Craft brewers often tell me about their beer epiphanies—those aha moments in which they first tasted full-flavored homebrew in their friends’ garages or decided while tasting local suds on exotic vacations that they would one day brew beer of their own, open breweries of their own.
For Eric McKay and Patrick Murtaugh, the co-owners of Hardywood Park Craft Brewery in Richmond, Virginia, that aha moment came in the form of a homebrewed beer served on a farm in a sheep station outside of Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia.
“David Crawford was the owner of the Hardywood Park farm,” McKay says. “In the evenings we’d make a great dinner, and we’d enjoy his homebrewed beer. He homebrewed out of necessity—there weren’t exactly bottle shops around the corner.