Diversions: Are there any beers you’re excited to showcase at the festival?
Sean Lilly Wilson, owner: We’re bringing a range of beers, a few of our standards and then the Beasley’s Honey White, which doesn’t make that many appearances because it’s only available here and at Beasley’s Chicken Honey in Raleigh. It’s a collaboration between us and Ashley Christensen, a twice James Beard that we’ve got good ties with, so just four beers, but it should be fun.
Dive: Does Fullsteam have anything special coming out this fall, any experimental beers?
SLW: Yeah, we just brewed today the paw paw beer, a beer made with native paw paws. A paw paw is an unusual fruit, it’s actually North America’s largest native tree fruit, but you don’t see it in stores because it spoils easily. After you pick it, it has a shelf life of two or three days. It’s like a cross between a mango and banana custard, it’s just a really sweet, unusual flavor, so we’re making a Belgian trippel with two hundred pounds of native paw paws.
We just brewed that today, we’re going to brew it for the rest of the week so that will be available in a month or so. And persimmons are in season now so we’re brewing our first frost with native persimmons. It’s a winter Belgian ale. It’s a good time of year for us because we’re doing a lot of experimentation with the last part of the harvest. I just bought a bunch of chestnuts from Rockingham County, I’m actually going to be roasting chestnuts tonight, then we’ll be adding them to a beer that’s going to be aged in bourbon barrels.
Dive: I know the paw paw and the persimmons are crowd-sourced beers.
SLW: Well, I stopped calling the paw paw crowd-sourced because we really only get it from two sources now. It’s really hard to find paw paws, you have to be lucky. Now we have a couple of suppliers that are harvesting paw paws for us. But the persimmons, yeah, we just had a couple bring in a hundred and ten pounds of persimmons. So we just paid her $330 to bring in her persimmons that grow in her backyard. That’s something that we do that’s pretty cool, a little different for sure.
Dive: Different regions are known for different brewing styles, what do you think makes the southern brewing style distinctive?
SLW: I don’t think there is one yet. I think we’re on a mission to discover and explore what that means. We’re two years into it. Other areas that have a defined style of beer have been at it for longer. So San Diego has twenty years of pushing the boundaries on hops; Pacific Northwest, same thing. New England or the Midwest have centuries of Germanic and English influence in the brewing process.
For us this is new, we’re only two years in ourselves and then there’s a couple of decades of brewing history, but not necessarily focused on southern style beer. I think balance and nuance is a big part of the emerging southern style of beer. I wouldn’t try to categorize it too much, but something that reflects the verdant land that we have here as we look to grow locally, I would like to think that’s an element of what makes for southern beer, but I think it’s still too early to say. And we could be wrong. We could have an idea of what southern beer is and then other people, the consumers or whatever go a different direction, so it’s our responsibility to adjust accordingly and give a fine balance of what we think it is and what the consumers think it is and join along in the adventure.
Dive: Do you have any favorite beers at Fullsteam?
SLW: Yeah, I really enjoy our beer that we did for the Raleigh-based Tasty Beverage called Chambers One; it was their one-year anniversary beer. We bottled that and it’s coming out shortly but we ran out of it on draft. But I just keep going back to Fullsteam, our namesake beer, the southern lager. It’s just tasty, it’s a hoppy lager but it’s refreshing. A little earthy, a little hoppy, it’s kind of been my go-to. It’s still a lager but it’s got a little bit of heft to it.
Dive: I read that Laborious Gollhardt is Fullsteam’s hero, why is that?
SLW: He’s Chris’s great-great-grandfather who himself was a – we don’t really know exactly – he was a brewer or brewery owner in Chicago at Y Tosetti brewery and they were known for their sour ales, so our use of him is a tribute to Chris’s own lineage as he was involved in the beer industry generations ago.
Dive: What can you tell me about the brewing process?
SLW: Sometimes we push the boundaries of what we can get away with on this system. It’s a German-built system that’s built for classic lagers and we do anything but classic lagers. Well, sometimes we do them, but we’re putting sweet potatoes in there, for higher alcohol beers we put a lot of grain in it – we’re really stretching the limits of what this brewhouse is capable of. We’re looking to upgrade and hopefully we’ll be getting, next year, a thirty barrel system. Right now we have a twelve barrel system so we’ll hopefully make a big leap forward in our capacity.
Dive: Pop the Cap happened not too long ago, what was your part in that?
SLW: I was the founder and president of it, it was amazing. That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing today. I started Pop the Cap as a craft beer enthusiast, just as somebody who loved beer and wanted to see a stupid law changed, I didn’t think I would be making this my career, but I couldn’t see myself doing anything other than beer after working on that campaign.
Dive: I know that’s really opened the doors for a lot of things that have happened; Sierra Nevada and a couple of others are going to be moving into North Carolina starting next year.
SLW: Yeah, it’s kind of cool to think that it might’ve had a small impact. But it’s a cumulative effect and I don’t want to take credit for that. They’re here because of the strong beer culture that’s in Asheville and elsewhere in North Carolina. So it goes well beyond that. But it’s kind of neat, there’s a little bit of pride. I feel like I helped in some small way. I really appreciate you knowing it because you were probably twelve at the time or something like that, right? How old were you in 2005?
Dive: That was seven years ago, so I’d be fourteen.
SLW: To me that’s really cool that you know about it. A lot of people don’t, but I’m good with that because the law shouldn’t have existed in the first place, so the fact that there’s this
new generation of craft beer drinkers who had no idea that there was this restriction in place, that’s great as far as I’m concerned. I’d just rather that part of North Carolina’s emerging beer narrative – I won’t say be forgotten, we need to be mindful of it – but I was here, I was here for ten years prior to the law and it was not a great thing to go shopping and only see a handful of beers. It’s a very different world.
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