In 1762, George Washington received a shipment of English beer that arrived more heartbreak than hospitality — broken bottles, soured ale, and the faint scent of empire in decline. His July 26 diary entry doesn’t rage, but between the lines simmers a realization: British porter doesn’t travel well, and maybe it’s time we brewed our own damn beer. It was more than a ruined crate; it was the foam-laced beginning of American brewing self-reliance — a warm ferment of frustration and inspiration that would bubble its way into revolution.
Not just a supply chain mishap, this was symbolic heartbreak. Imagine expecting frothy liquid comfort from across the sea, only to be met with stale regret and the unmistakable aroma of imperial letdown. It’s a metaphor, darling — for taxation, oceanic arrogance, and every cracked cask of English tradition that couldn’t survive the crossing.
From that ruined shipment — the fizzled toast of a would-be aristocrat — sprang the first bubbles of American fermentation freedom. The founding fathers may have argued over constitutions and cannonballs, but they surely united around one truth: the best beer is brewed close, fresh, and by your own damn hand.
Raise your taster glass, then, to July 26 — the day colonial patience went flat and the soul of craft beer quietly carbonated in a Virginian storeroom. To mark this hoppy hinge of history, Peaks & Pints offers a Saturday Beer Flight inspired by George Washington’s fateful diary entry: a curated cascade of ales brewed close to home, brimming with independent spirit, regional terroir, and not a single broken bottle in sight. Because from colonial calamity springs modern-day celebration — and this flight is your chance to taste rebellion, resilience, and a better shipping policy in five perfect pours.
Peaks & Pints Beer Flight: 1776 Problems but a Taster Ain’t One
Samuel Smith Taddy Porter
5% ABV
Samuel Smith Brewery’s Taddy Porter — the brooding, soot-smudged bard of British beer, here to haunt your palate like a 1760s London alleyway at midnight, only tastier. This is the beer George Washington wished he’d received in that famously botched shipment from London, the one that left his diary ink-smudged with existential thirst and colonial resentment. Brewed with well water drawn from a source older than the United States and fermented in Yorkshire stone squares like some monastic ritual, Taddy Porter hums with roasted barley, dark cocoa, and understated imperial discontent. At 5 percent, it’s not a bruiser — it’s a thinker, a fireplace confessional in liquid form, a silky nod to the idea that if Britain had just shipped this, the revolution might’ve waited until Monday.
Deschutes Black Butte Porter
5.5% ABV
Ah yes, Deschutes Brewery‘s Black Butte Porter — the beer that didn’t just kick in the saloon doors of American craft brewing, it rewrote the tavern hymnbook in smoky malt and mocha murmur. Brewed originally by the legendary John Harris (yes, that John Harris — brewing’s own Hamilton-meets-Gandalf figure), this velvety rogue was among the earliest declarations that the U.S. could do dark beer not just well, but prophetically. Born in Bend, Oregon, in a time when “porter” still meant “imported” and “craft beer” sounded like a Pinterest fail, Black Butte arrived like a leather-bound manifesto wrapped in espresso and cocoa. It’s creamy without pretense, bittersweet without brooding, and as foundational to American porters as Jefferson is to Monticello. Founding Father? No. Founding Fermenter? Absolutely.
Fort George Spruce Budd Ale
5.5% ABV
Fort George Brewery Spruce Budd Ale — the beer equivalent of crossing the Delaware in a hand-knit cloak of citrus sap and frontier defiance. This is what happens when colonial tax evasion meets forest foraging: zero hops, all sass, and a mouthful of sun-kissed Sitka tips harvested from coastal Oregon like some kind of piney manifesto. Brewed without bitterness but steeped in ancestral gumption, Spruce Budd is a nod to the days when early Americans brewed with whatever the land offered — and occasionally, what it whispered through the fir branches. Tart, lemony, and herbaceous with the ghost of a conifer breeze, this ale is a bright green protest poem to British tariffs and imperial predictability. It’s your third pour in the Peaks & Pints Beer Flight: 1776 Problems but a Taster Ain’t One — a wild sip of revolution in every spruce-laced gulp.
Outer Range Crux
6.5% ABV
Outer Range Brewing Crux — a mountain-forged West Coast IPA that hums with modern precision and alpine swagger. Brewed at elevation but speaking fluent lowland, Crux navigates that crystalline edge of clarity where lean malt scaffolding meets aromatics that snap like a pine twig underfoot. Powered by contemporary hop darlings Strata and Krush, it’s citrus with contour, bitterness with a brain. Expect grapefruit, green mango, and a flicker of forest floor mischief — a flavor profile that winks instead of shouts, smooth-talking its way into your palate before you can say “where’s the merch table?” It doesn’t reinvent the style — it retools it like a custom ride and speeds off under a sky scored in post-punk riffs and alpine air.
Crooked Stave Persica
6% ABV
Persica — not so much a beer as it is a fermented love letter sealed in an oak barrel and kissed by a Colorado peach at the precise moment it realizes summer is finite. Crooked Stave’s wild ale closer doesn’t just end your flight — it ascends. Tart? Of course. Funky? Naturally. But it’s also complex in the way only wild fermentations can be — like someone let a rogue symphony conductor loose in an orchard. Brettanomyces waltzes with lactic acidity. Peaches whisper to the oak. And every sip is a peach-pit elegy for those hazy colonial ideals of fermentation, when a little microbial chaos was just part of the plan. Unfiltered, untamed, and unapologetically alive, Persica is the foam-capped coda to your George Washington fever dream — the fruity, funky afterglow of the Peaks & Pints Beer Flight: 1776 Problems but a Taster Ain’t One.
LINK: Peaks & Pints beer & cider cooler inventory
