Eastern Shore Beer: The Heady History of Chesapeake Brewing

By Tony Russo and Doug Griffith

When Great Britain levied heavy taxes against the colonies, the Eastern Shore's first beer geek, John Beale Bordley, swore off English ales and set his substantial estate to perfecting his own home brews. It took another two centuries and a revolution of a different kind to bring brewing back to the Maryland shore. In 1989, Wild Goose bore the gospel of drinking local to Cambridge before falling victim to the first craft beer bubble. The next wave of high-gravity harbingers like Eastern Shore Brewing, Burley Oak and Evolution Craft Brewing fought to change collective palates and legislation allowing them to serve up their frosty pints. Beer bard and blogger Tony Russo taps into this full-bodied history while introducing the region's bold new batch of brewers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Nov 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781625852700

Tony Russo

Tony Russo has worked as a journalist since 2004, writing and editing for daily and weekly newspapers and magazines, and most recently as editor of OceanCity.com. Tony has written about beer almost since the start of the craft beer revolution in the region. He co-hosts a popular, weekly podcast "Beer with Strangers" and runs the ShoreCraftBeer.com craft beer lifestyle website. He lives in Delmar, Maryland, with his wife and four daughters.

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INTRODUCTION

The rise of craft brewing, especially on the Eastern Shore, followed from the rise of homebrewing. There is something of self-sufficiency, certainly, that drives the homebrewer. There is, doubtlessly, also a communal aspect that people embrace. Beyond all of those, though, we are captivated by the chemistry and the mechanics of brewing. People like to make stuff. Creation is a good unto itself. It amazes us when we take a bunch of things that always have been around and turn them into something that never has been around. Getting someone to pay us to do it is a bonus even when it isn’t a convenience. Traditionally, there have been two reasons to make beer. The first is economic. People have to earn a living, and when they are lucky, good or both, they can earn it making beer. The second is aesthetic. People develop a particular taste for something (be it beer, wine or, for the love of God, an edible slice of pizza), but region or circumstance deprives them of it. Eventually, they decide to make it on their own. The current craft beer revolution is a significant marriage of both. Many of the people who went to college in the 1980s developed a taste for craft beer during the first craft beer boom. By the turn of the century, they fell loosely into those two categories: people who needed beer economically and those who needed it aesthetically. These distinctions aren’t absolute; they make up two circles in a Venn diagram that has Excellent Sustainable Beer at its intersection.

In what follows, we will look at where and how this cycle began on the Eastern Shore. Beer always has been an economic tool. It is a craft no different from woodworking, textile production or farming, which humans have engaged in since we figured out that collecting grain was easier than being on the constant lookout for it. But—as opposed to woodworking, textile production or farming—brewing is something any of us can learn to excel at in a pretty short time. Craft brewing will always have artists, impresarios and imposters. As long as the first two make up the bulk of the professionals, we all will be able to survive the third.

Two quick notes before we get started:

I took a vague liberty with geography. The first chapter of this book takes place before Maryland state and county boundaries were set. As a result, things that are claimed to have happened in Talbot County, for example, happened in modern-day Dorchester. Rather than put a long explanation after each usage, or qualify where a place really was during the book, I wrote this little note.

Secondly, you may notice a brewery or two (or a dozen, depending on how much time elapses between the time this book is printed and the time it gets into your hands) missing from the text. I focused on what I consider the main breweries that were open at the start of the Eastern Shore craft beer and some that opened as a direct result of it. Several breweries either were already open or about to open as I completed this book. There was also at least one false start in the region that didn’t contribute to the culture or the attitude of craft beer, so I omitted it. I guess this would be where I plug my State of the Beer blog for those of you who need the most up-to-date information on continuing regional brewery development.

1

AN EARLY TEMPLATE FOR CHESAPEAKE BREWING

A VERY DARK TIME INDEED

It takes a vivid imagination to conceive the impenetrable dark in a world where light is always handy. A world not merely without roads, phones, light or help but no expectation of any. Gone would be concerns about safety and emergency response times. The best an injured person in the seventeenth-century Maryland wilderness could hope for was a speedy recovery or a quick death, but there was some movement to change that. Not for the sake of personal safety, of course, but infrastructure improvements were needed to streamline business transactions and travel to court. Maryland was undergoing its first population explosion, and roads were being cut into the wilderness to better facilitate the transport of tobacco, the lifeblood of the colonial American economy.

Today the land around Castle Haven is what might be called nineteenth-century pristine—many fields, few roads, fewer people and no streetlights to speak of—so it is easy to forget how developed it might look to a seventeenth-century man. Take away the modern homes and the eighteenth-century manor house at the end, and still it would be difficult to imagine how Castle Haven, northwest of the burgeoning city of Cambridge, appeared to Peter Underwood, who made his way there in the 1660s. Underwood was in his twenties when he purchased a nine-acre spit off of Castle Haven to open and run a tavern and a ferry house. Married, with a child, he was cruising toward middle age after a life of labor and adventure.

