“We had the confidence and maybe the stupidity that at age 52 years old Heidi and I put up every dime we ever earned in our lives, our home, our land and our accounts to go out and borrow $5 million to build the packaging brewery in Lexington.”ĭevils Backbone Brewing Company quickly gained national and international acclaim winning prestigious awards at the Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup. While the Crandalls and a small group of investors were bullish on the brand, the financial risks were daunting. Limited by the production capacity at the brewpub, Devils Backbone opened a full-scale manufacturing facility down the road in Lexington, Virginia. We became very quickly the darling of the craft beer industry.” “Oddly, at the same moment we couldn’t make enough beer,” said Crandall. With a newly constructed brewpub in the middle of nowhere and a tanking economy it seemed the brewpub might be headed for choppy waters out of the gate. The grand plan for building houses around the brewery fizzled when the stock market crashed that year - 2008. Originally, the Devils Backbone brewpub was going to be part of a residential development at the base of Wintergreen Mountain on Route 151. “We got a lot of pushback from folks that said this would never be successful,” recalled Steve Crandall. He took the book to heart and along with wife Heidi and brewer Jason Oliver began planning.įrom the start the idea of building a brewery/brewpub in a rural area went against conventional wisdom at the time, especially when craft beer had not taken root in Virginia at all. He loved the beers styles in Europe and thought why not build a brewery in his home state of Virginia.Ĭrandall called the Brewers Association with his idea and they provided him with a how-to book. The idea for Devils Backbone came to Steve Crandall on a trip to Germany. I am proud to be their friend and proud of what they have accomplished.” “From producing award-winning world class beers from a brewpub in the mountains of Virginia to ushering in the new “era” of breweries with their support of SB604 (the Tasting Room Law) to really pushing the envelope with spreading their beers around the Commonwealth with their state of the art production facility, Devils Backbone has helped secure Virginia as a beer destination. “There are many things that have elevated the Virginia craft beer scene, and Devils Backbone played a huge part in this surge,” said Kevin O’Connor, founder and president of O’Connor Brewing Company in Norfolk. When Devils Backbone emerged in 2008, it solidified a tipping point of consumer acceptance, elevated quality, and solidified demand for all craft beers in the state.” When I founded Starr Hill in Virginia in 1999, there were only seven breweries in the entire state, consumer demand was low and overall beer quality was at times suspect. The second wave started to expand to places like Denver by the mid-’90s, and it really wasn’t until the mid to late 2000s that the wave began to rise in Virginia. “The first wave in the early ’90s was happening almost exclusively in the North West. “Looking back on my 25 years in the craft brewing industry from Portland in the early ’90s to Denver in the mid-’90s to Starr Hill in Charlottesville in the 2000s, reminds me of the growing waves in the industry,” said Mark Thompson, co-founder of Starr Hill Brewery and current owner of The Brewing Tree Beer Company in Afton, Virginia. It’s been 10 years since Devils Backbone Brewing Company opened its well-known brewpub in rural Nelson County, and today the brewery is remembered as a trailblazer that helped raise the bar for all craft breweries in Virginia.
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