Chilly Hollow, Mount Vernon team up on historic Common Country ale

Common Country is the kind of collaboration that tells you as much about the business of craft beer as it does about the beer itself. Brewed in early May, canned on June 9 and released beginning June 11, the pale ale tied Chilly Hollow Brewing Company, Dynasty Brewing Company, George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Lost Lagers to Virginia’s 250th-anniversary celebration, with limited-edition cans available at all three spots.

The beer was built to feel rooted in the past without pretending the past ran on today’s equipment. Chilly Hollow and its partners based Common Country on a recipe derived from Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, a book owned by Martha Washington, then adjusted it for modern brewing by converting old measurements such as hogsheads into gallons and dialing back the hops to account for the lower alpha acids in colonial-era varieties. The finished beer is an American Pale Ale at 5.6% ABV, according to Untappd, and it uses a majority of Virginia-grown ingredients.

That recipe work is what separates Common Country from the usual anniversary tie-in. Mount Vernon has long used beer to interpret George Washington’s world: the site says beer was a favorite drink of Washington, notes that beer and porter were served at a Mount Vernon dinner in 1799, and points to Washington’s own “Small Beer” recipe, written around 1757 while he was stationed at Fort Loudon. Mount Vernon’s recipe archive also traces its historical dishes to cookbooks used by Martha Washington, which makes the Hannah Glasse connection feel less like a gimmick and more like a deliberate fit.

The collaboration also shows how heritage beer can function as a broader commercial play. Mount Vernon had already leaned into beer with Dynasty Brewing, announcing a porter line in December 2021 that included Mount Vernon Virginia’s Porter and a Rye Cask Aged Porter, both tied to Washington’s fondness for porter and brewed with Virginia-grown barley malt. By November 2025, Mount Vernon had joined the Virginia 250 Passport initiative alongside dozens of historic destinations, and by May 2026 it was already talking up summer programming built around America’s 250th anniversary.

For Chilly Hollow, the rollout fits its own local identity as a family-owned brewery on an operating cattle farm in Berryville, Virginia. The real story in Common Country may not be whether the pale ale tastes like a perfect colonial reconstruction. It is that Virginia history, packaged in limited cans and sent out through brewery counters and Mount Vernon grounds, now has real tourism value, community-event value and enough marketable heritage to keep the collaboration model moving.