When we can’t get away for the entire weekend we like to take day-trips, and there are a lot of great destinations within a couple of hours of our home in Kensington, Maryland outside of Washington, D.C.  We recently spent a day exploring beautiful St. Michaels, a quaint waterfront town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. St. Michaels beckoned with the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, freshly-caught blue crabs, and beer from Eastern Shore Brewing!

After exploring the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum (highly recommended), we found our way to Eastern Shore Brewing, a small but determined brewery. You’d have to be determined to open a microbrewery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where Natural Light and other fizzy yellow beers dominate the beer scene. Hats off to Eastern Shore Brewing for its efforts!

The new tasting room is large and welcoming. I enjoyed a sampler rack of five house beers, including:

• Lighthause Ale, a light beer for the masses
• Cherryhause Ale, the Lighthause Ale with a mild cherry flavor, a refreshing thirst-quencher
• Magic, a Hefeweizen and our favorite. Very citrusy for a Hef, but we loved it.
• St. Michaels Ale, an amber session beer
• Duck Duck Goose, a Porter

I left Eastern Shore Brewing with a mixed case, which included a six pack of Knot So Pale Ale, which is a hoppy and strong pale ale (7% ABV, 69 IBU).

We ended the day with a pile of steamed blue crabs at the dockside Crab Claw restaurant, washing down the crabs and Old Bay seasoning with the drinkable St. Michaels Ale.

As you can see from the gallery below, this was a great way to spend a summer day!

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