Baying Hound Aleworks (Rockville, Maryland) - 10 JAN 2014

On Friday, 10 JAN 2014 I drove my son from our home in Kettering, OH back to school at American University, in Washington, DC.   Because I was by myself and my son wanted to connect with his friends, I decided to find a hotel outside of the city.  I knew that there was a Dogfish Alehouse (see other post) in Gaithersburg, MD, so I decided to find a hotel there.  But curiosity sent me to the internet to see if I could find any other brewpubs and that is what led me to Baying Hound Alehouse, in Rockville, MD.

Entrance to Baying Hound Aleworks

I had a bit of trouble finding the place mostly because it didn't present itself as I expected.  See for yourself in this photo.  It was however, right at 1108 Taft Street, just as advertised.  (I later learned from the brewer that they aren't allowed to have external signage in the industrial park where they are located).





When I later told a friend that I had been to a nanobrewery, he remarked that if that description was correct then it would be 1000 times smaller than a microbrewery, located in someone's garage and selling beer by the bottle.  He wasn't too far from the mark.  Although this was in an industrial park, it was pretty close to someone's garage.  You literally had to step over things in the office before entering the brewery and even my messy garage was more organized than this place.  There was interesting artwork on the walls (particularly the "pictures" made from broken glass  bottles), a mannequin that caught me by surprise more than once, a guitar in the corner, and stuff piled every which way.  In further support of his assessment, they only distributed their beers in bottles.

Because of weird Maryland liquor laws, they were only able to sell samples at the bar which suited me just fine as that is what I wanted anyway.  For eight dollars I got six samples including puppy sweater, scratch-n-sniff black IPA, hop shot IPA, long snout stout, taj mahound, and s'more stout, all for $8. (As and added bonus, we were treated to Darwin, a sour that was still aging in a Buffalo Trace barrel acquired from Heavy Seas, that the brewer pulled out with a "beer" thief, if that is a real term.)  All were good, but I was particularly fond of the puppy sweater barley wine.  The scratch-n-sniff black IPA is part of an ongoing collaboration with Pub Dog, a brewery in Westminster, MD.  Hopefully it didn't take you as long as it took me to get the significance of the name of this series of collaborative brews.

I've been to dozens of breweries, brewpubs, and the like, but I can honestly say that I've never been to one quite like this.  I had a great time and highly recommend it to anyone in the area.