Exclusive locally made 'house beers' trending at Delmarva eateries

Blues Surfing Pig isn’t a beer on the shelves at a package store, or even a very high end bottle shop. It’s a beer pretty much only found on the menu at Bethany Blues, along with the other craft beers they sell.

Blues Surfing Pig is a house beer, designed in collaboration between the restaurant and Dewey Beer Co. to accompany the barbecue and whiskey-heavy offerings at the local restaurant.

There is nothing overwhelmingly special about the beer, but that is the point. It was made to be really accessible and also to pair well with pretty much anything on the menu.

That is a hard trick to pull off for lots of reasons, but mostly because independent craft beer tends to be about bigger and newer. One of the things people like about craft beer culture is that it doesn’t do staid well.

After all, ostentatious craft beers tend to get the most attention. Beers that are the most innovative, or super flavorful, or even really weird or novel, capture the imagination of craft beer drinkers and sometimes get into the zeitgeist in a way that even non-beer drinkers have heard about them.

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But the future of craft beer might very well be in these house beers precisely because they get very little attention. They are the crossroads where the craft beer and foodie revolution come full circle and begin recruiting new palates for the future.

Building beers with a particular menu and ambiance in mind allows the beer to be kind of a partner with the food. Blues Surfing Pig stands alone just as fine as any other beer. It’s low in alcohol so you can have a couple, but it is full flavored and that is the big point.

For people who would normally be squeamish about trying a craft beer, house beers make the perfect entry point. It’s both the restaurant’s and the brewery’s way of saying that beer can help improve a meal rather than just keep you from getting thirsty; reminding diners that, in fact, that is what beer in a better restaurant is supposed to do.

And it is becoming more and more common.

The right beer for the right food

Fin City makes “The Globe’s Hammered Copper Ale,” a truly accessible amber for the Globe in Berlin.

3rd Wave makes a caramel red “Captain Skipjack Ale” for Skipjack Dining in Newark, Delaware.

Evolution does “Seacrets Tropicale,” a light wheat beer with a sense of fruitiness for Seacrets in Ocean City.

And these are just a few of them. Many if not most craft breweries have a deal with a local restaurant to produce a house beer, and this is an upward trend that soon will be commonplace.

The beers all are different, but the stories are the same. Brewers, owners, managers, bartenders and servers get together and talk about what beer fits the restaurant’s profile. They try different foods and beers that already are out and try and get a sense of what would be a good fit and (most important) what will go over with the clientele.

These are not beers made to impress beer snobs, they are beers made to impress people who just want a beer with their dinner. Moreover, they’re designed to impress with understatement rather than glitz, to give the diner who isn’t particularly into craft beer a pleasant entry point.

A new twist on an old tradition

In the next decade or so, house beers are something that we will come to expect in a restaurant, whether they make their own beer on premise or have one made to accompany their menu, ambience and culture.

House beers are pretty much as old as dining out. In America, taverns made their own beer from Colonial times though the Industrial Revolution when bigger and faster meant cheaper and more efficient ways of centralizing beer production.

It peaked with chain restaurants and cheap beer, but now is trending a different way. There’s a middle ground that has been emerging for some time.

A place where value is not confused for expense, but rather quality. House beers are kind of the essence of that attitude. They’re a recognition that really good beer can still be beer-flavored beer, just like a great burger and fries is distinguished by care and ingredients rather than price.

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