A New Leaf

While most people start off their year thinking about meal preps and workout plans, we’re asking an entirely different question: What’s on tap in the drink world for 2019? We asked some local experts—brewers, distillers, bartenders, and wine makers—to conjure their best ESP skills and predict what drink styles we’ll be seeing more of in the year to come.

IPAs are Here to Stay
Brewers are still waiting for lagers to have their big day in the sun, but consumers will continue to want their beer hop-heavy. “Juicy, hazy, New England-style, brut, and sour will all continue to be applied to IPA, IPA, IPA,” says Union Craft Brewing co-owner Jon Zerivitz. However, some of the novelty of the milkshake-style IPAs might wear off and you’ll see brewers playing less with lactose than they did in 2018, according to Hop Culture. While Wet City owners PJ and Josh Sullivan say they are hearing “chatter” regarding lager beers, they echo the IPA growth prediction. “The popularity of Hazy IPAs is still going strong,” PJ says. “And we don’t see any end in sight.”
Where to try now: So many options! Change Order at Union; Lil Woozy at Wet City; Nobo at Monument City; Astrodon at Peabody Heights.

CBD, THC, OMG
It’s easy to find CBD—a cannabis compound that is not psychoactive like THC—in oils, juices, and sparkling water around town. But expect it to slip into more and more cocktails this coming year. Some bars will give you off-menu options and the bartenders at Gunther & Co. even mixed up some for a dispensary event last fall. This week, Frederick-based Flying Dog Brewery announced that it’s releasing Hop Chronic, a non-alcoholic IPA infused with therapeutic cannabinoids available at dispensaries throughout Maryland. (Release of the product is subject to regulatory and legal approvals.) “We see a lot of interest in cannabis from the craft beer community,” says Ben Savage, CMO of Flying Dog, which is partnering with Green Leaf Medical Cannabis on the product. “There are definitely similarities between the natural flavor profiles we extract from hops and the terpenes and found in cannabis.”
Where to try now: CBD oils are available at MOM’s Organic Market and area dispensaries to try out your cocktail-making skills at home.

Blurring of Categories
It’s no secret that the craft beverage market has become a really crowded space, so brands are looking to diversify and break out in any way they can. Looking at the year ahead, many breweries, wineries, cideries, and distilleries will be collaborating to come up with sub-genres to potentially attract a new customer base. “At our bar, we’ve seen kettle sours bring wine drinkers and people that don’t normally drink beer into the craft beer scene,” PJ of Wet City says. Lyon Distilling in St. Michael’s and Jailbreak Brewing in Laurel just collaborated on a “beerskey,” or a beer distilled into a whiskey, and Old Westminster Winery (OWW) is seeing great success by mixing it up. “Some of our most popular products are the wine and cider hybrids,” says Drew Baker, co-owner of OWW. “Producers—whether you’re making beer, wine, or spirits—are looking to fill that space in between.”
Where to try now: Pip & Berry from OWW at Grand Cru; Cherry Berliner Cider at Union Craft.

Non-Alcoholic Cocktails
Yes, this is a thing! Dry January participants can rejoice as the popularity of teetotalling and even zero-proof spirits will make a bigger impact on the market this year. “A large part of the population is not drinking as much as they used to or are a bit more conscientious about their intake,” says R. Bar manager Amie Ward. “This is a great thing! But it does require bars and restaurants to start thinking about alternative options. Simply throwing together juices isn’t going to cut it.” Non-alcoholic spirit companies—like Seedlip and Ceder’s—have launched in recent years, applying the same distilling process and equipment to create zero-proof booze. But, more commonly, bars in New York City, Chicago, and LA, are simply taking the alcohol out to create thoughtful and tasty mocktails.
Where to try now: R. Bar has four options that start as non-alcoholic and include a suggested spirit; Woodberry Kitchen has a lovely mocktail menu.

