Pocomoke City's new brewery, Cypress Roots, brings craft beer revolution in Maryland

Downtown Pocomoke City has celebrated the grand opening of the newest brewery on the Eastern Shore, Cypress Roots Brewing Company, an appropriate name for a brewery in a city with Cypress trees.

“It stemmed from my brother. He always told me that if there was a brewery down here that would be a great name. It all ties together. The city, the focal point,” co-owner Jessmin Duryea said.

For the grand opening, the taproom was packed with locals and the family and friends of co-owners Warren Willey and Duryea.

“I know for me it was a big sigh of relief. Like, we finally made it. Everything we’ve done has led us to this point, and now we can finally open our doors and do what we set out to do instead of handymaning it every day,” Willey said.

With the hard task of getting to opening day out of the way, now the pair can focus on the new one of operating the brewery in their hometown.

“I live around the corner, and I went to school here and I really enjoyed this place. The community here. I just think it’s a great location because there’s no other place like here,” Duryea said.

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Eastern Shore's newest brewery draws visitors from all around

The next closest brewery to Pocomoke City is at least a 30-minute drive away. Now a stop in Pocomoke City can get someone a locally brewed American Wheat, an Oatmeal Stout or an IPA, with more styles coming.

They also serve wine for those not as interested in craft beer.

Being in the heart of downtown puts Cypress Roots in a central location near Route 13 as people drive along the highway going north or south. There’s also the Pocomoke River traffic that sails through just a few blocks away.

“I know we had a couple maybe two weeks ago going up to New Hampshire from like Florida. It was a long trip, and they were like, ‘oh, we just needed to find a brewery to stop at’,” Willey said.

They’ve had visitors from across the Eastern Shore dropping in just because they heard a new brewery had opened.

With all that traffic passing by Willey and Duryea are hoping the opening of the brewery will help to revitalize the downtown.

“This is an old area. It’s got a lot of history and I think it’s neat. I always enjoyed when I walked around downtown areas, even in bigger cities like Salisbury,” Duryea said.

The brewery does not sell food with its beers, but they do provide snacks and menus to restaurants located downtown.

“It’s a total open policy with food,” Willey said.

Customers can call in an order and have it delivered to the brewery from Café Milano, Golden Garden and Dockside.

“There’s not a lot going on down here, especially not downtown, so this gave us the opportunity to bring some businesses around us help. Hopefully create kind of an avalanche effect where more people want to come down here, which brings more business,” Willey said.

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Friends who drifted apart, then bonded again through craft brewing

Willey and Duryea met back in 2010. They played music together in a band and shared musical interests.

The two started brewing sometime around 2012 and 2013, independently of each other.

“We didn’t know each other was brewing for a long time,” Willey said.

But their lives were moving in different directions, with Willey starting a family and Duryea starting his career at Sherwin Williams, which caused them to lose touch.

It wasn’t until 2019 that they met up again and found out the other was brewing.

“After casually brewing together for a couple years we were finally like let’s take this commercial. Do it for real,” Willey said.

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Cypress Roots blossomed in building that had been vacant since 2015

They both spent their entire adult lives working in manufacturing. They took that experience working in batch processing, quality control and inventory management and applied it to owning and operating a brewery.

Nothing in the taproom is untouched by Willey and Duryea. It’s just the two of them handling everything from building, brewing, marketing and serving customers.

The building that is now Cypress Roots was built more than 70 years ago and after the previous business closed in 2015, it sat empty until Willey and Duryea bought it and revamped the entire space.

“We bought this building in November of 2021, and we spent the last two and a half years working on the building and getting everything ready, getting through all the red tape,” Willey said.

They had so much free time between the different steps of opening the brewery all that was left for them to do was work on beer recipes.

That allowed them to seek feedback from the public as they worked on the building and waited for their licenses.

“We’ve probably worked on two dozen recipes, with six of them in production right now. There’s still another half dozen that we still need to bring to our commercial scale, and then probably another six to eight more that we’re still working on finalizing and testing out,” Willey said.

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From something fruity to IPAs, something for everyone at Cypress Roots

Willey and Duryea are more focused on brewing traditional styles of beer while also offering something for everybody, whether it’s a light beer, dark beer, something fruity or IPAs. Down the road, they have plans on making ciders and even seltzers.

“It’s our intent to make sure that you’re not coming here and you’re going to have six IPAs or 10 sours. We’re going to keep our recipes super simple, traditional, and authentic to the source,” Willey said.

Though the two have a combined 25 years of brewing experience, scaling up from home brewing to commercial has its challenges.

What they did on the small scale does translate to the large scale, even though the process is different. That is the learning curve that goes along with the change.

The challenges really come with learning to brew with the new and bigger equipment and learning the quirks of the new system.

“But as far as I think, the most difficult is not being satisfied,” Willey said.

Thinking they could have used more malt and liking a beer to be a little more bitter.

“You put all this time and effort into making a batch of beer and you’re happy with it, but you’re always like, ‘I could have done this a little bit better or a little bit different’," he said.

There is a lot of patience involved with brewing a beer, and waiting can be the hardest part.

“Because you can’t rush it,” Willey said.

32oz crowlers are available for sell for those that want to take some Cypress Roots beer home.

Cypress Roots Brewing Company is located at 148 Market Street in Pocomoke City, Maryland.

For more information on what they are making and for the Cypress Roots taproom hours you can visit their website at cypressrootsbrewing.com or their Facebook page.

This article originally appeared on Salisbury Daily Times: Craft beer comes to downtown Pocomoke with Cypress Roots Brewing