4.1 🍺 above average
A Need for Mead
Mead may be more popular at Renaissance fairs than tap houses, but its allure to beer geeks is growing by leaps and bounds on social media. The fermented-honey beverage that fueled the escapades of Robin Hood’s Merry Men and the pillaging by Viking marauders is a simpler and easier-to-make beverage than beer. Just add water to honey and it will ferment at ambient temperatures. Add apples, berries, or other fruits and you get melomel, a fruit-flavored mead that tastes similar to fruited kettle sours—only better.
Because of that similarity, beer-rating sites Untappd and the now-defunct RateBeer have also included ratings for meads (and cider). Currently the number of beers on Untappd (over 24,000) outnumber meads (647) by a factor of 37 to 1, and yet three of the top five (and 13 of the top 50) highest-rated beverage producers on Untappd are meaderies, according to a recent analysis by VinePair. So it should not be surprising that the Crooked Crab Brewing Co., which makes mead in addition to beer, scores high on social media and claims a place in Taphouse Guide’s Top Ten breweries in Maryland. What did surprise me was what a fun and engaging taphouse experience it provides—mead or no mead.
The first production brewery in Anne Arundel County, Crooked Crab was opened in February, 2018 by U-MD graduates Earl Holman, Dan Messeca, and Alex Josephs. It’s located in a prosaic business park sandwiched between two state highways in Odenton, MD. The two-story red-brick exterior is the definition on non-descript, redeemed somewhat by the brewery’s clever logo. Inside, though, customers are greeted by an expansive floor-to-ceiling mural of colorful cartoon characters that inhabit the brewery’s beer universe.
There’s Furious George (a hefeweizen) scowling at a banana, beneath him Pizza Shark (an amber ale) and Gnarly Narwhal (a West Coast IPA), and over there Crabadile Dundee (an imperial IPA). As befits the first brewery in Maryland with “crab” in its name, crustacean puns and aquatic allusions are rampant: Leonardo Da Pinchy (a NEIPA), Claw & Order (a West Coast IPA), Crab Haus (a Bohemian pils), and Stoned Crab (a dank IPA). It’s kind of corny and sort of silly, but it’s also a lot of fun, especially when accompanied by complementary can art that will make even the crabbiest customer smile. (Pro tip: Don’t leave the taphouse without taking a pee or washing your hands. You’ll miss the beer wall in each bathroom, which is covered with a colorful grid of 266 can art designs.)
If the names and art are playful, the beer is quite serious and skillfully brewed. With 20 taps, the brewery does a better job than any other in the Maryland Top Ten of providing something for everybody yet with plenty of depth for the most popular styles. Here are lagers light, hoppy, or malty; ales amber and robust or dark and mild; a cream ale, hefeweizen, and fruited wheat. When I visited, they were pouring three sours (including one dessert smoothie), two West Coast IPAs, FIVE hazies of moderate strength, and one of imperial strength. The lagers I tasted had plenty of fresh malt character, the smoothie sour was intensely flavored and satisfying, and the West Coast IPA was wonderfully aromatic and well balanced.
These days, however, a brewery will thrive or languish according to the quality of its hazies. One of Crooked Crab’s earliest efforts, Super Brewer Steve, won best IPA at the 2021 Maryland Craft Beer Competition. The beer ticks all the boxes for a New England-style IPA: dense haze, big juicy aroma, intense tropical and citrus flavors, hint of dankness, and pillowy mouthfeel. The brewery has been producing variations on this tasty 7% beer ever since: Fire Brewer Steve, Scuba Brewer Steve, Need for Steve, and a triple-strength version, Tanooki Brewer Steve (10.5%). The version on tap when I visited, Bizarro Brewer Steve, wasn’t bizarre so much as intensely New Zealand-like, with a pronounced white wine character mashed up against peachy sweetness and tropical notes that finished with some fresh dank. Quite tasty.
The eponymous brewer referenced here is Steve Degreenia, part-time brewer, part-time bartender and all-around taphouse MVP whose myriad skills have contributed to the brewery’s success since its earliest days. I asked Steve to recommend a mead and he poured me a small glass of Zed’s Dead (14% ABV) (a reference to Bruce Willis’s memorable line in Pulp Fiction). This fruited mead, or melomel, is flavored with blueberries and black currants and aged with vanilla, cinnamon, and bourbon oak spirals. It’s reminiscent of a semisweet red wine, only much more interesting and complex.
Crooked Crab offers seven different fruited meads, ranging from 10–15%, plus one 5% session mead made from apples and Monster’s Pacific Punch. Two of the stronger meads are aged in bourbon barrels, one in a gin barrel, and another with bourbon oak spirals. Serving sizes range from 1½ to 3 to 6 ounces. The meads are the handiwork of Devin Bitner of Township Meadery, who has been hand-crafting them exclusively for the brewery since 2022. Crooked Crab also offers wine by the glass (rosé, cabernet, sauvignon blanc) and fresh Topo Chico hard seltzer from a tap.
An expansion of the facility in 2022 nearly quadrupled its size from 2,200 square feet to 8,700 square feet and added a kitchen that serves a half dozen varieties of pizza plus wings and soft pretzels. The original bar and seating area features an expansive view of the 15-barrel brewhouse and is now used for special events.
With a social media score of 4.1 pints above average, Crooked Crab easily deserves a place in Maryland’s Top Ten Taphouses. Its 20 taps are among the most you’ll find anywhere in the state, pouring just about every beer style you might be interested in. The IPAs and sours are all first-rate, and the pizza is very good too. But if you come for the beer, you’ll stay for the mead. I’ve visited meaderies that also pour draft beer (Clear Skies Meadery in Rockville) but never a taphouse that serves mead—much less one that produces it in house.
One final gratuitous note: Recently, more than 100 former spies and intelligence officers complained about a proposed casino in the Tysons Corner area being too close (6½ miles) to CIA headquarters in nearby Langley, VA. How about a meadery that’s only 3½ miles from Fort Meade, MD, home of the National Security Agency (NSA), U.S. Cyber Command, and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA)? So far, none of the spooks are complaining.
CROOKED CRAB BREWING
8251 Telegraph Rd.
Odenton, MD 21113
OPEN
Monday–Thursday: 2 pm–10 pm
Friday–Saturday: noon–10 pm
Sunday: noon–8 pm
NUMBER OF TAPS
20
AVERAGE ABV
6.2% (beer)
11.8% (mead)
SPECIALTIES
LUKR side-pour faucet
OTHER DRINKS
2 can pours (beer)
8 meads
1 cider (Bold Rock)
1 NA beer (Athletic Hop Wave IPA)
3 wines by the glass
1 seltzer tap
FOOD
8 varieties of pizza
3 types of wings
Soft pretzel
Cheesy Bread
PARKING
Abundant in business park