Delaware's 5 best summertime craft breweries to drink under the sun

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3 days ago

Every winter, craft beer lovers either coop up with their favorite cans at home or push through the weather to gather in taprooms for drafts of the good stuff.
But now with the warmth of the sun mostly reliable, it's time to bend those pasty elbows outdoors.
For beer lovers, drink sessions at picnic tables in between games of cornhole is the best time of the year.
And here in Delaware, we have a few stand-out spots for drinking under the sun. Here are some of them.
Revelation Craft Brewing, Rehoboth Beach
Revelation Brewing is perhaps undersung, as home to some of the tastiest beer in Delaware. But to beachy locals, hardly a secret.
Its original Rehoboth Beach taproom is humble and out of the way, a backroad bar with a chalkboard beer list that feels made for the neighborhood. A little shack out front serves wood-fired pizza, and its beertenders justly have been voted some of the friendliest in the state.
But its beers, likewise justly, have won national awards year after year. Mostly, this stems from Revelation's deftness with sour beers conditioned on unholy amounts of fresh raspberry or apricot or blackberry: beers that are balanced, light and beauteously expressive of fruit. But don't sleep on a clean and crisp Pilsner, nor a brown ale accented with on woody notes from Caribbean Mama Juana wood.
Just off the Junction Breakwater Trail, its patio is a prime spot for bicyclists to mingle with other beer-drinkers under the open sky near the beach.
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Revelation also has expanded to a Georgetown brewery and taproom far from the beach, but conveniently located at a cross-section of highways for those coming in from parts south or west.
19841 Central St., near Rehoboth Beach. Visit revbeer.com.
Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, Milton
Delaware's oldest, biggest and most famous craft brewery is still worth a check-in even for locals. For out-of-towners, it's a rite of passage.
Its Milton headquarters features a large outdoor area anchored by the 40-foot tall Steampunk Treehouse, also offering cornhole and patio space. Every once in a while, they also put pickleball courts in their parking lot for pickleball tournaments.
Live music, picnic table seating and the buzz of beer tourists from around the country make the Milton brewery a great way to burn a weekend afternoon. And that's even before you get to their exclusive tap room tastings, offering hard-to-find pours.
If you have time, a brewery tour is worth it.
Choose from the $5, 25-minute "Quick Sip Tour" and the deeper dive $25, 75-minute "Off-Centered Tour," but note that you must be wearing closed-toe shoes to go into Delaware's Wonka world of beer.
6 Village Center Blvd., Milton. Visit dogfish.com.
Crooked Hammock Brewery, Middletown
Crooked Hammock is a brewpub with the approximate personality of a Jimmy Buffett concert: a fun-themed Southern-beachy backyard of a place with rainbowed Adirondacks and ping-pong and an actual hammock we're not sure is crooked.
And that goes for both their original Lewes and Middletown locations.
The beers you should order also are the ones themed for "fun." This could be a pineapple-fruity Jungle Juice sour that tastes more sweet than sour. Or it could be a 'Joint Collaboration IPA,' infused with cannabis aromatics, which smells like a lit bong but tastes mostly mild.
Especially, it should be the Hammock Light.
The Hammock Light, a crystal-clear beach lager if there ever was one, is the most basic and frictionless beer you can expect to find in this world: It is low calorie, low hop, low gluten, low alcohol and low effort. It's what you'd drink in a parking lot or while thinking about mowing a lawn, the flavor of a life lived without care. A life led, we presume, mostly on a hammock.
But the fun spills out into each brewery's "Backyard." At Middletown alone, they have two bocce courts, two horseshoe pits and seven cornhole sets to keep the good times rollin' at the family-friendly spot.
36707 Crooked Hammock Way, Lewes, and 316 Auto Park Drive, Middletown. Visit crookedhammockbrewery.com
Thompson Island Brewing Co., Rehoboth Beach
Thompson Island is the original beer outpost of Rehoboth Beach's omnipresent SoDel Concepts, the restaurant group behind well over a dozen restaurants and bars and breweries along the Delaware coastline.
Thompson's better-than-usual taproom food menu shows evidence of this, from stacked smashburgers to seafood to locally famous wings. So does the minimalist white-on-white cottagecore of the restaurant's interior, whose self-consciously rough-hewn furniture looks a little like its painters left early for the day.
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But if you're here, you're almost certainly here for the indoor-outdoor back bar, the spacious firepit patio with multiple cornhole courts, and an array of beers from a spot-on Baltic porter to No Bad Days lager that starts dry and ends with a strong noble-hop finish. Hopheads should always spend a glass with a truly excellent piney-citrusy, malt-balanced Thompson Island IPA.
Some far-flung beer flavor experiments, like a maple pancake sour, might reward caution. But,a mixed-culture Brett saison, a style known for barnyard funk, scored national medals in 2024 at both of the biggest craft beer competitions in American beer.
30133 Veterans Way, near Rehoboth Beach. Visit thompsonislandbrewing.com.
Wilmington Brew Works, Wilmington
Sure, the former site of the Harper-Thiel Electroplating Co. has a tasting room in what resembles The Alamo.
But when the weather is nice, the best seats in the house move outside.
The front patio is filled with tables for hoisting pints of Hazy Tang tangerine cuvée IPA or a glass of Nom de Pomme dry cider.
In the back, the patio is a little more bustling with live music, food trucks and usually a kid or two running around and joining in the fun.
Even though they have a solid line-up of food trucks, it's hard not to contemplate grabbing a pizza from stand-out La Pizzeria Metro in the same complex, which you can carry over to the brewery.
3129 Miller Road, Wilmington. wilmingtonbrewworks.com.
Have a story idea? Contact Ryan Cormier of Delaware Online/The News Journal at [e-mail] or [phone]. Follow him on Facebook (@ryancormier) and X (@ryancormier).
This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Try these Delaware breweries for summer outdoor craft beer sessions
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