“There’s a lot of breweries in Northern Virginia—Loudoun County, Prince William County—but there’s not enough weird breweries,” says Joe Rivera, the COO of the newly opened Eavesdrop Brewery. He hopes to change that through his collaboration-focused operation.
While many breweries develop a core lineup of more traditional beers, Rivera plans to do things differently. “I’m kind of a beer nerd at heart, so I really like the specialty stuff and the one-off stuff,” he says. “I like the core stuff too, but what I drink is the one-off experimental stuff.”
Rivera, who is a veteran of Old Ox and 3 Stars Brewing Company, was approached by Eavesdrop owners Jeb Carney and Frank Madden to run their brewery and oversee collaborative efforts with other breweries both locally and nationally.
“Our collaboration focus is really based on the fact that we want to bring a lot of people together in this one point right off of 28 in this really cool tasting room,” Rivera says. “We want to be kind of a soap box for some lesser-known, out-of-market breweries that might be trying to get into NoVA.” They also plan to host collaborative culinary events with local chefs, like beer pairing dinners.
So far, they have four beers on tap and they intend to ramp up to 10 by mid-May. They don’t have plans to distribute, except in a few select cases. The closest thing they have to a core lineup is a house IPA and a house Pilsner that will always be on tap. From there, the drafts will rotate frequently with experimental beers and collaborations.
They’ve already worked with Crooked Run Brewing to brew a Berliner Weisse with Skittles and they’ve partnered with Old Ox Brewery to do a porter with coffee and hazelnuts.
Plans are in the works to brew a New England double IPA with Solace Brewing Company and a chocolate-covered strawberry Gose with the Oozlefinch Craft Brewery in Hampton Roads.
Eavesdrop’s production area is housed in an old racing pigeon loft, which explains the company’s avian logo. “Racing pigeons, who knew? I had no idea that that was a thing,” Rivera says. “That was a really easy mascot to pick.”
The team added a farmhouse-style tasting room onto the front of the loft and a rooftop bar above it. They plan to open the rooftop in May as a space for people 21 and up.
“We’re super family-friendly. We love kids—we love having families come by,” Rivera says. “But I thought it was really important as well to have a space that is separate if that’s not your thing.”
The rooftop overlooks the property’s gardens, which will supplement the brewing program with hops, fruits and botanicals. The hop garden will consist of decorative hops growing up to the eaves of the building and hop trellises around the perimeter of the property where guests can drink and enjoy the atmosphere.
“We definitely won’t be self-sufficient,” Rivera says. “We don’t have enough land to produce enough ingredients to have everything that we need.”
Virginia also isn’t prime terrain for growing what Rivera calls the “sexy hops.” Their trellises will likely grow cascade and centennial hops to use in the beer or potentially pelletize at Vanish Farmwoods Brewery’s processing plant.
The other garden plots currently have blueberries, raspberries, apples, persimmons, juniper berries and spruce trees. “I think it’s really important to have at least some level of ingredients that you can grow on site to utilize in your production,” Rivera says. “It helps kind of give you your own thing. Not a lot of people can say this beer is brewed with blueberries that we grew on site.”
The garden will also be a focal point at the brewery’s first Ale Harvest in May. The festival will allow guests to harvest a specific crop, be it strawberries or flowers, that Rivera and his team will then add to a barrel of beer to age for a year. That barrel will be released at the following year’s Ale Harvest, and the cycle will continue.
“I really love doing barrel-aged stuff,” Rivera says. “That’s going to be a big component of our business. I think around here a lot of barrel aging has been mostly barrel-aged stouts and bourbon barrel-aged stuff…We’re going to do a lot of stuff with wine barrels and farmhouse-style ales.”
“They’re also really good for fruit and different adjuncts, stuff that we’re growing in the garden, because they’re typically really light, wheat-based ales,” he adds.
Currently, drinkers can pair their beers with fare from visiting food trucks or deliveries from nearby restaurants. “We try to have food trucks every day,” Rivera says. “People are welcome to bring their own food if they want to bring food in. There’s a couple places nearby that deliver and we keep their menus at the brewery.”
Down the road, they plan to transition their production license to a brewpub license.
“There’s another building on our property that we’re already planning to build into that’ll house our kitchen and do a lot of our barrel aging and stuff, so that’s the end goal.” // Eavesdrop Brewery: 7223 Centreville Road, Yorkshire