Ready-to-Drink
Thought the concept of bottled and canned cocktails has been around for a while, things are starting to get a little more sophisticated. “When people think ‘ready-to-drink,’ there is the unfortunate connotation of the sugary stuff from the 2000s,” says Jaime Windon, co-owner of Lyon and president of the Maryland Distillers Guild. “But you’re going to see the new age of bottled cocktails. You don’t have to go to the bar to necessarily have a beautiful cocktail.” Many brands around the country are bottling classic cocktails like the negroni (sign me up!) to elevate the trend. Next month, winemakers at OWW will be coming out with a low-calorie, low-proof spritzer cocktail in a can. As Windon sums up: “People want less work.”
Where to try now: The 84-proof Rock & Rum, basically a rum old-fashioned, at Lyon Distilling.

Fermentation Experimentation
Of course, the fermentation process is crucial in making alcohol of all forms and flavors, but expect people to get pretty weird this year. Brewers will play more with barrel-fermented and mixed-fermented sours for extra tart and acidity, which many drinkers in the market have demanded. Plus, fermented beverages like kombucha will still have a place as mixers or additives in booze. And exotic fermented cocktails like the pineapple-flavored Tepache are staying prevalent on local bar menus, as well. “I’ve many customers start to appreciate the more complex, mixed-fermentation sours these days,” says PJ of Wet City.
Where to try now: The Artista Zynergia barrel-aged sour series at Wet City; Tepache at Alma Cocina Latina and Clavel.

[Editor’s Note: After press time, the Trump administration lifted an Obama-era policy that discouraged federal prosecutors from bringing cannabis-related charges in states where it has been legalized. A congressional amendment prohibits the Justice Department from interfering with medical marijuana programs in approved states, but justice officials have expressed that this would not bar the possibility of medical marijuana-related prosecutions.]

Walking into the warehouse of Curio Wellness, you’re hit by a scent that’s somewhat expected but still surprising in its strength: marijuana.

As one of the Baltimore region’s first medical cannabis facilities, this large industrial space looks like a futuristic science lab, with bright lighting overhead and staff drifting about in turquoise scrubs and lab coats. Past security, through a hygienic entrance, and down the long hallway, you pass cultivation chambers filled with lights for growing cannabis plants, and drying and curing rooms, where long, leaf-covered stems hang upside down to dry. It all adds up to one thing: the medical cannabis industry is officially here, and even as the Trump administration throws its future into uncertainty, well-oiled machines like Curio make it look like it’s going to stay.

Dressed in a hazmat suit and hairnet, Wendy Bronfein rattles off the high-tech features of this state-of-the-art facility, which she co-founded in 2014 with her father, Michael, an alumnus of the healthcare industry. “We’re taking the structured, common sense approach of the food and drug industry and applying it here,” says Bronfein, pointing out the complex irrigation system and beaker-filled research and development areas. “Our goal is to make standardized medicine. We’re going to need to sustain the demand.”

After state approval, Curio’s production began at their Timonium facility this past August, and when their dispensary opens—they’re aiming for this month—they will be among the first growers and processors to hit the local market, offering a range of premium products to the more than 10,000 residents already waiting with medical cannabis cards. (Cannabis can be recommended by doctors for the treatment of everything from cancer to chronic pain.) At full capacity, Curio expects to grow upward of 11,000 pounds of “flower” a year.

Those harvests will then be available just down the street at Curio’s brick-and-mortar dispensary in the form of smokable buds, tinctures, topicals, capsules, and vapes. Here, cardholders can come for patient consultations and pickups, while other features, such as a vitamin and supplement pharmacy, massage, and acupuncture, will be open to the public.

With modern fixtures and a sleek spa vibe, Curio hopes to offer a more holistic approach to wellness in a setting that feels like a high-end experience. “Not a headshop,” insists head pharmacist and dispensary manager Brian Sanderoff, noting that the space will double as an educational facility with workshops, support groups, and job training. The goal is to inform the local community about this new industry’s role in the future of integrative medicine. 

“It’s a really exciting time,” says Bronfein. “We don’t believe that cannabis is here to be a cure-all. But we do know it improves people’s quality of life, and we think that’s really important.”
 

The Center for Innovative Pharmacy Solutions (CIPS) at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy in Baltimore has begun offering training for workers in the medical marijuana industry. The patient-focused certification training (PFC), which launched on July 1, provides professional instruction and educational standards to a growing national industry that struggles with evolving regulations and science.

