Beer Spotlight!

Ballad Brewer’s Select: Anniversary Ale ‘22

$14.99 for the 16oz four-pack cans
Ale Blended from Porters and Stouts

Ballad Brewing in Danville is a weird beast. As far was we can tell, it’s a brewery that was founded more from a love of business than of beer. And yet … years later, we love giving them our beer business.

Back in the teens, Danville real estate developer Ross Fickenscher was buying up buildings in Danville’s River District hoping to turn the area from a collection of abandoned warehouses to a prosperous commercial zone (you know, the same battle of recovery that many towns throughout the nation have gone through when previous sources of business have dried up). Fickenscher and his partner — developer and contractor Garrett Shifflett — and his wife, marketer Aly Fickenscher conspired to birth a craft brewery in a former 19th Century tobacco warehouse that had stood unoccupied for decades. Somewhere in all this businessing, they were able to score an actual brewer in the form of microbiologist Dr. John Andorfer, and in the summer of 2017, Ballad Brewing Company was off and running.

(The name “Ballad” is inspired by the ballad “The Wreck of the Old 97,” which describes a 1903 railroad disaster that took place outside the town — perhaps preferable to Danville’s other claim to fame as the capital of the Confederacy after Richmond fell. Anyhoo …)

It’s been five years. In 2020, Dr. Andorfer stepped aside for Chris Meyers to be head brewer, and Ballad (quite surprisingly considering its origins) has become a craft brewery that we reliably turn to for tasty beers. Enter their Anniversary Ale ‘22 from their new Brewer’s Select Series.

The Anniversary ‘22 is a blend of five previous batches of porters and stouts, and it is great! Just through the blend, Meyers (We assume it’s Meyers.) is able to coax a whole raft of delicious flavors — caramel, vanilla, hazelnut. Plus it’s got that — we don’t know how else to describe it — rich, blended beer taste. The Anniversary ‘22 is thick and off-dry and smooth and if this is what you get after the last five years, we look forward to years six through ten.