Richmonders The

For Patrick Murtaugh and Eric Mckay, the co-owners of Hardywood Park Craft Brewery, it’s all about relationships as they strive to incorporate local ingredients into their beers.

CRAFT BREWERS OFTEN TELL

me about their beer epiphanies—those aha moments in which they first tasted full-flavored homebrew in their friends’ garages or decided while tasting local suds on exotic vacations that they would one day brew beer of their own, open breweries of their own.

For Eric Mckay and Patrick Murtaugh, the co-owners of Hardywood Park Craft Brewery in Richmond, Virginia, that aha moment came in the form of a homebrewed beer served on a farm in a sheep station outside of Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia.

“David Crawford was the owner of the Hardywood Park farm,” Mckay says. “In the evenings we’d make a great dinner, and we’d enjoy his homebrewed beer. He homebrewed out of necessity—there weren’t exactly bottle shops around the corner.

That was what Mckay remembers as “first real experience with craft beer.”

“I was fascinated by the fact that you could brew beer at home with authentic ingredients and ultimately [produce] beers with so much flavor,” he says. He would go on to host his childhood friend Patrick Murtaugh at Hardywood, and the two would become borderline obsessed with homebrewing. Murtaugh went to brewing school at the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago; Mckay went to business school; and ten years later they called David Crawford at Hardywood Park about opening a brewery of their own.

“When we reached back out to the Crawford family, they had sold the farm and were thrilled to have the name Hardywood Park carried on,” Mckay says. “The name is homage to our epiphany beer.”

Mckay and Murtaugh opened Hardywood Park Craft Brewery in 2011 in The Diamond neighborhood of Richmond, just a stone’s throw from Scott’s Addition Historic District, which in recent years has become a thriving area for craft beer. his