Because of the dual concept, homebrewers get the chance to have their beer served to the public.

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“I call it beer Disneyland,” says Bret Kimbrough. “It really is an amusement park for brewing.”

Kimbrough is the brewer at The Craft of Brewing, a dual concept brewery and brew-on-premise operation that Travis Travers, who co-owns it with his wife, Chitra Sivanandam, says will open next Wednesday, March 7, in the new Ashburn Crossing development.

Germantown, Maryland native Kimbrough, who has been brewing for more than two decades, got started through a college gig at a brewery in Kansas and most recently worked at Capitol City Brewing Company in Shirlington. In between, he attended culinary school for pastry—”I stuck with fermentation because that’s what I understood,” he says—baked bread for fine dining restaurants in New Orleans, taught at a culinary school in Vermont and is back in the beer world now.

And he has a lot of beer to brew.

The Craft of Brewing features a 20-tap self-service beer wall. It will debut with 18 house beers, plus a root beer and cream ale. Kimbrough and Travers (Sivanandam, a Wharton business grad, is on the finance side) will, at least to start, try to ignore what Kimbrough calls the “gigantic hop bombs” dominating mainstream craft beer culture and instead focus on classics: brown ale, English pale ale, English bitter, Scotch ale, Irish dry stout, English Porter, Baltic porter, Biere de Garde, Belgian styles and of course, their version of an IPA.

Once the weather breaks, tapping into local agriculture will influence more of the experimental mash-ups that have also been popular at local breweries. “When you live in an area like this, with some beautiful things growing around you, it’s a privilege to use them.” He’s thinking about a Belgian triple with Barolo grapes, a porter with a port-style wine base and a Belgian witbier using local peaches.

Also on the beer wall: Maybe something made by me, or you.

Travers waded through paperwork and legal issues to figure out a way for someone who brews on-premise to sell their beer at the brewery. “I wanted to give homebrewers an opportunity to pursue their dream,” he says.

After a judging competition, The Craft of Brewing can decide to purchase a brewer’s recipe. The brewer will be able to name the beer and the brewery will then be able to sell it to the public. Travers hoped to find a revenue-sharing model or another way to build in royalties, but at this point, the one-time recipe purchase is how the brewer will be compensated.

That path, of course, is the outlier. Most people will book an appointment, select one of the house recipes, and brew 10 (one case), 20 (two cases) or 50 liters of beer (about a half-barrel keg, or around 100 beers). Costs range from about $50 to $200, plus bottles ($1.25/bottle) and labels (which can be customized for extra.) Brewers can bring in bottles, but then won’t be able to use the brewery’s high-end German equipment which automates the process.

Brewers should expect to be at The Craft of Brewing for about six hours, but two of those hours can be used for downtime—trying out the beer wall, playing pool and shuffle board or watching sports on one of the four 65-inch screens. Brewers will come back to bottle their beer approximately three weeks later.

Food is BYO, and as of now, food trucks are not allowed in the development, though that could change, especially when another brewery, Dynasty Brewing Company from Lost Rhino’s Favio Garcia, opens 120 feet away. // The Craft of Brewing: 21140 Ashburn Crossing Drive, Suite 170, Ashburn