54 CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // JULY 2019
THE ANSWER, a brewpub on a lonesome
stretch of highway in northwest Richmond,
ocially closes at midnight on weekdays. It
is past midnight. We are still drinking. The
late night crew has assembled for its usual
Thursday gathering, which breaks up at an
indeterminate hour early
Friday morning. Half-full
crowlers and pint glasses
litter the patio tables.
Earlier, a pair of tour-
ism authority reps advised
me to meet up with Mike
Gorman, a 42-year-old
native of and evangelist
for Richmond, National
Park Service ranger for
the Richmond National
Battleeld Park, and organizer of local beer and
history tours. He’s a regular at these Thursday
night beerathons. I arrive at 9:30 p.m., not
knowing if I’ll run into him. An hour later, on the
patio, I hear a booming voice and a reference to
his name. “Hey,” I call to a stocky fellow sitting
nearby. He wears the cap of the now-defunct
triple-A Richmond Braves. “You Mike Gorman?”
He is. This is typical of Richmond, a city of
about 225,000, big enough to support one
of the East Coast’s fastest-growing food and
cra beer scenes but small enough to enable
a face-to-face encounter with a guy I’ve heard
about but never met. Gorman is an enthusi-
ast—about history, about theatre, about his
hometown. “Right now, it is happening,” he
tells me. “Food, beer, wine, mead—shit, I mean,
what do you want? It’s here!”
It’s been only since 2012, when the Virginia
legislature passed a law that allowed on-prem-
ises sale and consumption at breweries, that
Richmond has transformed into what Fortune
magazine last year referred to as “the new
cra beer mecca of the American South.” The
phenomenon has given rise to more than 30
independent breweries and turned a decaying
industrial section of Richmond called Scott’s
Addition into a brewery-rich neighborhood akin
to our South End. But The Answer, three miles
up West Broad Street and near no other brew-
ery, is “the beating heart” of the beer scene,
Gorman says, mainly because of a 46-year-old
Vietnamese immigrant named An Bui.
At the moment, Bui is upstairs—“hiding,”
Gorman says—but he eventually comes
down to talk. He explains that he opened a
Vietnamese restaurant named Mekong in 1995
and experimented with wine pairings. A couple
of years in, he realized they
weren’t pairing well. “At
that point, I said, ‘You know
what? Let’s try beer, ’cause
I kind of know something
about beer,’” he tells me as
he nurses a cigar. “Back then,
it was literally a beer desert.”
Mekong began to stock
fancy, $7.50-per-bottle
German and Belgian beers,
and before long Gorman and
other beer geeks were congregating at Mekong
and downing whatever Bui uncapped and set
before them. Their names dot the current roster
of Richmond brewery owners. “I see guys who
make great beer,” Bui says, “I tell them, ‘Dude, you
need to open a brewery.’”
In 2014, so did Bui. He founded The Answer
(An-swer, get it?) in an old nightclub next door
to the restaurant. It’s won multiple regional
and national awards, including one this spring,
when The Answer routed 31 competitors to
win a USA Today voters’ contest to determine
the best cra brewery in the country.
As we push toward 1:30 a.m., the
aer-hours posse has dwindled to
a handful of die-hards. Bui has set
me up with ve 32-ounce crowl-
ers, including a stout, a double IPA,
a triple IPA, and God knows what
else. They sag in black plastic bags.
I’m done. Before I leave, I thank
Bui for his hospitality and notice
the relative paucity of what’s in his
hand. “What’re you drinking?” I ask.
“Oh,” he replies, “just a little bour-
bon.” —G.L.Richmond By the Crowler
How did Virginia’s capital transform into the East Coast’s
craft beer flagship city? Here’s The AnswerBEER TRAVEL RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
BEST
FEELING
THE ANSWER
BREWPUB
STYLE: German Kellerbier/
Zwickelbier (“cellar beer,”
not clarified or
pasteurized)
ABV: 6 PERCENTTRY
THIS!The Answer’s Best Feeling,
(right), is a German-style
Kellerbier; Annie Rudasill
(opposite), a bartender
and manager.COURTESY