A new brewery opens in Newport News, with hazy IPAs and fruity sours and bourbon barrels

Downtown Newport News has a new home for hazy IPAs and bourbon-barrel stouts.

Coastal Fermentory, at the southern edge of downtown near the water and the railroad tracks at 206 23rd St., is a brewery project begun by a trio of partners more than a year ago — in a zone of fallow warehouses the city hopes will become a new restaurant row.

“With the shipyard here and all the municipal buildings down in the downtown area, there’s a lot of activity,” said co-owner Mike Reppert, who works part time as an engineer at the nearby shipyard. “I feel like it’s pretty untapped area.”

He says they originally passed on the location, while scouting in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake. But they pulled the trigger on the space after seeing cars back up at the on-ramp to I-664.

“We realized that that is some pretty good potential right there,’ Reppert said.

Eight taps already are pouring at Coastal, after the brewery’s industry-only opening last weekend. Coastal will celebrate its public grand opening Saturday with food trucks Redwood Smoke Shack and Flame and Pie Pizza. Newport News’s mayor will dedicate the space on Friday.

“We haven’t broadcasted it yet,” Reppert said. “But, we’ve had a lot of people just wander in, which is great. ... A lot of people are pretty excited for our spot to open down here.”

The three owners are engineers; co-owners Brandon Samuels and David Lamb have worked as military contractors and took a trip to Afghanistan while the brewery was getting built as special forces support. But like many engineers, the three have also been homebrewers for years.

“We’ve won a few awards,” Reppert said. “Mostly in Virginia.”

In addition to its six-table patio, the brewery offers about 2,000 square feet of floor space abutting Coastal’s 10-barrel brewing system — with additional space for a barrel-aging program and two large foeders for Belgian-style experiments in mixed fermentation. The brewery’s neighbor, Ironclad Distilling, is allowing the brewery to use their bourbon barrels for boozy stouts, and Reppert said the two have already had crossover customers.

“We’ve had people come from Ironclad who were like, ‘I like liquor, but my wife doesn’t. She likes beer.’ So we’ve had that back and forth, which kind of highlights the good relationship we have with our neighbors over here.”

Among the opening taps — which we stopped in to try on Wednesday evening — the winner so far is a hazy Intergalactic Secrets IPA, made with tropical New Zealand and Australian hops whose pineapple notes and orange-juice haze mask the beer’s heady 8.2% ABV. A Unicorn Rave sour arrives loaded with raspberry flavor, while a Pilsner tastes clean and light, if also with a slight haze and a heftier-than-usual dose of German hops.

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Pale lagers and low-ABV beers always will be among the brewery’s 16 taps, said Reppert, in part to serve what they hope will be a strong after-work crowd from the shipyards. The hazies and barrels — which will eventually include farmy, funky Brett beers — will be on hand for the beer nerds. A funky farmhouse IPA, and an open-fermented saison, are coming soon.

But among the taps available this Saturday will also be a rarity in Virginia: a cousin of kombucha called jun, brewed by their friend Bethany Caddell on the brewery’s half-barrel pilot system.

“It doesn’t even have a name yet. We’re just calling it our ‘house jun,” Reppert said. “But it’s something you don’t see around here, and we know there are people who come to breweries that don’t drink, or who don’t enjoy beer.”

Where kombucha is made with black tea and sugar, jun is made with green tea and honey, and is much milder in both flavor and acidity than kombucha. It tastes a bit like honeyed green tea, with a gentle tang of something unplaceable. And like kombucha, which is legal to sell to children in grocery stores, it’s only the barest bit alcoholic.

The hazy, the raspberry sour and milk stout, a well as a low-alcohol IPA called Opening Session, will also be available in cans. The partners invested in a canning line as an insurance measure during the pandemic, when taprooms aren’t always assured. Beers unavailable in cans can leave the brewery in crowlers or growlers.

“A canning line that size would usually be for a much bigger brewery,” said Samuels. “But now we’re prepared.”

Coastal Fermentory’s grand opening is noon to 10 p.m. Saturday at 206 23rd St., Newport News, coastalfermentory.com. Food trucks will be Redwood Smoke Shack and Flame and Pie Mobile Pizzeria, with live music from Tre Smith and Nick Weber. Moving forward, the Fermentory’s hours will be noon to 10 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday, noon to 8 p.m. Sunday.