WASHINGTON — The owners of a new brewery and restaurant in Alexandria. Virginia, will create craft beers based on pre-prohibition family recipes, but they also will give wanna-be brewers a chance to test their own recipes.
Portner Brewhouse will include a Craft Beer Test Kitchen, which will let patrons taste and rate home-brewed recipes.
The idea is to give home brewers interested in going professional a chance to see whether they have what it takes.
“They have an opportunity to apply for the program where we will evaluate a recipe and a sample of their beer, invite them to join us to brew that recipe in the brewpub itself, and from there we will serve it on tap for the adoring public to enjoy,” co-owner Catherine Portner tells WTOP.
Portner Brewhouse will collect customer feedback and sales data on those recipes, and turn that information into a “recipe report card” that will be given to Test Kitchen participants, valuable information for aspiring brewers looking for friends or investors to back their business plans.
The Test Kitchen eliminates many of the barriers that keep home brewers from pursing their hobby professionally.
“In beer, you can’t just set up a lemonade stand,” Portner said. “It is a regulated industry, so this program allows an individual to reach folks they otherwise would not have been able to do so in a legal and fun way.”
For Catherine Portner and sister Margaret, the brewhouse pays homage to their great-great grandfather, Robert Portner, who emigrated from Germany and opened the Robert Portner Brewing Company in 1869. It became the largest pre-prohibition brewery in the Southeastern U.S., and Alexandria’s largest employer.
The original brewery closed after Virginia passed Prohibition in 1916.
The new Portner Brewhouse will brew a pre-prohibition series of beers, based on recipes reconstructed from the Robert Portner Brewing Co. using information from old advertisements, historical data, and a memoir that Robert Portner left to his children to create representations of what the original Portner beers were like.
The new Portner Brewhouse will serve what it describes as classic and contemporary German-American cuisine.
Portner Brewhouse, at 5770 Dow Ave. in Alexandria’s Modera Tempo development, at the corner of South Picket Street and South Van Dorn Street, has just begun in-house brewing and expects to open within four to five weeks.
The restaurant and pub will seat about 150 inside, and another 70 on its outside patio.
