A local brewery has transformed a Founding Father into a frontcourt firebrand.
Dribblin’ George’s Lager is the product of a November partnership between GW Athletics and the District-based brewery DC Brau to create a Revolutionaries-branded ale served at the University’s home games. Advertisements of the new beer line, featuring the can’s design of George Washington dribbling a basketball decked out in colonial garb, have emblazoned the Smith Center’s jumbotrons this season.
I wanted to know the history of the love child that blended hops and hoops, so last Wednesday, I schlepped up to the Maryland border to the DC Brau brewery, which employs fewer than 20 people, to witness the beer’s production.
The brewery holds a warehouse where massive kegs, pipes and barrels churn through wheats and waters for hours to craft DC Brau brews, a brand created by D.C. native Brandon Skall 14 years ago. Skall said that before the basketball season, GW was looking to partner with a brewery, and athletics officials reached out to his “mom and pop”-style, family-owned brewery to gauge interest.
“‘We could do a beer for you,’” he remembers suggesting to GW officials at the time. “And that’s how the Dribblin’ George’s Lager was born.”
Dribblin’ George’s Lager was born in a small room on the left side of the DC Brau warehouse: the lab, which shelves cans of each of the more than 100 beers that brew technicians have produced to identify mishaps in the rare situations where batches are sent back.
Along the walls of the closet-sized lab are vintage posters of beer chemistry, breaking down the ingredients of lagers to IPAs. The cabinets are stuffed with red and green and blue and purple beer cans, each labeled with their respective brew dates.
Down a hallway was another massive warehouse, where waist-high wooden wine barrels for sour beers, bulky metal kegs and towers of beer cans stood near shipping platforms ready to depart for the taste buds of boozehounds and beer connoisseurs alike.
Skall offered me a pair of safety glasses before entering the next room — the “fermentation hall” — lest stray drops of bubbling barley from the factory singed my eyes. The loud grinds of machinery welcomed us as we trudged forward, the entire area thick with the smell of beer like the fragrance of a dim dive bar with sticky floors.
We walked between two rows of large metal vats towering over us with funnels at the bottom and pipes at the top. Yelling over the churn of barley beside us, Skall said these machines, known as fermenters, are the last step in the brewing process, adding yeast into the mix to create a finished product.
“Once the yeast is added in the fermenter, it starts to digest those sugars, and after it chews away at them for a while, you’re left with basically your finished beer, which is going to be alcohol and CO2 in the liquid created as natural byproducts of the yeast digesting that sugar,” he said.
Almost as if we were spinning back in a Bill and Ted-style phone booth, we wound up at the end of the row of fermenters and back at the beginning of both the beer brewing and DC Brau business building process. Behind all the fermenters were two machines — the manual brewing machines Skall used at DC Brau when he first opened the business in 2011 that are now used for smaller specialty batches.
It was here that he explained the brewing process that must take place before fermentation. Malted barley first gets mixed with water and mashed to create the sugars, which help form the alcohol in the beer, Skall said. Steeped water then gets separated from the grains, boiled and whirl-pooled to remove any final solids.
“Then you drain that liquid again, you run it to a fermenter where you add yeast to it,” Skall said.
We walked away from the old machines and traveled back to the present, toward a Willy Wonka-esque assembly line where a series of devices were working in tandem to can the beer.
Red cans bearing the company’s movie poster-style logo and a picture of the Capitol circulated from just below the ceiling and traveled down a conveyor belt before machinery swiveled them up, down and around. A small hose filled each can with beer, which were then fed through a box that applied silver metal lids and six-pack toppers to them. Bundled in jackets, two workers arranged the fresh brews onto a wooden platform for shipping.
Behind the beer canning device were hundreds of empty beer cans, some pre-printed with DC Brau’s logo and others a blank aluminum ready for a sticker to be applied. The mountains of cans led us into the brewery’s final room, where even more cans of beer, already filled, seized the space.
In between stacks of cans was what I had been in search of: pints decorated with a navy blue background and illustration of a slightly melancholic George Washington running point that signified the specialty Dribblin’ George’s Lager. The drawing came about since the founding fathers are “such a part of who we are here in town,” Skall said.
In the back of that room were four massive vats where DC Brau’s brewing operations currently take place for all of its beers, including the Dribblin’ George and other D.C.-themed names like “The Corruption.” After the beers go through the initial four steps of brewing in those containers, large pipes transfer them back into the fermentation machines in the other room.
Skall said he settled on producing a lager for GW because the beer is not “too extreme” and could appeal to anyone at a given basketball game, without the particularly earthy emanations of an IPA.
“It can be appreciated by, say, it’s a craft beer enthusiast slash connoisseur, whatever, but also just that person who’s enjoying having a beer at the game,” he said.
The last stop at DC Brau was the tasting room, decked out in red walls and gold medals from competitions. Though it wasn’t yet noon, I sipped on the refreshingly bitter Joint Resolution Hazy IPA and the heavier Nunya Red Ale. But if I wanted to sip on a Dribblin’ George, I’d have to find my way to the Smith Center for a basketball game — something Skall said he did back in December with his family when men’s basketball beat Navy.
“My daughter immediately wanted to sign up for basketball,” he said of his family’s reaction to the game.
Three days after my tour of the birthplace of Dribblin’ George, I made my way down to 23rd Street to see GW take on St. Louis at the Smith Center, purchasing a Dribblin’ George for $9 at the downstairs concessions stand. The beer was classic, with a taste so easily associated with “beer” that it wouldn’t have seemed out of place to George Washington himself. It had a light flavor but one tailored to absent-minded sipping while cheering Rafael Castro’s heroics.
I stared into the solemn eyes of George on the can and felt a camaraderie with the illustrated revolutionary. As the buzzer sounded a GW victory, I finished the remaining beer in one gulp.
