E-Malt.com News article: USA, NC: Skull Coast Brewing Company to open in New Hickory soon

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 Brewmaster are hard at work, hickoryrecord.com reported on January, 12.

Brewmaster 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.

Skull Coast founder and Chief Drinking Officer Dave 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.”

At Skull Coast, plans for the layout of the taproom and brewery were stretched out on the unfinished taproom’s bar.

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. When developers approached Fox with an opportunity to brew at the old mill, he said: “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.”

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.


23 January, 2013