While the better part of the enterprising, unemployed freemen and failed farmers were making their way to the courts of Talbot, Kent and Anne Arundel or opening the era’s equivalent of speakeasies along the roads to villages and towns, Underwood had a good opportunity for long-term, legitimate work. Running a tavern was hard, as was running a ferry, but no harder than the rest of his short time in Maryland had been. Underwood had been a runaway indentured servant, a captive and a workman for hire. He entered the wilderness to open the next chapter of his life as an innkeeper.

NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED

Underwood had come to Maryland as an indentured servant, bound to Peter Johnson of Patuxent. Johnson died within the first three years, and though he was left to Johnson’s son in Talbot County, Underwood and another boy, John Boone, ran away to seek their fortune. Trading a rifle for supplies, the pair lit out into the Chesapeake Bay bound for Elk River and freedom. The immensity of the New World to these two teens from England must have been staggering and seemed theirs for the taking. The ad campaigns to attract young workers had not yet reached the streets of gold level of hyperbole, but they did give one the distinct impression that the game was as plentiful as the fruit trees and just as ripe for the picking.

Today, on a moonless night, the dark is stifling out on the Chesapeake. Even with such light pollution as might seep from Easton or St. Michaels, you can close your eyes or keep them open for all the good it will do. During the day, especially in the back bays and along the creeks, one isthmus looked like another, one waterway like the next, and similarly with the coastlines. Underwood and Boone were from, at best, the seventeenth-century England equivalent of the suburbs but were as likely to be from Liverpool or London. Like nearly all the other street kids lured to the New World, they might have had a working knowledge of how to use a gun, but hunting, fishing and agriculture were probably as much a mystery to them as they are to the bulk of twenty-first-century suburban teens. The boys were lost after only a few days. They were saved by Abraham Holman, who put them directly to work. Holman knew they were escapees, so he kept them hidden from neighbors, treated them poorly and forced them into his service, as Underwood later would testify. Eventually, they were discovered and rescued when the young Peter Johnson brought suit against Holman and spirited them back to Talbot County.

The land around Castle Haven hasn’t changed significantly since Peter Underwood opened his tavern in the seventeenth century.

Underwood worked as a laborer—marking cattle and doing odd jobs—first for his new master and then, on his release, on something of a freelance basis. There are a hundred reasons he might have elected to go to Castle Haven, but work seems the likeliest. The entire isthmus was under development as large landholders were planting as fast as the seasons and their access to labor would allow.

Today, Castle Haven Road can accommodate two cars traveling in either direction, but one of the drivers certainly will wince his way through the passing. If there even was a road before Underwood staked his claim on the water, it was little more than a path. Trade was primarily by water, and until the late seventeenth century, there were very few landlocked plantations on the Eastern Shore. That a ferry was needed there, given that all of the other plantations traded out of their backyards, suggests that beyond travel, inland growers were looking to get their wares to market. Squatters and would-be plantation owners abounded in the area as the first generation of indentured servants came of age.

Early colonial Maryland was powered by indentured servants more than by slaves, but not all indentured servants were created equal. All were given a land warrant at the end of their servitude, but most were city kids like Underwood and Boone, genuinely surprised at how hard it was to make stuff grow. True, sometimes they selected or were given useless land, but more often they selected perfectly arable land that they were not savvy enough to work. What small amounts of tobacco and crops they could grow and sell, they had to move from their land to market. The Castle Haven complex was strategically placed for those planters, farm workers and travelers without boats and access to water. This became important as unemployed servants began rethinking their career choices. The least successful of them returned to being hired hands, finding work where they could. The more successful, or at least more ingenious (depending on how you look at it), became minor-league entrepreneurs. They opened their houses to travelers, hoping to supplement their income by opening tippling houses.

A QUICK DRINK

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, it was common for widows and the borderline destitute to beat back starvation by opening tippling houses, where people could come in for a quick drink or a few, a bed and a small meal if they needed one. In colonial Maryland, which had many more people than jobs, unemployment became something of a problem as the 1600s came to a close. A dearth of land for the government to offer as incentive made it harder to attract indentured servants from England. The rise of slavery made it difficult for plantation owners to front the costs for a servant’s trip from Britain, especially since they often wanted pay and rights as Englishmen. Out of work and out of options, many of the former indentured servants began opening their shacks to travelers. Before long, the land around every courthouse, ferry and large village was dotted with tippling houses. And they started to become a