Not so fast with those Flying Dog brewery tours
After I followed up on a Washington City Paper blog post reporting Flying Dog Ales was getting ready to start public tours of the brewery again, CEO Jim Caruso reached out to me: not yet.
Caruso said there was a tour of the facility last week, but that it was only an experiment to see if it would be possible to start the tours in the future.
"We’re studying how we might organize tours if we did open the brewery to the public," Caruso said. But, "No decision has been made to open the brewery to the public."
Flying Dog closed its tap room and ended tours a year ago over a Maryland law that allows licensed breweries to offer only 6-ounce beer samples to visitors who've completed public tours.
State breweries, including Flying Dog, have protested the law in the past, and expressed interest in bringing the tours back.
To explore that possibility, Caruso said, the brewery invited two groups of around 30 people - retailers, journalists like the writers from City Paper, and "friends of the brewery" - to tour their Frederick brewery last Thursday.
After the tour, City Paper reported the brewery would be able to bypass the Maryland law by simply dividing the brewery into parts, and offering samples after visitors have toured each section instead of after one seamless tour. But Caruso said it's still to early to reach that conclusion.
Photo: Flying Dog's Frederick brewery, via The Lagerheads' Facebook. They got a tour last week.
Erik Maza is a features reporter at the Baltimore Sun. He writes for several sections of the Sun paper and contributes weekly columns on music and nightlife. He also writes and edits the Midnight Sun blog. He often covers entertainment, business, and the business of entertainment. Occasionally, he writes about Four Loko, The Block, the liquor board, and those who practice "
