#10 - Virginia, "The Old Dominion State" - Intro

I've been on two great vacations in the last two months and as a result had to work a lot in between them. But now I'm back on the trail with Virginia.


A lot of breweries are popping up near D.C., bringing with them a little bit of character and style to a region that lacks an accent. It very well may be that as a teenager I was blind to some of the cultural aspects we did have, but to me, the sense of shared local experiences built up over time isn't as deep in the D.C. metro area as it is in other places. Possibly because about half of the people are transplants that work for the government or the military*. But I love Virginia, so my hope is that with the growth of craft breweries comes the growth of other cultural measuring sticks like art, film, music, and a wider breadth of industries.

Southern VA is a whole different ballgame and that is where most of the older micro-breweries in VA are located. There are some really beautiful rural areas, and some nice little towns.


*Complete guess, but probably accurate.

Stats:
Population: 8 million people (12th largest state)
Breweries: 16 currently operating
Breweries in Planning: 18. Some of these 18 projects have already been put on hold, but even if 10 full breweries get off the ground, that will be 26 breweries in VA.
Brew Pubs: 15
Suburbs: Too many too count. If you are in Northern Virginia and you get lost, good luck finding any landmarks to help guide you to where you want to get. "Go past the office park" "drive by the sub-development" and "take a left after the next supermarket but before the next oversized high school" could lead you in about 4000 different directions.

Virginia is my home state, but when I lived there I knew very little about beer and I think Virginia as a state also lagged in the beer department. However, these days, the beer scene in Virginia is exploding. It makes sense to me; the state has a lot of people, it's centrally located on the East Coast, and it has three metropolitan areas to support a growing desire for craft beer. We'll see how many of them can stick around for the long haul. Perhaps Virginia is destined to be the next big state in the craft beer world, alongside California, Oregon, and Colorado.

Hopefully later this week, I'll get the post on the first set of breweries up.