Oliver's Twist

If you follow Herring Run Park down through northeast Baltimore, you will eventually come to a nondescript industrial park just inside the beltway.

There, in a former ice-storage facility, Oliver Brewing Company is prepping its new headquarters, which opens the weekend of November 6-8 with live bands, food trucks, and exclusive beers.

The new facility—necessitated by growing demand for the microbrewery’s English-style cask ales, stouts, and porters—will more than double Oliver’s production capacity, and give it something increasingly essential for success: a public brewery with a taproom, retail area, and regular tours.

“This is the next step for us,” says co-owner Justin Dvorkin, 33, who purchased the label with his business partner, Donald Kelly, in 2008. Until now, all brewing for the company—which includes Pratt Street Ale House, The Ale House Columbia, and Park Tavern in Severna Park—was done in the cellar at Pratt Street Ale House, where the label started in 1993.

“[At Pratt Street] we get a lot of [out-of-towners] asking, ‘Do you do tours?’” Dvorkin explains. “It wasn’t really feasible. Now we can show off.”

And he isn’t worried about the brewery’s off-the-beaten-path location.

“We’re a little bit of an offshoot, but in reality, it’s 10 minutes from Canton,” he notes. “We want to give people a reason to go this way.”