E-Malt.com News article: USA, NC: Ship Bottom Brewing is the newest and tiniest brewery in Delco

Fully licensed and operational, Ship Bottom is brewing up minuscule batches of two barrels each, or enough to fill just over 100 six-packs - if it had a bottling line. It is the newest and tiniest new brewery in Delco, North Carolina, Philly reported on June, 20.

If small beer makers like Sly Fox and Yards are known as microbreweries, Ship Bottom is a nanobrewery; all of its product are draft and are distributed mainly to three or four bars around Media.

Rob Zarko, the owner, started the business as a hobby. Over the years, he added equipment and experimented with various recipes. A couple of years ago - about the time that he built an electronic monitoring panel that could be controlled with his Smartphone - Zarko realized that it had become more than a hobby.

"I was investing more and more money into home-brewing," he said. "I was making 10-gallon batches every weekend, more beer than I could possibly drink. I shared it with friends, and people would tell me it's pretty good."

Nanobrewing is very young, it has no legal definition. Generally, it's a brewing system that makes less than four barrels at a time, and fewer than 500 barrels a year. The beer is served either at the brewery or at local pubs, one keg at a time.

There are about 100 of them in the United States, including about a half-dozen scattered across Pennsylvania.

The lack of a legal definition is a significant challenge, because nanobreweries must follow the same local, state and federal alcohol rules as even the largest breweries.

Surprisingly, Zarko encountered little opposition from his neighbours.

"I went door to door and told my neighbours I'd been home-brewing in my house since 2000, and you didn't even know it," he said. "This brewery is not substantially larger than what I had already been doing. . . .

"There was only one person, a lady who spoke against me for 45 minutes at a township meeting. She kept saying she didn't want my brewery to turn into the next Anheuser-Busch."

Ship Bottom Brewery is mostly a weekend pursuit. Zarko said that he considers himself to be in the "branding" stage, when he can perfect recipes and learn what beer drinkers want.

Lately, though, he has found himself hustling to fulfil a commitment to provide beer for a July 6 fundraising festival at the Ship Bottom (N.J.) Firehouse, which was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy.


21 June, 2013