“Each program is a little bit different—this is not a simple one hour, quick in, quick out,” said Roxanne Zaghab, director of operations and business development for CIPS. “This is a true commitment to learning the things you need to know: state laws, federal laws, how those two interact.”

The school will offer courses through an online platform that will award certification required under the state’s law for medical marijuana. The curriculum and instruction is provided by Americans for Safe Access (ASA), a nonprofit advocacy group that the school vetted.

The program will prepare its students to “safely cultivate, process, dispense, and control the quality of medical cannabis, as well as how to manage customers.”

Courses can range anywhere from six to 10 hours of instruction that includes a combination of PowerPoint slides, videos, and course guides with a price tag of $450-$750. The proceeds from the courses go toward supporting patient efficacy and generating new content for the program.

With science and regulations evolving at a rapid pace, chief scientific officer for ASA, Jahan Marcu said this type of training is something that took 15 years of vetting to perfect. Back when there were only 11 dispensaries in the country, the instruction originally only focused on law enforcement interaction and customer service.

“We needed a more aggressive training program that turned up the heat,” he said. “The patients also require clean medicine, and testing records—things to hold these places accountable for patient advocacy and safety regulations.”

Although the regulations vary form state to state, this program is designed to fit the national industry and meet the requirements of all 29 states that have legalized medicinal marijuana.

“These regulations will continue to evolve as the industry evolves,” Marcu said.

This training is only phase one of three with the next phase—geared to more advanced professionals—is rolling out on August 15.

The program comes at a good time, as the state just granted its first medical marijuana dispensary license to the Wellness Institute of Maryland in Frederick. The first crop is not expected to be ready until September, so the Frederick dispensary is accepting pre-orders until then.

“I think regardless of how you feel about cannabis, we all have the same goal,” Marcu said. “Whether you’re for it, against it medically or recreationally, we all want to protect public health, that’s the main thing. How do you do that? With education and training.”

As if it were yesterday, Shannon Moore remembers the moment two years ago when a neurologist asked her and her husband, Louis Deliyannis, if they wanted hospice care for their identical twin boys, who were then 3 years old. The boys, Nicolas and Byron, were born with Miller-Dieker syndrome, which causes them to have severe seizures all day, every day.

“When the neurologist said it was time to choose between length and quality of life, we considered medical cannabis,” says Moore, 42. “I knew other parents had successfully used it to treat their children’s seizures.”

But since it wasn’t available in Maryland, they had to use legal hemp oil instead, giving it to the boys through their feeding tubes. It was a stopgap measure, since it has some of the therapeutic qualities that cannabis does. Nevertheless, within days, the frequency and severity of the twins’ seizures decreased by more than half.

“I believe it saved their lives,” says Moore of her boys. “And because it did, I became very driven to make sure that others could be treated with cannabis, which will give us more options.”

In the very near future, those new treatment options will be available to patients like Nicolas and Byron when the state rolls out its medical cannabis program.

But it’s not the panacea it might seem for patients like Moore’s boys: The implications of the new legislation are complicated and imperfect because of discrepancies in federal and state laws—and because of widespread misconceptions about the medical variety of marijuana.

Maryland’s not exactly leading the charge in legalizing medical marijuana. The first time sanctioning cannabis was suggested in Maryland was 1979, but it took years for the cultural zeitgeist to get to a point where the state legislature was ready to join the 18 states (plus the District of Columbia) that have legalized medical marijuana since 2013. That same year, Maryland made cannabis available to teaching hospitals, though none participated. But public opinion backed yet more change: A spring 2014 Goucher College poll showed that 90 percent of Marylanders support the use of the drug for medical purposes, and more legislation passed with bipartisan support last summer.

“Medical cannabis got caught up in the epic war on drugs,” says Del. Dan Morhaim of the 11th District in Baltimore County, an emergency-medicine physician who sponsored the initial bill. “What I’m saying is, let’s remove the sick and the dying from the battlefield.”

The complicated part of the new law is that medical cannabis is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration and the federal government still classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, the classification reserved for the most dangerous drugs, including heroin.

As a work-around, the U.S. Department of Justice has told federal prosecutors they can’t go after patients and doctors in states where medical cannabis is legal.

