‘Soft’ opening set for second brewery

By Erin McGrath

Published: November 19, 2008

A week before the opening of Devil’s Backbone Brewery in Glen Mary, fireplaces were getting the finishing touches, brown paper still covered the copper-topped bar and the brewing kettles were getting a fresh polish.

Nelson County’s second brewery will have a “soft” opening on Friday, with five beers on tap ranging from pale ales to stouts, and the brewery’s operators are planning a grand opening for a later date.

“It’s been a very long process,” said Steve Crandall, owner of the brewery and Roseland resident. “We’re trying to be a win-win thing and support local people and have local people support us and make that work.”

The brew pub and restaurant, which have been in the making for more than four years, have the feel of a hunting lodge that was picked up out of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and set down in the Blue Ridge range. It’s a feeling Crandall said he had been looking for while planning the establishment.

“All the good things about western mountain lodges that work for the west also work out here in the east,” he said. “And it’s also very similar to, in a lot of respects, European beer halls.

“We wanted something that would showcase the natural environment and some of the neat different elements of this area,” he said.

The building has rusty tin walls, floor-to-ceiling windows to showcase the brewing equipment, exposed beams, two fireplaces and will showcase four regular brews along with a few seasonal beers, said Jason Oliver, Devil’s Backbone Brewery’s master brewer.

“Right now we have eight different types in the tanks,” Oliver said. “Generally speaking, we’re going to have four year-round beers and three seasonal, so a total of seven different types of beer on tap when everything gets going.”

Oliver said the pub will also have guest taps and showcase other beers from Virginia microbreweries.

“We’ll just share the love a little bit,” Oliver said.

Crandall came up with the idea for a brew pub more than 20 years ago, while on a ski trip to Italy. There, he said, he was changed from a gin and tonic man to a beer man after one sip of a Weihenstephan brew.

“The first sip I had blew me away,” Crandall said. “I was like Oh. My. God. I fell in love with beer then and the idea sort of was in the back of my head.”

The restaurant and brewery was eventually used as an anchor to the village at Glen Mary that Crandall has been a part of. The area, which is at the intersection of Va. 151 and Va. 664, is on the road that leads to Wintergreen and is also home to Sparrow’s Café, which opened earlier this year.

The name Devil’s Backbone Brewery came from an old story about Thomas Jefferson’s father, Crandall said, who was one of a group of 40 men given the task of conducting the first survey of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Crandall said that one of the men wrote a journal entry about the journey, about an incident in which the group almost lost horses off a cliff and had to go over the “devil’s backbone.”

“We sort of liked the name,” Crandall said. “It has a little bit of irreverence with it and it is a historical term and the name for sort of the front range of the Blue Ridge, so it stuck.”