Fullsteam Ahead

Sean Lilly Wilson wants to convert you into a Southern beer drinker. “We’d like to be a landmark brewery for the South, to be candid,” the 39-year-old self-titled chief executive optimist of Fullsteam Brewery says while sitting at a hexagon-shaped picnic table in the middle of his one-month-old brewery. “It’d be easy to go the soft route and be like ‘oh, we’ll go where our customers want us to go, and we’ll grow organically and all that,’ and there is that element to it, but we definitely have a vision to be a notable, exciting, high-growth brewery for the South. “

Wilson is on a crusade, and North Carolina is his initial battleground. He helped pioneer the idea of a Southern-style beer five years ago by successfully lobbying to lift the state’s Prohibition-era limits on the alcohol content of beer. Now that those archaic laws are only a memory, Wilson is aiming to grow a beer culture amidst the state’s conservative roots. He says it’s time for the area to mature its tastes and grow up.

He’s starting with this state’s version of milk and honey—sweet tea and barbecue.

“Historically beer in North Carolina has not been associated with North Carolina barbecue,” Wilson says. “The best barbecue is typically from a place that’s closed on Sundays and doesn’t serve alcohol at all. So I came up with this tagline, Beyond Sweet Tea. Getting beyond sweet tea as a pairing for barbecue, even though it’s great, but like, you know, let’s get beyond it, let’s grow a little bit.”

Wilson and his compatriots, Brooks Hamaker, a veteran craft brewer from Louisiana and Fullsteam’s operations manager, and head brewer Chris Davis, wanted the tavern to have a “Durham-ish spirit.” The crowd differs from night to night—there are plenty of fedora-wearing hipsters, Wilson among them, mixed in with both middle-aged men and woman eating Randy’s Pizza (customers are encouraged to support local restaurants and bring takeout) in polo shirts and other 20-somethings on a recent Friday night. At 10 p.m., there were about 30 people inside listening to 1960s era soul music being projecting from a record player and another group of around 15 sitting just outside the open door listening to a bongo and guitar trio.

“From a business perspective, we get to sell what we just produced from 20 feet away, which really helps pay off this huge debt load and the big risk that I’ve personally taken in this venture,” Wilson said of the on-site tavern. “We also wanted to build a sense of community. It’s a big, open area where all people are welcome.”

Fullsteam’s beer is also available on tap at other popular Durham bars and restaurants—Watts Grocery, James Joyce Irish Pub, Tyler’s Restaurant & Taproom, Blue Corn Cafe, Dos Perros and Alivia’s Durham Bistro are among the approximately 30 locations carrying the local brew. Wilson plans to be in 50 places by the end of the month.

When Fullsteam made it’s initial rollout at Tyler’s last month, the bar sold out of all 10 kegs, general manager Rusty Privett said. “There’s been a tremendous response so far,” he added.

eer is typically made of four ingredients—water, barley, yeast and hops. Wilson has a few extra southern fixins he likes to toss in, including hickory smoke, sweet potatoes and corn grits, to compliment the principal ingredients. In Wilson’s mind, the epitome of southern beer would be a year-round, fully sustainable southern product grown with all local ingredients. Unfortunately for Fullsteam and other local breweries, barley and hops are typically cool weather crops, making this area a less-than-ideal location. Growing these crops locally isn’t impossible, Wilson insists, and there has been an uptick interest from local farmers, thanks to advances in genetic engineering and government subsidies to small farms. Wilson has even helped N.C. State plant 400 hops bines.

The production of beer is just that—a production—and normally relies on an entire infrastructure to complete the process. Take hops, which help give beer stability and flavor, as an example. The post-harvest process of drying and pelletizing is just as crucial to creating high-quality hops as the actual growing. In a region were hops are typically produced, farmers will send their product to a co-op, which in turn kiln (dry) and produce the hops according to a set standard. Then the co-op sells to a hops broker, who in turn sells to a brewery.

None of the above exists in this area. It’s up to Wilson to build the market first and then hope the industry will come.

