Brewery Hopes Hemp Beer Will Be A Hit; Drug Foes Recoil

Psssst. Don’t bogart that pint.

An upstart East Coast brewery is combining two of America’s most well-known vices and rolling out the nation’s first beer made with hemp, a cousin of marijuana.

The beer, known as Hempen Ale, will hit stores in May in California and 22 other states. And although the hemp seeds that will replace up to 30 percent of the beer’s barley have been cleared for use because they don’t get drinkers stoned, anti-drug groups aren’t exactly rushing to belly up to the bar.

“I can’t believe these people,” said Marilyn MacDougall, executive director of Drug Use is Life Abuse, an Orange County, Calif., anti-drug group. “Make pumpkin beer. Make raspberry beer. But hemp? It sends the wrong message to kids.”

The beer maker, Frederick Brewing Co. of Frederick, Md., says it’s only trying to find a niche in the fast-growing industrial hemp market. Already, hemp tennis shoes, paper, clothes and other products are sold in an estimated $200 million industry.

“The hemp seeds give it kind of a creamy head, and kind of an herbal, floral smell,” said Marjorie McGinnis, Frederick Brewing Co. president.

Unlike marijuana, sterilized hemp seeds contain no THC, which has psychoactive properties.