipes to the suddenly hip Navy Yard three years ago. Rustico carries 400 options at two locations in northern Virginia, and the NRC team has just unveiled The Sovereign, an earthy Belgian restaurant in Georgetown that carries fifty Belgian and farmhouse styles on tap and more than 200 by the bottle.