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Hidden amid industrial complexes and wooded lanes a few miles outside of Charleston, Westbrook Brewery looms like a three-story-tall secret, leaking the smell of fermentation. It’s here, a 20-minute drive outside of booming foodie haven Charleston, along a small road most notable for its strip malls, that South Carolina’s best beer is brewed. In the six years it’s been open, Westbrook has gained renown for its canned gose, a sour, salty summer porch sipper, as well as its IPA, a clean East Coast style. But once a year, the brewers here perform a sort of alchemy that’s elevated them from solid local brewery to national name. Not lead into gold: they transfigure a love story into one of the most strange and delicious beers in the world.
“I think it tastes like a date,” says Morgan Westbrook, co-owner of the brewery, sipping the inky black liquid in front of her. Morgan is the voice of the brewery; her husband, Edward, is the head brewer; their little girl, Ellen, is a fixture at the brewery, and giggles at a video of herself practicing ballet as we sip in Westbrook’s tasting room, a small oval at the front of the brewery with ceilings so tall it echoes like a cathedral. Morgan’s a wispy blond, bubbly and polite — but not, uh, timid. “You’re two drinks in. And you realize, ‘Whoa, this person is amazing.’ And then you get the heart explosion. Like: I’m gonna drag that person back to the cave.”
I was gonna say it tasted like my favorite Mexican dessert, sopapillas, pillows of deep fried dough coated in honey, sugar and cinnamon. But yeah, that too.
The proper name for the heart explosion/primal lust liquid is Mexican Cake: a 10.5% alcohol Imperial stout, brewed with cacao nibs, vanilla beans, cinnamon and habenero peppers, brewed once a year on a special anniversary, half its batch turned into special editions aged in a variety of barrels that previously held things like red wine, tequila, rum, bourbon, or maple syrup. People say it tastes like a lot of things: chocolate mole sauce, a dark chocolate bar, espresso topped with cinnamon. It all tastes like a hit.
Also, like a valuable secret kept under lock and key. When my photographer takes the whole range of bottles outside for a photograph, Morgan and the other brewers grow noticeably tense. These bottles are only sold at the brewery, and the Westbrook team very strictly doesn’t let them outside of it. This is because of their high price, from $12 to $150 per bottle, and their rarity, since Westbrook only makes 120 barrels, or around 20,000 22-ounce bottles of the regular beer and 120 barrels of the special barrel-aged editions a year. It’s also because every year, without fail, some make their way to the “beer black market.” There, they’re sold online between rabid collectors, with prices that skyrocket to between $300 and $900 a bottle. One New York beer bar owner said that high end is the most he’s ever heard an American-made craft beer going for. (This puts them in a realm with super-high-end Belgian Cantillon lambic beers, which regularly go for what I spent on my first car, a 1997 Subaru Legacy lemon.)
The black market prices are a divisive subject. For the brewers it’s vindication of the quality of their product — “A gold star each time I see it,” brewer Will Roberts says. But Morgan is a former school teacher who remembers not being able to buy expensive bottles herself. “It makes me uncomfortable,” she says. “And then people complain about the pricing that we charge. I say, ‘Really, did you see what this person just bought it for [online]?’”
