Our Story
Lickinghole Creek Craft Brewery is a majority woman-owned and operated, water-conscious, biologically friendly farm brewery and agritourism event venue carefully crafting beers and growing hops, barley, and other adjuncts. We operate on a beautiful working farm in the heart of Virginia.
Lickinghole Creek is a farm brewery and outdoor agribusiness venue that promotes and hosts events and beer collaboration with talented artists to combine the best of beer and the best of music.
Lickinghole Creek is a water-conscious brewery. We brew with well water drawn from the deep. Our wastewater is purified on-site and returned to the Lickinghole Creek watershed.
Our name pays homage to Little Lickinghole Creek, which runs through the farm's rolling hills. Since pre-colonial times the creek has been known as the Lickinghole where wildlife stopped to drink from the nourishing waters. May the tradition continue.
Knolls Point Dr. is a private shared gravel road. When visiting the brewery please drive slowly and responsibly with respect to our neighbors and rural area.
Lickinghole Creek Craft Brewery is Virginia's award-winning Farm Brewery, located on 305 pristine acres in Goochland County, Virginia, USA, Earth. We love to make innovative, premium beers for beer lovers. Small batch flavor and hard-to-come-by ingredients are just by-products of the craftsmanship and care that goes into each brew.
We grow many of our own ingredients such as: wheat, barley, hops, berries, pumpkin, and what we don’t grow, we source it from local farmers, and from global farming communities. We strive to be global stewards of clean water, and, unlike most breweries in the world, we sustainably source our own water on site. Many of our signature beers are aged in ultra-rare Kentucky Bourbon barrels (so rare, we can't name our source) for up to 12 months and we utilize some of the finest hops in the world in our brews.
We look forward to you enjoying our award-winning beers and event venue!
WELCOME TO OUR FARM
Lickinghole Creek is located on 305 acres of rolling hills, fields of barley, hops, wheat, corn, pumpkins, sunflowers, trees, and a whole lot more. We are a water-conscious brewery, because the main ingredient to beer (and life) is... water. We source our water about 400 feet below the surface to tap into the purest, cleanest water around. Brewing also uses a ton of water to make beer, so we take the high road and filter all of our wastewater before returning it to the Lickinghole Creek / James River watershed. It's not the easiest process, but it's the right thing to do.
Our Farm Brewery location is in Goochland County, about 35 miles west of Richmond, and about 35 miles east of Charlottesville. It's kind of hard to find, but that's ok, because once you arrive at the brewery you won't see any trace of civilization. It all started on a teeny, tiny 1/2 barrel (BBL) SABCO pilot brew system in our founder’s house. Now, the brewery boasts just under 5,000 square feet, and a 20 BBL system - JVNM (American Made!) Brewhouse, x5 40 BBL fermentation vessels (FV) and x1 gigantic 80 BBL fermentation vessel.
We love sharing our workspace with customers. Stop by and schedule a behind the scenes tour of our shiny stainless steel vessels.
HISTORY
This was never supposed to happen. A Farm Brewery? That's insane. Adding "farm" in front of anything will be: a) too much work b) no sleeping in c) and will certainly lose money. After a casual beer infused conversation at Mekong (a local beer bar, for you out-of-towners) the original co-founders went on their way to enlist the help of local ad-agency to come up with a suitable brand..The brewer had the land, now she just needed a name.
The property had inherited some pretty unique names, and some gems that were pre-fabricated into the local lexicon, like "Goochland" (be sure not to look up "gooch" in the Urban Dictionary), Magic Beaver Pond, and Little Lickinghole Creek, which runs right through the backwoods of the property and empties into the James River. We are fairly certain, that the runner up brewery names were something Jeffersonian and boring, which made the winning name stand out even more: Lickinghole Creek. Yes, it's one word: Lickinghole. Spellcheck hates that word. It will always try to separate it into two words for you. Don't let it do that. It's one word, because the it pre-dates "good English" and stuff. "Lickinghole" is a pre-colonial term used to describe a place where wildlife would go to find good water to drink. You probably thought it was something else.
If you read in between the lines of our seemingly silly name, you can decode that our backbone is about the clean water, for creatures both great and small, nature and people. That's why this unique farm brewery business model is so challenging, yet so rewarding. If it was easy to farm your ingredients, filter your wastewater, and keep bears out of your grain, every brewery would be a farm brewery; but only one can be Virginia's Farm Brewery.
WTF IS A LICKINGHOLE?
We get a lot of questions and giggle’s about our name and the brand. First of all, we can't make this stuff up. AND, yes, Goochland County is a real place. ." The name Lickinghole is as old as the people who first discovered it. As a matter of fact, it's so old, it pre-dates proper English. It's the creek that runs through the farm. Technically it's Little Lickinghole (you guessed it, there is a Big Lickinghole). You'll also notice that it's one word, and not two. Let's start with the definition of a 'lick'—not the verb, the noun. A lick (n) is a waterway somewhere between a 'rill' and a 'stream,' often changing in-depth, path, and size. Many of these 'lick' waterways had minerals and nutrients that animals would seek out, creating a 'licking hole' making it a great place for Native Americans and early Colonists to hunt animals.
WHERE DID THAT SWEET LOGO COME FROM? We also get a lot of questions about the origins of our 'Merchant Mark' logo. It's a delightful rip-off of early 17th c. merchant's marks used to stamp casks, crates, boxes, pottery, and other vessels of goods transported on tall ships making the six-month long voyage to India and the West Indies. If the majority of the world is illiterate, then how can you identify your goods? And more importantly, if you're the King, how do you know who to TAX? Well, you just cut a bunch of simple, identifying marks on your product. Boom! Logos were born. If you're a beer scholar, you'll know that the IPA (India Pale Ale) was created for the British officers stationed abroad, in the late 18th c. Previous, lesser ales, with lower ABV, couldn't withstand the long journey, so the brewers fortified these particular beers with a higher ABV to stay fresher, for longer.
LCCB MERCHANT MARK has borrowed select characteristics from a few of our favorite symbols through out time.
Fig 1. THE HEART. Not only is it the symbol of Elizabethan England, the original 'Queen of Hearts', it is the symbol of the Virgin Queen in our home, Virginia AND the epicenter of our commonwealth's slogan 'Virginia is for lovers.'
Fig 2. ST. ANDREW'S CROSS. St. Andrew was crucified on an 'X' and was considered a martyr for standing up for his beliefs. We are always under constant scrutiny for doing things differently, and we like to believe we're sticking to our guns.
Fig 3. PATRIARCHAL CROSS. Not necessarily related to Christianity, the cross is originally a pagan symbol for nature worship. The two bars represent land and sky, above and below. + Magnum PI thought it was cool.
