3.9 🍺 above average
Don’t Stand Too Close to Me
Covid took a heavy toll on taphouses, where much of their revenue is from on-premise sales. And yet Elder Pine Brewing and Blending thrived. With its outdoor seating spread throughout a pine grove, social distancing was already built into the taphouse experience. If you wanted to drink some beer and hang with friends, this was the safest place to do it. It’s also one of the coolest places to drink craft beer.
Unlike the bulk of Montgomery County’s farm breweries that grow corn and beans and graze cows, Elder Pine sits on a 17-acre Christmas tree farm. As natural light fades at the end of day, string lights woven through the trees illuminate a sylvan wonderland of mature white pines interspersed with clusters of rustic tables and chairs on a soft pine needle floor. In such an enchanted setting, even mediocre beer would taste world class. Great beer, like that crafted by head brewer Paul Davidson, can taste transcendent beneath the evergreen canopy.
Since opening in 2018, Elder Pine has been one of the most ambitious breweries in the state. From the very beginning, the brewery stood out for its blending and barrel-aging programs, and readers of USA Today voted Elder Pine the 6th best new brewery of 2020. Their first doppelbock, Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Sun (9%), was aged for six months in oak foeders, the extra-large barrels that provide a higher ratio of beer to wood, enabling a slower, more controlled aging process. Empyreal Radiance (6.6%), racked into the brewery’s distinctive black and gold cans, was the first (and only) barrel-aged schwartzbier I’d ever tasted.
But it was their innovative farmhouse ales that helped Elder Pine redefine the saison in an American context. Like Arctic Villein (6.6%), a blend of an oat saison with another farmhouse ale brewed from four varieties of rice, then aged in Pinot Noir barrels for 17 months. Then there was The Waves Have Come (6.5%), a saison fermented with Brett yeasts and barrel-aged for 22 months before being re-fermented with pomegranate juice. Other early experiments included Farmhouse at Dawn (6.3%), a saison brewed with rye and chocolate rye malt; Grizzette (5%), hopped with New Zealand varietals; and Gjaerkauk (5.7%), a farmhouse ale brewed with malted and caramel rye and smoked barley malt, and fermented with a Norwegian kveik yeast. This adventurous approach has been evident throughout Elder Pine’s portfolio, from the frequent use of the heirloom grain spelt to an “Americanized” dark mild brewed with rye and oats and dry-hopped with Cascade Cryo.
The competitive reality of craft brewing in 2025, however, has imposed a certain restraint on Elder Pine’s ambitions. When I visited the taphouse in May, there were no saisons on tap, no spelt beers, and no barrel-aged specialties. Of the 19 taps, only a dozen were pouring and nearly half of them were IPAs. Not that I was complaining. My options included two hazies, one single strength, one imperial; two West Coast IPAs, one single, one imperial; and a black IPA. Doesn’t get much better than that, especially when the character of each was of such high quality. Particularly memorable was Dense Brume (7%). Hopped with Citra, Mosaic, and Lemondrop, and barely a week out of the fermenter, it was as intensely flavored, perfectly balanced and beguiling as any IPA I’ve had this year.
The remaining taps were pouring a Mexican lager (left over from Cinco de Mayo), a hefeweizwen, and a spiced ale fermented with a kveik yeast. Two nitro taps offered a cream ale and Bitter Geezer (5.5%), an earthy, herbal ESB that tasted authentically English. For sessionability, Elder Pine’s house pils (5%) can’t be beat. Made with German malts and Czech hops and fermented with Weihenstephaner yeast, it emerges intensely aromatic when served from a LUKR side-pour faucet. A half dozen can pours are also available from the bar.
Most successful taphouses cultivate a vibe or reflect a theme. Elder Pine nurtures an aesthetic. You can hear it in the lyrical names of its beers: Benign Obscurity, Illicit Solarium, Cognitive Reflections. You can see it in the brewery’s logo, framed by a medieval scythe and harrow and strikingly rendered atop the main bar. Or in the vaguely impressionistic black-and-white mural of pre-industrial age farm laborers that fills the space behind the main bar. It’s a pagan vibe at its most spiritual and naturalistic in such beers as Asleep on the Forest Floor (a piney NEIPA), Through Woven Branches (a dark lager), A Light Brighter Than Any Star (a thiol-heavy IPA). It’s a creation story: The Sun’s Gone Dim and the Sky’s Turned Black (a Baltic porter), The Waves Have Come and What the Waves Left Behind (both wild ales), Where the Mystic Swims (another thiol-heavy IPA).
Elder Pine’s pagan predilection speaks with a French accent, as befits its farmhouse brewing philosophy. Many of its hazy beers are named “brume” (French for “light mist” or “fog”): Dense Brume, Shallow Brume, Nordic Brume. Numerous saisons end in “villein” (an Anglo-Norman term for a freed serf): Bine Villein, Terroir Villein, Arctic Villein, Véritable Villein.
The brewery also has a fraternal musical connection. Head brewer and co-founder Paul Davidson’s brother Dustin is the bass player for the Grammy-nominated metalcore band August Burns Red. The band’s poetic moniker could easily have been lifted from an Elder Pine brew. In fact, the band and brewery have collaborated on four beers: Christmas Burns Red (a reddish lager), Sleddin’ Hill Coffee Stout (named after their 5th studio album), Rescue (a German-style pils commemorating the 10th anniversary of the band’s highest-charting album Rescue & Restore), and Death Below (a Riwaka-hopped pilsner named after the band’s most recent release in 2023). The band’s fondness for unusual time signatures inspired Paul Davidson to create a series of IPAs entitled “Odd Time Signatures”: 5/4 (a 5.4% West Coaster), 6/4 (a 6.4% hazy), and 7/8 (a 7.8% imperial).
Thanks for reading this far. Elder Pine brings out the fanboy in me, and there are so many things I like about this brewery that are worth writing about. Other Maryland beer drinkers on social media apparently agree. Elder Pine’s ranking as the 7th-best taphouse in the state is well deserved. In fact, I can only think of one other brewery in the state that brews better beer.
ELDER PINE BREWING & BLENDING CO.
4200 Sundown Rd.
Gaithersburg, MD 20882
OPEN
Tuesday – Thursday: 3 – 9 pm
Friday: 3 – 10 pm
Saturday: noon – 10 pm
Sunday: noon – 8 pm
NUMBER OF TAPS
19
AVERAGE ABV
5.5%
SPECIALTIES
2 nitro taps
1 LUKR side-pour faucet
OTHER DRINKS
5 can pours
FOOD
In-house food truck serves chili, sandwiches, sausages, flatbreads, nachos, and salads
Thursday: 3 -8 pm
Friday: 3 – 9 pm
Saturday: noon – 9 pm
Sunday: noon – 7 pm
PARKING
Abundant parking along side and back of taphouse
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