Pick your cliché: Rock. Dart. Dead Cat… throw any one of those items around Atlanta and chances are good you’ll hit an up-and-coming brewery. After all, nearly 30 have popped up around the state since 2010. Now you can add Dry County Brewing Company, based in Kennesaw, Georgia, to that list. Although they went online in November of 2015 with a five barrel system, expansion plans are in the works. Their future is bright. They’re all wearing sunglasses.

Co-Founder Trey Sinclair’s story is not uncommon: Undergrad wants beer. Undergrad has no money for beer. Undergrad brews beer. And although he claims his first batch tasted like a watered down version of a watered down macro-brew, he and his buddies drank it. After all, it was beer, and they were in college. And brewing their own made them feel a little like bootleggers and outlaws — those original backwoods characters forced to brew their own because they lived in, wait for it, a dry county. Yes, the name stuck.

Lucky for the Atlanta craft beer scene, Sinclair stayed with the brewing beyond graduation and through six years in the corporate world, experience that gave him brains and passion to hang up a shingle of his own in Kennesaw, Georgia, 25 miles northwest of downtown Atlanta.

Their two inaugural beers, an IPA and a blonde, are both “showcase worthy”,  but on the day I sat down to write this, the weather was nearing hot with that classic Atlanta humidity… like walking through warm wet gauze. So I went for the blonde.

The 100% Mt. Hood hops in Namesake, their American blonde ale, are thrown in at whirlpool, giving the beer a hoppy aroma without the bitterness. It is a light straw colored beer with citrus, cut-grass, and honey on the nose, which promises a refreshing brew. It is malt-forward — a slightly toasted malt — delivering on its promise of some citrus with a little bit of pine on the finish. The brewers use flake barley to give the beer body. And with an ABV of 4.9%, it is sessionable, light, refreshing and crisp. So if you have an unkempt lawn and a riding mower, take a Namesake Blonde and make a Saturday chore a little more delightful.

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