HICKORY N.C. – The first batch of beer is at least a couple of weeks away from being brewed at the new Skull Coast Brewing Company brewery, but the Chief Drinking Officer, First Mate and Brewster are hard at work.

After the brewery equipment arrives, Fox said it will take two or three weeks to start brewing beer. “Once stuff starts coming out of the tanks, trust me when I say this, the doors will be open and we’re going to be welcoming people in,” Fox said.

On Wednesday, Skull Coast founder and Chief Drinking Officer Dave Fox rushed around the active construction site that will house the brewery at the former Hollar Hosiery Mill on Lenoir Rhyne Boulevard.

While Fox conferred with construction company representatives and discussed the placement of the brewery’s new equipment, First Mate Mark Olson met with bar staff applicants, hoping to find people who will make Skull Coast’s customers “come in and feel like they’ve had a great experience, as opposed to just having a great beer.”

Brewster Alexa Long was working on perfecting her recipes for a pumpkin stout, a chili-chocolate porter and a special brew that Skull Coast will announce after opening.

Fox notes that a passion for high-quality beer in North Carolina is held not only by producers, but also by consumers. “There is such a great following for craft beer here in North Carolina it’s insane,” he said. “Anybody that you meet, you can have almost an encyclopedic kind of discussion with them about all the different types of craft brew . . . It’s remarkable, the knowledge-level that there is here. Some people call them ‘beer geeks,’ but they really know their stuff.”

The opening of the new brewery will give people in the area yet another place to sip locally-made craft beers and represents the rise of craft brewing in North Carolina.

North Carolina, Fox said, has become “kind of a new Colorado or Portland. The fact that major breweries are now moving out into North Carolina just speaks to why you would want to be here to begin with.”

Those major breweries Fox mentions include Sierra Nevada and New Belgium, two of the largest craft beer producers in the country, which both have plans to open new breweries near Asheville.

Craft breweries coming from the West Coast are not the only players in North Carolina’s brewing industry. Smaller operations, often run by home brewers turned professional, are growing in number.

Win Bassett serves as the executive director of the North Carolina Brewers Guild. He said there were 26 breweries in North Carolina in 2005. At the end of 2012, the number of breweries in the state stood at 73. About 16 breweries opened in North Carolina in 2012 and another five or six breweries have announced plans to open in 2013, he said. “You don’t start a brewery if you intend to make money,” Bassett said. “You start a brewery if you have a passion for the craft.”

Beer ‘geek’ gets started

One of those ‘beer geeks’ Fox referred to might include Jason Howard, whose passion for craft beer led him to start Howard Brewing Company in Lenoir with his wife early in 2012.

Howard took up home brewing as a hobby more 10 years ago while he was living in Michigan and operating a construction company. He grew increasingly interested in home brewing when he moved the construction company to North Carolina six years ago and became the president of a local home brew club.

When demand for his work in custom homebuilding waned, Howard saw an opportunity to take his brewing hobby to the next level. He took time to develop a business plan, and, about eight months after he decided to become a professional brewer, Howard Brewing produced its first batch of beer in August 2012.

Howard now has accounts in Lenoir, Boone, Blowing Rock, Morganton and Hickory, and he plans to expand to Greensboro soon. “I’ve been happy with the amount of beer that we’ve been able to move. We need to do more, but I think that will come in time as we get more brand recognition,” he said.

Howard thinks Western North Carolina’s brewing industry is growing because of the number of active, outdoor-oriented people in the 21- to 40-year-old demographic. He said such people have embraced the craft beer movement and helped their local breweries thrive.

“We’re finding that North Carolina is getting identified throughout the nation as a place to go for great beer. That was usually reserved for the West Coast, up in the Pacific Northwest and Seattle and Portland and all the Colorado beer towns, but it’s fun that North Carolina is now getting on the map that way,” Howard said.

As North Carolina’s reputation as a beer destination has grown, the popularity of beer festivals in the state has increased. The Hickory Hops Brew Festival will celebrate its 11th anniversary in April. Hickory Hops is hosted by Olde Hickory Brewery and the Hickory Downtown Development Association. The festival allows beer lovers to sample craft beers from about 50 breweries in the southeast.

Connie Kincaid, executive director of the Hickory Downtown Development Association, said events such as Hickory Hops and Oktoberfest have “an incredible economic impact on this area.” She said the Western Piedmont Council of Governments analyzed factors including attendance and number of hotel rooms reserved to estimate the economic impact of Hickory Hops in 2012 at $250,000.

Bobby Bush, a home brewer who has written columns for brewing magazines, helped found Hickory Hops and the Carolinas Championship of Beers competition. The competition rewards brewers who participate in Hickory Hops and offers awards in about 134 categories of beer.

NC laws are beer friendly

Bush said certain state laws allow breweries to thrive in North Carolina. In 2005, the General Assembly passed a Pop the Cap Bill, legislation which raised the alcohol by volume limit on beer from 6 percent to 15 percent. The bill was a “big sign to brewers that this state was more beer-friendly than they’d thought,” he said.

Bush said that North Carolina laws allowing breweries to offer onsite tastings and beer sales are more liberal than laws in many states. Brewers in North Carolina are able to self-distribute their beers, allowing them to circumvent formal distributors. Howard said the state “seems to have a good relationship with all the small breweries, meaning they’re on our side and we’re all trying to do this together as opposed to being antagonistic.”

In addition to the benefit of laws that support the brewing industry, new brewers can benefit from the assistance and advice of established brewers. When Fox realized Skull Coast’s new facility would not be ready in time to brew the beer for an account with Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, he contacted Howard and was able to use Howard Brewing’s equipment. “Who else would do that?” Fox asked. “I think people in a lot of other industries would say, ‘Oh, you can’t make it? Let me try to get in.’”

Fox said local brewers have been welcoming and have provided practical advice. “Even as we were laying out some of our brewery, Olde Hickory invited some of the contractors to come by and take a look a their place to see if they had any questions on certain things that they needed to be aware of or pitfalls that they wanted to watch out for.”

Steven Lyerly, who has co-owned Olde Hickory Brewery since 1995, said the new breweries do create competition for him, but the competition does not concern him. “You reach a critical mass. The more that’s out there, the more exposure the people have to craft beer, and then they’ll start drinking more craft,” he said. “Every drop of beer I make this year is sold, so I’m not worried about that. I’m worried about trying to keep up. I think in the foreseeable future it is just going to get busier and busier.”

Skull Coast almost ready

At Skull Coast, plans for the layout of the taproom and brewery were stretched out on the unfinished taproom’s bar, and massive, 30-pane windows allowed shafts of sunlight to filter through the construction dust.

The brewery was first scheduled to open last summer, but construction and equipment delays continue to push back the opening date. “I’d like to think that we can be up and brewing this month,” Olson said, “but we’re kind of at the mercy of the construction schedule . . . I think the value now is that no one’s rushing anything. The proper time is being put in.”

Fox started Skull Coast as a contract brewing company in 2009. In contract brewing, a brewer uses another company’s equipment to brew its own beer. When developers approached Fox with an opportunity to brew at the old mill, “we decided that we didn’t want to contract anymore, just because we wanted to be able to brew our own beers. We have so many new recipes that we wanted to make sure that they were in our house,” Fox said.

Olson said that he and Fox researched several cities in order to decide where to site the brewery. The size of the space at the mill drew them in initially, but Hickory’s geographic location also played a role. Hickory will give Skull Coast close access to Interstate 40 and will allow easy service to accounts in Charlotte, Raleigh and Asheville.

To see the story in its online version, please click here.