Cushwa Middle America Imperial IPA, Williamsport, Md.
Date: October 24, 2018
The Story— The best feature of the craft revolution on both sides of the Atlantic is the bumper crop of tiny but amazingly good breweries in tiny towns, back streets and otherwise-desolate industrial parks.
Hagerstown, Maryland, is a small town trying hard to reinvent itself in the post industrial western part of the state. It clings to its A level baseball team in beautifully historic but aging ball park that floods when the weather gets cloudy. Its Antietam brewery has been one of its brightest stars, but today we’ll slide a few miles even further into Maryland’s back roads to the tinier town of Williamsport. You won’t find a little world series here, but you will find one of those tiny breweries that is starting to get some recognition well beyond its neighborhood.
>> Cushwa is not only in a tiny town, but it’s hidden in an end unit of a business park you’d never find without a GPS. It is so worth the effort to find. A squeakingly tap room seems to reflect the clean flavors of the beers poured there. It’s small — a conditioning tank is actually in the tap room, but there’s room enough for an afternoon of table games and great beer and local popcorn, meats and cheesses. Crowlers flew from the bar during the time we were there. Indeed, a couple of those flying crowlers landed in our home in Bethesda and our Beer of the Day was one of them.
>> Cushwa is an IPA lovers dream with lots of versions to taste side-by-side. It wasn’t easy to choose which to feature, but these days a full IPA that isn’t either densely cloudy or brewed with a wild or Belgian yeast isn’t all that easy to find. 21st century hops infuse clean flavorful and fruity flavors. We’ll feature another of their fine IPAs tomorrow.
The Beer–The Middle America Imperial IPA is just over the range for a standard IPA with tons of flavors that make it a fine sipper. It’s big and flavorful with ripe fruit, pineapple and some metal. Berries show as it drinks – blueberries mostly and ultimately a berry – fruity- dry- bitter. All of the fruit mingles with the malt to achieve a nice complexity. Very skillful.
Value — Good. $13 for a quart is a fair price for an 8% abv hop bomb.
This week we return to the US to highlight some great American craft beers, some of which we’ve found in researching out first US Beer publication: Brews and Snooze-– Breweries you can visit and walk back to a fine place to spend the night. Look for it in 2019.
Next week we stay in the US with a full week of Guinness beers — a few from Dublin, but most from “Guinness Open Gate Brewery” in Halethorp, near Baltimore, Maryland. We’ll talk more about the venue in our main post and highlight seven exceptional beers– most from the Baltimore Brewery, but a couple of can’t miss beers from Ireland you can only get here.
In November, we return to HIGHLIGHTS OF EUROPE– Surprisingly good beer in “bad beer cities.” The best we’ve found in researching our next book – a guide to great beer in European tourist cities. (Planned publication 2019.) We’ll shift back to great American beer finds next week.
About these posts: We taste and evaluate over a thousand beers every year. The beers posted here rank in the top quarter of those tastings. Values: “fair” is a good beer at an above market price, “good” is worth the money, “very good” is a bargain, and “excellent” is a steal.
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