It’s ironic that this great prophet of southern beer was actually born in New Jersey and spent the bulk of his childhood in Pennsylvania. After completing his undergraduate degree at Wheaton College in Illinois, Wilson got his first taste of the South when moved with his now-wife down to Oxford, Mississippi, the adopted hometown of the great southern novelist William Faulkner. From there, Wilson did his graduate work at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, obtaining a joint degree with the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy.

He started to lay the foundation for his foray into the brewing industry in 2005 when he helped launch the Pop the Cap campaign that aimed to eliminate North Carolina’s limit on the alcohol content in beer sold and produced in the state. At the time, the state was one of only five to still have the 6 percent by volume cap in effect—today, there is only one remains (Faulkner’s Mississippi). With Wilson’s help, the allowable alcohol content was upped to 15 percent, opening the doors for local breweries such as Fullsteam to flourish. The North Carolina brewing industry expanded rapidly.

“The marketplace right now, with more than forty breweries in North Carolina, it’s not a very good time to be a pale ale, porter, IPA, stout kind of brewery. You have to do something different to get people’s attention.”

Enter Fullsteam’s Plow-to-Pint series. “Quirky, but balanced,” is how Wilson describes Fullsteam’s more innovative offerings. “They’re unusual, but not out-of-control.”

The Hogwash hickory-smoked porter (5.5 percent alcohol by volume) is Wilson and head brewer Chris Davis’s ideal mate for a heaping helping of Carolina barbecue. They achieve the desired “smoke on smoke” effect by roasting about 15 percent of the barley over hickory wood, letting it rest for a week and then mixing it back in with the other ingredients.

Puréed sweet potatoes are namesake ingredient in the Carver sweet potato beer (5.8 percent ABV). Snowhill, North Carolina-based Yam Co. supplies the 500 lb. batches of sweet potatoes not fit for sale due to either blemishes or irregular shapes. Aesthetic beauty is a nonfactor in a purée, and Wilson and Davis use a 1/3 sweet potato and 2/3 malted barely mix as the fermentable base in the mash tun, the large tanks seen at most breweries.

The cloudy Summer Basil (5.4 percent ABV), which is now out-of-season, is a Saison, or Farmhouse Ale-style beer. Fullsteam receives its wheat and basil from a farm in Hillsborough and adds them to the boil, one of the final stages before fermentation.

So far, all three have been enormously popular—Wilson has had trouble keeping them in stock. For those customers, who want a more “true-to-style” beer, Fullsteam has its worker’s compensation line, with the Rocket Science IPA (6.5 percent ABV) and El Toro Cream Ale (5.5 percent ABV). Even the cream ale has a local kick—it’s brewed with Carolina roasted corn grits.

Fullsteam plans to keep innovating as it expands. The brewery already owns the sapce next door and will either convert it into more tavern or production space—when the time is right. The initial phase of the Fullsteam project cost $1.2 million, partially funded with a $350,000 loan from the federal government’s Small Business Administration’s main lending program, which Wilson obtained through Winston-Salem based BB&T Corporation. Simple math reveals how much he personally has at stake in the brewery’s success. On a smaller scale, Fullsteam is rounding out its lineup with its flagship Carolina Common beer, called Fullsteam, and several other varieties in development. Fullsteam’s next brewing venture will be the Working Man’s Lunch MoonPie stout, a low-alcohol creamy stout with hints of R.C. Cola and MoonPies (a chocolate-dipped, biscuit-like cookie with a marshmallow filling), what Wilson calls the foundation of the South’s “15-cent working man’s lunch.” The Fullsteam should be done by the middle of this month, he said.

Wilson has ideas for the tavern as well. More local music acts to showcase on the stage and maybe even a masseuse that comes in on Friday nights. There’s one idea in particular that has Wilson especially excited. “We also want to show bad movies too. Like The Room, I’m dying to show The Room. It’s like the Citizen Kane of bad movies.”

The local southern beer shaman smiles a quirky grin. The excitement in his eyes is evident. Beer is his passion, and he plans on spreading the good word.

And the South rises again.