More than two years after it was first announced, a new brewery called Vibrant Shore will arrive at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront — with room for 150, a rooftop patio and a mural depicting a spiral in the sky and the imposing bust of King Neptune.
Vibrant Shore Brewing Company is due to open by November at 501 E. 18th St., a block or so from the long-planned, much-delayed Virginia Beach location of Richmond’s Isley Brewing.
“It’s gonna look fabulous,” said owner and brewer Rhett Rebold of his Vibrant Shore brewpub. “There’s a patio out front delineated with planters, a visual block to give the apartments next door a break. We’ve got some holly trees planted … a rollup door that rolls up onto a bar, so you can sit on either side of the door in nice weather.”
The brewery will be full of cozy nooks, Rebold said, so each person can find their own place to be: at the bar, atop or underneath a mezzanine area, out on the front patio or sitting on the roof.
Rebold says he bought the former Red Flag Athletics building in 2017 from filmmaker Derrick Borte, and it has taken until now to bring the place in line with his vision.
But the brewery has been a long time coming in general.
Rebold worked for the CIA in the 1980s and ’90s before moving on to imaging analysis at the Pacific Disaster Center in Maui — helping create models for how hurricanes and tsunamis afflict the coastline.
He’s been brewing beer since even before the first legal craft brewpub was allowed in California back in the ’80s — when a college roommate got him a fateful homebrew kit, and he tried the first the first recipe he found.
“There were a lot of bad homebrew recipes at that time,” Rebold said. “It was a can of malt extract, two pounds of corn sugar, and the hops were these sorta yellow clusters. I almost threw in the towel after that.”
He persisted, and by 1995 he was named the best homebrewer in the country by the American Homebrewers Association, largely on the strength of a German-style Helles lager that won best in show at that year’s beer competition.
“They thought it was a ringer,” Rebold said. “There was no sediment at the bottom.”
Rebold will serve a recipe similar to that award-winning lager at his new brewpub; he started brewing Vibrant Shore beers on Sept. 19, and expects to have eight or nine taps of his own beer pouring when the brewery opens its doors.
“We’re a bit on the traditional side for now: in planning, we’ve got a kettle sour, a fruited gose, a milk stout, a Vienna lager,” Rebold said.
A Scotch Ale will go on a nitro tap, and Rebold poured a hazy IPA at the 757 Battle of the Beers this month. He’s also looking at adding a cold-brew coffee tap from his neighbors at Fathom Coffee, and maybe a kombucha tap from Virginia Beach’s Maha Kombucha.
Rebold said it’s interesting to find himself opening a brewery in the middle of another craft beer boom, after watching the first craft beer boom end in a sudden implosion in the 1990s.
“The millennials are really thirsty all of a sudden,” Rhebold laughed.