That, of course, leaves a lot of a weird middle ground. Doctors can’t be prosecuted for giving you a recommendation for marijuana to alleviate your multiple sclerosis, for example, but you can still get fired from your job if you come up positive in a drug test.

“Medical cannabis got caught up in the epic war on drugs. Let’s remove the sick from the battlefield.”

Hannah Byron, the outgoing executive director of the Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission (MMCC)—of which Shannon Moore is a member—says that other states are looking at Maryland as a model for their own laws. Among the Maryland law’s stipulations, for instance, are quality controls to make sure medical cannabis is free of substances such as mold, which can be life-threatening to the immune-suppressed.

Byron, a former administrator at the Department of Business and Economic Development, says anyone who is concerned that Maryland is suddenly going to look like Amsterdam on a holiday weekend doesn’t understand what medical cannabis is—and isn’t.

“The way the medicine can be given includes tinctures, oils, patches, suppositories—people want to see alternatives to smoking,” says Byron. She notes that different strains of the plant serve different purposes. The medication for seizures, for example, is low in tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, marijuana’s active ingredient and the part of the plant that makes you high.

Byron abhors when people use slang like “pot,” and is no-nonsense about the measures the MMCC—which has 16 voluntary members including a police chief, lawyers, a horticulturalist, and doctors—will follow in registering patients and doctors as well as managing licensing, community education, and data reporting. She notes that there are extreme penalties (a $10,000 fine) for diverting medical cannabis. And honestly, if you just want to get high, there are easier ways.

“If someone is really interested in using cannabis for recreational purposes, they’re not going to go through everything you need to go through to get medical cannabis,” says Byron.

Cannabis will have an economic impact. In 2014, Arizona’s medical cannabis market was worth an estimated $155 million, with those numbers in 2015 projected to reach $207 million. Maryland could experience something similar.

“We’re building an entire, homegrown industry that encompasses agriculture, manufacturing, and retail,” Byron says.

Unsurprisingly, entrepreneurs have already jumped into the game to get their slice of the economic trickle-down. Green Leaf Medical, a prospective grower and processor based in Gaithersburg, leased 42,000 square feet of warehouse space last year where it hopes to grow at least 5,000 plants. The company CEO, Philip Goldberg, a local businessman, says Green Leaf’s climate-controlled operation can bring in three or four harvests a year, with each plant providing at least half a pound of dry cannabis. Ambitious local teenagers can abandon hope of getting inside, though. Goldberg says the walls are tilt-up concrete and security includes more than 140 cameras.

“It takes 24 hours to get a guest pass so we can vet you, and, without a badge, you aren’t getting inside,” he says. “We don’t sell retail, so it would be suspicious for anyone to be there. You wouldn’t make it past the gate.”

Proponents point out that cannabis has proven helpful to many, from cancer patients and people with conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis to those with epilepsy. It’s also used for the palliative care of those in hospice. Critics of medical cannabis say there’s not enough research showing its efficacy in disease treatment. And they’re both right.

Because of its classification as a Schedule I drug, research into cannabis has been somewhat restricted. Advocacy groups such as the Epilepsy Foundation are actively working to reclassify marijuana so more studies can be done.

“Of course, there are risks and side effects as we see with many drugs we currently prescribe,” says Morhaim. But marijuana overdose deaths are extremely rare: A recent study claimed to have identified two such cases. In addition, legal medical cannabis could help reduce overdoses using other drugs: The Journal of the American Medical Association reported in 2014 that states with medical cannabis laws saw a 25 percent drop in opioid overdose deaths compared to states where cannabis is still illegal. Such a drop would be good news in Maryland, where the painkiller fentanyl was implicated in 185 deaths in 2014 alone, more than three times as many as the year before.

That’s why Shannon Moore can’t wait to try cannabis instead of the drugs she’s been using as a rescue medication to stop her twins’ extreme seizures. The cannabis is said to help control such episodes without the risks posed by Benzodiazepines (BZD) opioids, which can be addictive and cause respiratory depression.

“I used to think medical cannabis was a joke,” says Moore. “Now, I feel very grateful for it, and I want to make sure others can work through their doctors and have safe access to it as medicine.”