An award-winning American craft beer with a distinctive Bermuda flavour is set to make its debut on the Island.

A range of beers from the Devils Backbone brewery in Virginia — the brainchild of hardware store Gorham’s chief Rod Ferguson and wife Martha with a US partner — is soon to hit bars and supermarket shelves.

And even the distinctive Devils Backbone logo and packaging has a Bermuda touch — they were created by US-based Bermudian graphic designer Jason Farrington.

But Mr Ferguson said the brewery only got off the ground after he chose a builder to build a vacation home in Wintergreen, Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Mr Ferguson said he and the builder Steve Crandall decided to go into the house-building business together and successfully built several homes until the global recession meant the bottom fell out of the housing market.

But the partnership already owned 90 acres in a Virginia valley with permission to build housing and commercial properties.

And after Mr Crandall said he had always wanted to own a restaurant, they decided in 2007 to build one at Nellysford in Virginia, complete with a microbrewery attached using second-hand equipment brought from Japan, called the Base Camp.

Mr Ferguson said: “It’s very exciting — it’s nothing like selling hardware.”

He added: “It’s at the base of the Wintergreen resort, which is four-season. When people are skiing — and they’ve had a great year this year — we are inundated with people wanting to eat and drink.

“We’ve got so busy, we’re going to build an additional restaurant, which will include a distillery.”

Mr Ferguson said: “The beer just took off — we kept winning awards and we realised we didn’t have a big enough plant. We shopped around and found that the county of Lexington was keen to get us there.”

He explained that the package of incentives from the county, which was looking for investment and jobs, meant that they set up a new and bigger brewery in Lexington called the Outpost.

Mr Ferguson said: “Up until February last year, we couldn’t make enough beer — we sold everything we produced and we were only selling in Washington DC, Virginia and Maryland.

“We have some excess now, so we’re going into North Carolina and Bermuda.”

And he added the firm had also created a beer dubbed Devils Backbone for the massive Wetherspoon’s chain of pubs in the UK, which is brewed under licence in Britain.

Mr Ferguson said that two Island clubs had been appointed agents for the beer and it had sparked interest from bars and stores looking for new top-quality products. He hoped to be able to offer Island hotels their own branded beers as well.

He said: “I have not approached any hotels at this stage — but if they wanted, we could make, for example, a special Fairmont beer, which we have done recently in the UK.”

Mr Ferguson added: “We now employ about 120 people in total and some of these people have never had a permanent job in their entire lives and we have almost no turnover of staff.

“In Lexington, we’ve encouraged local farmers to grow hops so we can source them locally.”

A total of three beers, in kegs and in bottles and cans, will be available in Bermuda from the end of the month — the firm’s Vienna Lager, a dark German-style lager called Schwartz Bier and Eight Point IPA, as well as Gold Leaf Lager and Bravo Four Point IPA.

The Lexington brewery has pushed production up from 60,000 barrels a year to 100,000 — and the firm hopes to be producing 200,000 barrels a year by the end of the decade.