Chesepiooc Real Ale Brewery

Chesepiooc Real Ale Brewery is a small craft brewery in Crofton that describes itself as Anne Arundel County’s first brewery. It brews traditional cask-conditioned real ales and draught beer, but it also likes to experiment and see what happens. Its 29 taps include five beer engines. A typical day might bring a traditional ESB, an English nut brown, a German-style lager or a West Coast IPA alongside a honey-basil hefeweizen, a mango-habanero New England IPA or a cinnamon-vanilla white stout. The brewery skips flagship beers in favor of constantly changing small batches, made on a small custom-built system. The name, pronounced chess-uh-pee-auck, comes from an Algonquian word that may mean a village by a big river or a great shellfish bay. The brewery says Chesepiook is among the oldest surviving English place-names in the country, first recorded in the 1580s, and it celebrates the Chesapeake Bay and its culture.