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Phase 2 Brewing, open for less than five months, is already proving itself to be an industry maverick.
One, this brewery is owned by a pair of 50-something-year-old women, a rarity in a field dominated by men. And two, for the fall line-up, there’s no pumpkin beer.
“I actually make a really delicious sweet potato souffle,” says Cathy Frye, one of the owners. “I kept thinking, ‘How would I make this into a beer?’” Enter Silence of the Yams, a sweet potato ale with, Frye says, “a Belgian backbone, sweet but strong” at 9 percent ABV.
This is one of the fall and winter beers rotating on three taps and a beer engine, a device traditionally used in English pubs for serving cask ales.
Phase 2 is a tiny operation. Frye, the head brewer, and her sister and business partner, Mary Battaglia, added a brewery into Brew LoCo, their Leesburg cafe, bar, bottle shop and home brew supply store. After opening four years ago, running beer-making classes and stocking all the gear and ingredients necessary to become a brewery, Frye and Battaglia finally initiated the second phase of their business plan. “We were teaching classes and said, ‘Isn’t this silly? Why don’t we just make beer and put it on our own tap?’”
That was the plan all along, and when they decided to start brewing for themselves and needed a name, their catchphrase, “When we get to phase two …” was the obvious winner.
Producing a half-barrel a week of beer, or 24 barrels a year—compare that to the largest brewery in the DMV, Port City Brewing Company’s 16,000 barrels a year—qualifies it as a nanobrewery. But the beers are inversely ambitious. The line-up includes a signature IPA, Sibling Rivalry (7 percent ABV) with Citra and Mosaic hops; a fruity double IPA, the Mango Mama DIPA (8 percent ABV); plus a New England-style IPA, a rye-forward IPA, a lime-peppercorn saison, an ESB and an imperial stout. There’s also a gruit, Going Hopless, based off ancient recipes before humans knew hops were edible that uses culinary herbs (sage, for example) for flavor.
For now, all four concepts of Brew LoCo remain (though they’ve stopped classes) and are concentrating on brewery expansion: bottling or canning beers, adding more equipment and infrastructure and making enough beer for LoCo Hanger Fest next month. Phase 2 will be showing off its renegade chops at the local festival: sweet potato beer anyone? // Phase 2 Brewing: 19382 Diamond Lake Drive, Leesburg
