All About Beer Magazine

Birth of a Brewery

Posted August 28, 2010 by daniel 6 Comments | Post a Comment

It’s rare that a beer lover gets to watch a brewery being born. However, years ago I offered a young man a job at the magazine for no apparent reason other than he seemed really interesting. Along the way he lead the charge to change the alcohol limit law in the state of North Carolina with the Pop The Cap initiative and dreamed up a brewery that connects agriculture and beer.

“Fullsteam’s mission is create a distinctly Southern beer style that celebrates the culinary and agricultural heritage of the South.” That’s Sean Lily Wilson’s brewing idea.

A week ago that dream came to fruition. Fullsteam Brewery opened. Just two blocks from our office, the whole staff has had a chance to watch it grow step by step – from the early fundraising with homebrews and different concepts for the brand, to building the team and opening up the doors.

A master of social media, Sean Lily Wilson, owner of Fullsteam, had created a community icon even before the equipment was bought. And the town showed up for the day when Sean opened the doors. Along with the All About Beer Magazine crew, neighbors from the surrounding businesses filled the room. Government officials from the city of Durham showed up to see the new addition to their constellation.  I overheard one saying the brewery was anchoring the revitalization of that corner of the city. Only blocks away lies a huge residential area and I recognized people walking to the brewery from their homes.

It was a fantastic crowd spilling out onto the lawn on either side of the brewery with the rolling Only Burger truck providing the food.

The look of the brewery brought together a wide variety of aesthetics. The stainless steel system was on display behind a wall of glass. A wooden stage filled an adjacent corner, prime location for singer/songwriters. Old-fashioned picnic tables filled the rest of the space. The steampunk aesthetic donned the walls ranging from construction wall hangings to panels of dials picked up at a salvage shop. They adorned huge vistas of gray and red wall paint set off with rugged industrial warehouse exposed brick.

The beers?  Well, the crowd was there for the beers.  Sure the muffulettas from Neil’s Deli in Carrboro were special. The deserts by Crumb vanished before hitting the table.  But it was beers.

The team behind the bar was so slammed that I stepped in and joined them as a server. What a great way to get the beer passion. People were jammed together six or seven deep and everyone was ordering four to six beers. There were only four of us covering about 60 feet of bar. Plus, Sean had a portable tap set up out in the dining area and his line was pretty steady at forty feet. Amy from our office backed him up on that draft line for awhile.

Sean had five beers on tap. He has created two groups of beers – Plow-to-Pint which features local ingredients, and Worker’s Comp featuring classic styles. From Plow to Pint was Hogwash Hickory-smoked porter, the Carver sweet potato beer, and the Summer Basil farmhouse ale.  From the Workers’ Comp Sean had Rocket Science IPA and El Toro Cream Ale.

As I was running back and forth with handfuls of beer, along with staffers Kevin and Johanna,  I noticed that people kept asking for beer by its agricultural ingredients. Not the Carver but the sweet potato. Not the Summer Basil Farmhouse ale but the basil. Interesting. Yet, the others were requested by style, the Cream Ale or the IPA. However, Hogwash was, and probably always will be, Hogwash, just plain Hogwash. Sean is going to have fun with that mixture of branding challenges.

I’ll save a discussion of the beers for a later time. It is enough to say there was an unending request for pints of beer and I was stealing sips from an IPA when I could grab a moment. I’m going to like this neighborhood brewery/pub/bar.  I think I’ll be bumping into a lot of my friends and business associates there.

Just a close knit beer family

Posted August 27, 2010 by daniel 0 Comments | Post a Comment

While running errands the other day I got a funny call from Andy at Triangle Brewing Co.  He needed a favor.  Now, you need to understand this.  The Boys From Triangle are some very resourceful, self-reliant, guys not above some serious razzing and I’m one of their favorite targets.  Andy calling me for some help?  Well, I got ready.

The back-story started a few hours earlier, when after quite a struggle with a recalcitrant cask to be tapped at a Alivia’s, (home to Triangle’s weekly cask program), uncovered some technical weirdness with the tap.  Frankly, I’d never seen a gizmo like this thing.

So, the Boys From Triangle decided to borrow a tap from me, which I delivered to their brewery early in the afternoon and picked up my service fee in the form of a pint of Triangle IPA. Sweet.  Nice beer and a nice Good Neighbor feel.

Back to the call from Andy a few hours later.  It turns out my tap didn’t match the threads of their system.  Okay, three serious beer guys and we couldn’t have anticipated that move.  Huh?  By now Andy had inveigled the All About Beer Magazine staff to beat it up to Alivia’s, declaring a state of emergency!  When he called me they were cheering on The Boys From Triangle as they struggled mightily for hours trying to get this cask tapped without disturbing the cask ale.  Time was of the essence because the cask tapping party loomed.

I was doing a site inspection for the World Cask Ale Festival coming this October (get your tickets, not many will go on sale) and didn’t have my office/car keys.  Did I tell you that the staff was at Alivia’s?  So I called Angela, but then thought of the landlord.  Three trips back and forth from their office to mine before one of their keys unlocked the office.  I called Angela to tell her not to come, but she’d set out to let me in the office and left her phone at Alivia’s.

I am getting to a point, patient reader.

I drove home and pulled the correctly threaded nut off of my own tapped cask of Top of the Hill Saison, which later leaked all over the refer and the shop, and triumphantly delivered it to Alivia’s, The Boys From Triangle and the gang from All About Beer Magazine and the World Beer Festival.

Within moments we all had pints of Triangle’s cask IPA.  Then I looked around the gathering and realized, ah ha, one of my favorite moments — beer community! Here was the local brewery, owner and manager of one of our better beer bars, and the crew from the world’s best beer magazine and four spectacular beer festivals, all conspiring together to get a pint of brilliant cask ale on a beautiful Thursday afternoon.

It was a great toast from all of us.

Okay, this is weird.

Posted August 26, 2010 by daniel 0 Comments | Post a Comment

I’m sitting down to watch an old movie with a bomber of Foothills Baltic Porter.  Pop the cap and pour a nice tulip glass full of the dark liquid.  I put the bottle on the coffee table and pick up the glass.  Then I look at the open bottle.  I put the cap back on it, but it’s now crimped and doesn’t sit well.

Then the “ah ha” experience.  I head into the kitchen, rummage around the crap drawer (you know you have at least one of those) and find this old holiday present of a pair of wine stoppers.  These really, really heavy three dimensional dart shaped things with rubber ribbed sides.

I drop one in the Foothills Baltic Porter and get a pretty good seal.  Hmmm.  Knowing I had a couple more bottles I took that half empty bottle with the cork dork seal on it and stuck it in the fridge.  Let’s see what tomorrow brings.

The next evening, it poured a pretty good head.  I couldn’t taste any oxidation, but one day, in a fridge, with a big beer, I didn’t expect that.  Still, a pretty good head.

I guess there are some good things coming out of the wine world after all.