Farm to Mug

Todd Boera takes the craft of craft beer seriously.

Every batch of Fonta Flora beer he brews in Morganton, North Carolina, starts with a journey through the seasonal-landscape of Appalachia.

Whether he’s scavenging the countryside in search of honeysuckle and dandelion, scouring mom-and-pop farms for fennel and carrots, or tracking down local honey and sorghum cane juice, Boera is on the cutting edge of the farm-to-mug movement.

Sourcing local ingredients is labor intensive, however, and Boera is often torn between the role of brewer and purveyor.

“If there’s things to be done, I don’t have four hours to go wandering around the woods hoping I run into some spice bush twigs,” Boera says.

But the time spent on farms and in forests is the source of his creative roots as a craft brewer.

“Finding paw-paws in the woods is one of the most joyful things,” Boera said.

Building relationships with local growers is critical to Fonta Flora’s brewing philosophy: A fusion of his ingredients and the beer. 

“It is becoming a competitive scene with a lot of breweries wanting to get their hands on these ingredients now,” Boera said.

But Boera is more than just a buyer, he’s forged lasting friendships with farmers.

“It ends up being a pretty social thing. Of course, it is really incredible making these connections with people, but by putting in that time my hope, at the end of the day, is they are going to think of me first when it comes time to harvest,” Boera said.

Take the heritage corn variety known as Bloody Butcher, so called for its burgundy colored kernels. Grown by Fox Farms in Burnsville, North Carolina, the corn variety has exploded in popularity as an Appalachian novelty and is the namesake behind Fonta Flora’s signature Bloody Butcher Appalachian Grisette.

“It is hard to come by. There was nobody else growing it, and you can’t just go find it in the fall,” Boera says.

The locally-sourced mantra limits what beers Fonta Flora can brew year-round, but it’s a handicap Boera embraces.

“You have a quite an intimate connection with the ingredients you are using, rather than opening up a jar of raspberry puree from Oregon,” Boera says. “It truly does mean beers that honestly represent the seasons in Western North Carolina and the bounty it provides.”

Boera wasn’t sure, off the top of his head, exactly how many Fonta Flora brews he’s created since opening their doors 3 years ago.

“Gosh, at least 100,” Boera said.

With that many brews, some had to be busts. But Boera says he’s never retired a recipe.

“It’s sort of like being a good cook in a way. You either get it or don’t,” Boera says. “I’m more of the cook who can look at a spice rack and just feel how much of what is going to go in.”

When brewing a new beer, he writes down what he’s doing as he does it, “so I can have some repeatability when I go to make this beer again,” he says.

Fonta Flora’s unusual ingredients aren’t always detectable in a blind taste-test. 

“We just came out with a beer with chanterelle mushrooms, but a lot of people don’t know what a chanterelle mushroom is going to taste like,” Boera says. “There’s others that are far more blatant, like the beet saison. If you hate beets, you aren’t going to like it.”

Often, the ingredients are the driving force for a new brews, like the eureka discovery of a farmer growing kiwis, a rare crop to find in the mountains. Boera bought the farmer’s entire harvest — 500 pounds of kiwi — and created Vestige Bloom Appalachian Wild Ale.

“There are certain ingredients I desperately want to work with so I try very hard, and there’s others I feel like I have to work with in a way,” Boera said.

Fruit tops the list of obligatory ingredients.

“Fruit season is pretty insane for us,” Boera says. “The season starts with strawberries and it doesn’t really stop from there. Raspberries, blueberries blackberries, black raspberries, elderberries persimmons, peaches, apples — you name it. Really every fruit that is out there.”

Boera spent $30,000 on fruit alone last year. Fonta Flora’s overhead for ingredients is unusually high for a small homegrown brewery.

“It is frightfully more expensive on every level,” said David Bennett, one of the co-owners. “Our cost per ingredient is very high.”

Buying a pick-up truck of sweet potatoes from a family farm costs more than a tractor-trailer dropping off pallets from a mega factory farm.

“We are buying on a very micro level from local farms with small production. In many cases we are their largest customer,” Bennett said.

Fonta Flora collaborates regularly with the local craft food industry. 

Boera came up with the Sal De Gusano stout specifically to showcase cacao nibs from French Broad Chocolates in nearby Asheville, North Carolina, finished with sea salt from the Outer Banks.

Boera launched an entire series of old-world kvass style beers brewed in collaboration with local bakeries, using bread in the fermentation process. There’s Smoke Signal Kvass made with Carolina-grown wheat bread from Smoke Signal bakery in Marshall, North Carolina, or the Underground made with rye pretzels from the Underground Bakery in Hendersonville, North Carolina. 

Boera discovered his love for both brewing and farming as a student at Warren Wilson College in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Boera fulfilled his campus work duty by toiling in the communal garden. Meanwhile, he’d begun dappling in home brewing, and soon put two-and-two together.

He planted hops and barley in the college garden to experiment with homegrown ingredients in his homebrew, but soon found himself eyeing the other crops, like pumpkins, and wondering how he could work those in as well.

Before launching Fonta Flora with three other business partners in 2013, Boera worked as a brewer at Catawba Brewing Co. where he began experimenting with local ingredients.

“I didn’t quite see how big the connection could be yet,” Boera says. “But when it was me calling the shots, I was like, I can make this work. The ingredients cost more money, are harder to find and take a lot more work, but it is truly feasible to do.”

A novelty of Fonta Flora beers is the ingredient list on the bottle. Brewers aren’t required to list their ingredients, and few actually do. But for Fonta Flora, why not? It’s their bragging right, after all.

“The majority of the beers we bottle are predominantly brewed with locally-sourced ingredients,” Boera said. “Putting it on the bottle is the final stamp of ‘Here’s the ingredients we used to make this beer.’”

What’s a Fonta Flora?

Fonta Flora. It sounds familiar, one of those words you’ve heard before but can’t put your finger on. Maybe it’s a type of snail? The nickname of a Yellowstone geyser? Or something to do with flora and fauna? 

There are a lot of things to love about Fonta Flora beer, and its name is one of them. A stroke of luck and genius at the same time, the Fonta Flora guys stumbled on the name while trolling for local historical references.

“We were in the North Carolina Room at the local library here in Morganton, digging around for ideas, and one of the nice old ladies there mentioned the name Fonta Flora,” recalls David Bennett, one of the brewery’s owners.

A forgotten share-cropping village, Fonta Flora was lost to history a century ago when Lake James was created for hydropower.

The rising water flooded the settlement of mostly African-Americans and poor whites, and Fonta Flora was nearly erased from memory. But not anymore.

“We’ve kind of revitalized the name in some respects,” Bennett says.

Little did the Fonta Flora crew know how serendipitous the name would ultimately be. In desperate need of more brewing capacity, Fonta Flora purchased the historic Whippoorwill Dairy Farm outside Morganton last year with plans to turn the site into a farmhouse brewery. It’s located on shores of Lake James, not far from the original Fonta Flora settlement.

“When we decided to call our brewery Fonta Flora, we loved the folklore and it’s a beautiful name,” says Todd Boera, the head brewer and co-owner. “We had no idea we would be moving in to the very in the valley where the community Fonta Flora existed. It’s going to feel like home once we are there.”

“It’s better to be lucky than good sometimes,” Bennett adds.