Diamondback Beer
When Tom Foster started brewing his own beer, he said a college campus full of eager taste-testers was the perfect place to do it.
Foster began brewing beer during his senior year at this university with his friend Francis Smith in their house off Guilford Road in College Park. The 2013 alumni spent most of the year working on their hobby, Foster said, coming up with new recipes and inviting friends over to try different brews.
“Through college, we were always looking for the next adventure and brewing helped to fulfill that desire,” Smith said. “After doing extensive research, we really just winged it for the first couple batches. We went off the smells of the grain and the malts, and built our unique beers based off recipes we saw online.”
After a while, Smith said, they developed more skill and started producing some consistently “quality beers.” By the time the two graduated, Foster with a degree in economics and Smith with an engineering degree, their hobby had turned into a business goal.
The two brought on their high school friend Colin Marshall, who had earned a business degree from Saint Michael’s College in Vermont, and founded their own craft brewing company, Diamondback Beer, later in 2013, Foster said.
It all started with a name and a premiere brew. Marshall said the three debated on company names for several days, finally deciding on one that would be familiar in the state and paid homage to the company’s origins.
“We wanted to keep the Maryland roots, and the diamondback terrapin is a really unique, iconic symbol for Maryland,” Foster said. “We also wanted a unique logo that would really stand out, and that diamondback shell was really perfect.”
For several months they invested “tens of thousands of dollars and every waking hour of time” to build the business and develop a good first beer, Foster said. Finally, Diamondback Beer’s 3:30 Amber Ale debuted in its “first cold sale” in December as a growler option at Canton Crossing Wine & Spirits in Baltimore.
Photo courtesy of Diamondback Beer
Aaron Lubliner-Walters, Canton Crossing’s general manager, said the first time the beer was available as a growler option, it sold out in five days. The second time around, it sold out in three.
“It’s a nice beer, well-balanced, not too heavy,” Lubliner-Walters said. “It sold fast. And the way it works here, people taste the beer before they buy it, so if they don’t like it, they don’t buy it.”
Foster said the idea was to start out with one beer with wide appeal to help get the Diamondback name on the map.
The 3:30 Amber Ale is now available at several bars and restaurants in and around Baltimore, including The Greene Turtle in Towson, The Rowhouse Grille in Federal Hill and Smaltimore in Canton.
Jason Zink, owner of Smaltimore, said as a new beer, the 3:30 is ““very good, very drinkable,” and doing well in sales.
The hope is, Foster said, that after this first brew, it will be easier to expand and push more beers into the market. Foster said he is proud of Diamondback’s early success and the experience of building the business up from nothing.
And now, the team is focused on their next market endeavor: College Park.
Foster and Smith said they remember going to places like Looney’s Pub, Ledo Pizza and Cornerstone as students at this university and trying all the different beers available.
They used the campus as their brewing “guinea pig in a sense,” Foster said, and now, they are excited to bring their beer “back to UMD.” Foster said the 3:30 is the “perfect beer” for a college town and Marshall said the company is talking with a few bars in the area and trying to get the beer into College Park by the end of February or March.
Sophomore government and politics major Libby Brennan said she tried the 3:30 Amber Ale at the Greene Turtle in Towson. She said she is excited about the beer coming to College Park.
“It’s just very, very refreshing and it’s got a good hoppy kick to it,” Brennan said. “I definitely think kids on this campus would like it. It’s definitely a step up from like Bud Light or Miller Lite, but it’s not too intense.”
Brennan said she thinks students will also be drawn to the beer because of the company’s name and tie to this university. Marshall agreed.
“If you bring in a beer that’s local, with graduates of Maryland behind it and sell it at a reasonable price, that’s a recipe for success,” Marshall said. “It’ll be great to be able to deliver a product back to a community that brought us all to where we are today.”
