Photo by volcanojw.

Washington City Paper food writer Tim Carman is citing anonymous sources which claim that the Brickskeller, the venerable beer institution located at 1523 22nd Street NW, is up for sale.

Carman’s sources say that the building could be taken over by a boutique hotel group, which would “modernize the Brickskeller Inn while leaving the two-level bar virtually untouched.” An industry source told us that the owners of the bar have been seeking to maintain naming rights after the sale, which could leave the door open for “The Brickskeller” to pop up somewhere else around town in some form. All jokes about their beer stock aside (and there are plenty out there), the Brickskeller is a D.C. institution — and even if, as Carman notes, the new owners would maintain it as “a beer emporium,” we’d be very curious to see if it would still have the same kind of danky, beer geek charm.

Also: what is going on with the beer cathedrals in this town? First, the Saloon threatens to leave U Street because of regulatory hassles, and now the family that’s owned the Brickskeller for over fifty years is thinking about selling off to a boutique hotel group and taking the name with them? A changing of the fermentable guard was inevitable, I suppose. That said, this isn’t the first time rumors about the bar’s sale have surfaced.