Our favorite discoveries in local beer, cocktails, wine and booze in 2020

It’s been a strange and frightening and often boring year — one that’s likely driven far too many people to drink.

It’s also a year in which we’ve all been less likely to try new things. A pandemic, it turns out, is a time when you resort to old standbys, convenient crutches, and whatever happens to be nearby.

But life can still contain surprises, even if you’re stuck at home. Here are a few of my favorite developments and discoveries in local drinks this year — most of which close to home in Hampton Roads. This might be a brewery that turned over a new leaf, a Japanese cocktail revived from the ’80s, or a novel experiment in Virginia single-malt whiskey

Heirloom Watermelon Jouble Jeuce, Benchtop

There are any number of new releases this year at Norfolk’s Benchop Brewing that count among my favorites for the year — an excellent and modern West Coast IPA, a corker of a triple IPA made for the brewery’s December anniversary, and a beautifully precise Oktoberfest lager. But in a pandemic year, the Patrick-Swayze-themed Jouble Jeuce series was special, a way to bring takeout customers to the brewery when breweries needed them the most. To make them, brewer Eric Tennant infused various beers in his lineup with fresh fruit. And so Jouble Jeuce is beer as agriculture, and beer as perishable item — a crowler-only beer to be drunk within days. The watermelon, made with an heirloom Bradford, was Tennant’s favorite of them all: bursting full with the flavor of one of the South’s sweetest watermelons, plus the farmhouse yeast of a light saison. Damn, it was good. And until the watermelons come back, the drink won’t either.

Schwaz Schwarzbier, Elation Brewing

Norfolk’s Elation Brewing took a moment to get rolling in 2019, in part because of a holdup getting certified because of a federal shutdown. The beers have gotten steadily more accomplished in ther intervening year, and the North Colley brewery has hit their stride with lagers in particular — none more thoroughly than with this beautifully balanced, roasty black lager. Alongside the Schwarzbier from Devil’s Backbone, it’s among my favorite takes on this style in Virginia.

Craft Lager, Tradition Brewing

Speaking of breweries that have hit their stride with lager, the beers at Tradition in Newport News have undergone a bit of a transformation under brewer Brian Martin, who took over last year after stints at Three Notch’d and Cape Charles. It’s the lagers that have mattered most. The Pilsner may have been the one that medaled this year in the Virginia Craft Beer Cup, but the one I keep putting in my fridge is the Craft Lager — a loose take on a Munich-style Helles that drinks as clean and crisp as a dream of winter.

Short Throw Brewing in general

Is Short Throw a Virginia Brewery? It’s debatable. Brandon Tolbert is a former brewer from Richmond’s The Answer and Final Gravity — and Richmond is where he and his company are based. But after difficulties starting a brick-and-mortar brewery, his beers are brewed instead in at contract brewer Twelve Percent Beer Project in Connecticut. Well: based on the quality of the beer, we have decided to henceforth claim Short Throw for Virginia. Their brews have been the sudsy revelation of the year — thumpingly loud stouts, creamy IPAs packed with a big boom of tropical hops, fruit beers that taste like just-picked berries. I drink every can that comes to Hampton Roads. And luckily, Bottlebox beer shop in Norfolk has had a hookup for a steady stream of them.

Courage and Conviction whiskey, Virginia Distillery Co.

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This dram is part of a new-ish movement among makers of whiskey: The American single malt. In the Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia Distillery Co. started out by blending young American whiskies with older Scotch — a sort of funny hybrid that amounted to a teaser for their true plans. With their all-local Courage and Conviction, they’ve embarked on a rarefied path toward true American single malt. Already after three years’ aging, Courage and Conviction embodies both the idiosyncrasy of a single-malt and the oaky vanilla of a homegrown bourbon, with a lovely and high brightness brought from sherry casks: Truly, it tastes like an American re-imagining of Scotch, with local ingredients. It’s no longer easy to find in stores this year, though it’s available on the distillery’s website. But even at a heady $70 a bottle, this will be among a small number of Virginia whiskies I’ll try each year it releases.

Reverend Spirits Gin, R.D. Wilhelm Distillery

Count this as an early expression of faith. R.D. Wilhelm distillery — tucked behind Benchtop Brewing in Norfolk’s Chelsea district — is still very young, starting earlier this year during the pandemic. Their 5-year whiskey, which tastes quite nice, is distilled out-of-state, with the local-distilled barrels still aging until it’s time to release them. So it’s the vodka and gin so far that exemplify the promise of R.D. Wilhelm’s future. The vodka is all-corn and shows it, making Wilhelm the rare American distillery to take pride in a vodka expressing the character of its grain. The dry Reverend Spirits gin is a further evolution from this, taking that corn base and redistilling it with juniper and more floral aromatics. The result on the first batch is pleasantly balanced and comes on like a woodland journey: juniper on the nose, floral and citric on the tongue, and a wee bit of pepper at its finish.

Natural, funky and low-intervention wines in Hampton Roads

This is the year that wine got a lot more fun in Hampton Roads. 2020 saw a sudden critical mass of shops and restaurants embrace adventurous grapes: fruit-forward carbonic wines, whites that smack of wild yeast, Slovenian or Northern Italian oranges, funky reds. The list at Chartreuse in downtown Norfolk was always excellent, but they’ve now been joined in Norfolk by a natural wine shop at Toast on Colonial Avenue, and increasingly adventurous selections at Crudo Nudo — including Bolivian wines hard to get most anywhere at a recent special dinner. In the ViBe district in Virginia Beach, the Pink Dinghy’s natural wine list and bottle market arrived this summer next to the often very interesting selections at Prosperity Kitchen. But best of all? Grandiflora Wine Garden, Norfolk’s very first natural wine garden, is open for business at 1231 Boissevain Ave. An early visit has shown it well worth the wait, with conscientiously chosen and one-of-a-kind wines that include a Cypriot dessert wine with the nose of sweet sherry and the body of port, and a stunningly acidic and mineral verdejo from Spain.

Spumoni cocktail at Baby Izakaya

Virginia Beach’s new Baby Izakaya has a whole mess of curveballs on its drinks list: tequila drinks sprinkled with chile spice and MSG, rare sakes, Manhattans made with bourbon that tastes like plum. And yet, the biggest surprise was a prettily pink Japanese cocktail modeled after the bitter drinks of the Italian riviera. The spumoni, newly becoming popular among American bartenders, is a revival of a Japanese trend of the ’80s: grapefruit and tonic and bitter liqueur blended into unlikely and floral balance.

Takeout singani cocktails from Crudo Nudo

One of my signal pleasures of the early pandemic was — like the watermelon Jouble Jeuce and the spumoni — another somewhat pink drink. Who knew pink would be the color of the least cosmopolitan year on recent record? In any case, Norfolk’s Crudo Nudo has a habit of rotating cocktails made with Singani Rujero, a high-altitude Bolivian grape spirit. In winter, this involves the zesty orange flavors of curacao. But during much of the early pandemic, it was strawberry season. And so whether at Crudo or at bartender Josh Seaburg’s Model Citizen pop-up, the singani drink involved clarified local strawberries and a bit of lime. Ordered as a takeout cocktail — illegal in Virginia until it suddenly wasn’t, making all of life’s rules seem like an impolite fiction — that singani cocktail was Pungo summer in a glass, a stirred cocktail for stir-crazy times. For its role in keeping me occupied, and less bitter, and maybe a little bit tipsy, through the dull and endless months of the early pandemic, the drink will forever have my gratitude.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated when Elation Brewing opened. The brewery held its soft opening in March 2019.

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com