Something Old, Something Brewed

Microbreweries of the mountains are peddling more than pints these days. The Smokies’ national acclaim as a craft-beer destination has led the burgeoning microbrewery scene on a quest for expansion, one that’s intersecting with the region’s rich history. For this issue, we visited three breweries that are breathing new life into once-iconic historic sites. A shuttered train depot, a rural dairy farm and a Civilian Conservation Corp camp are all being revived as destination breweries that serve up cold brews with a side of history.

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Down on the farm: Fonta Flora brewery reclaims the agricultural heritage of beer

For decades, the pastoral soundscape of bluebirds and barking dogs in the foothills community of Nebo, N.C., has been punctured by an occasional splintering crash reverberating across the valley.

It’s another plank sheering off the Whippoorwill dairy barn and clattering to the ground, each ricochet a nostalgic reminder of the fading agrarian heritage. 

A piece of that heritage will soon be revived, however, thanks to the back-to-the-land motto of a local craft brewery.

Fonta Flora based in nearby Morganton, N.C., has purchased the abandon Whippoorwill dairy farm with plans to turn the long-dormant property into a farmhouse brewery and till the land once more. The lofty mission is a big leap for a small hometown brewery.

“A lot of things are easy. The things that you do that are hard is what makes the difference,” says David Bennett, one of Fonta Flora’s owners who grew up in Morganton. “You take some steps now that are arduous, but we have a long-term vision.”

Fonta Flora’s beer is inspired from the land. A farm-to-mug brewery with a penchant for the locally-grown, Fonta Flora hangs its hat on seasonal ingredients born from the Appalachian landscape.

Reclaiming the long-latent farm for a craft brewery is iconic. 

SEE ALSO: Farm to Mug

“That was always my dream to have a farm brewery,” says Todd Boera, the head brewer and co-owner.

Boera’s vision as a brewer is driven by local ingredients, a fusion of agriculture and ingenuity. While the farmhouse brewery concept will allow Fonta Flora to grow some of the harder-to-find raw ingredients behind its unique craft recipes, it will never replace the strong bond between the brewery and local growers.

Boera bought 2,000 pounds of peaches alone last year, and another 1,200 pounds of blueberries. 

While the acreage is an important showcase for what Fonta Flora stands for, it’s got a bigger row to hoe. Repurposing the historic barn and milking parlor into a production brewery is a huge undertaking.

“It would be a lot easier to set up shop in a brand new industrial park and start brewing,” Bennett says. “But we are closely tied to agriculture so being in a farm setting speaks to what we are.”

Brew it and they will come

Demand for Fonta Flora is so high, the brewery rarely has beer to spare for selling outside its own tap room.

When a new beer recipe is finally ready to tap, so many craft beer aficionados descend for the release party, the brewery limits the number of bottles each person can buy. It’s a crazy business model on one hand, but a needed safety net for microbrewery connoisseurs from far-and-wide hoping to land a bottle of Meemaw, brewed with wild high country cherries, or the Funk and Flora, brewed with wild-foraged yarrow, sourwood leaves, ginger and black locust flower.

For last summer’s release party of the raspberry-infused Razzmatazz, Fonta Flora issued numbered wrist bands starting at 8 a.m. — with no proxies allowed — even though tap-room doors didn’t open until the afternoon. It still didn’t quell the lines, however, so for last fall’s release of Rhythm Rug, a strawberry beer, Fonta Flora tried selling advanced tickets online, only to sell out in the first three minutes.

Since its inception in 2013, the only way to get Fonta Flora was to come to Fonta Flora, and that was part of the allure.

“When people make a journey there is definitely something to that, in terms of the experience,” Bennett says. “People like visiting our brewery. Our setting and ambiance is top notch, with a great foothills-mountain small-town feel to it.”

The new production facility will be five-fold increase in capacity, from a 3-barrel to 15-barrel system.

The question now is whether the unrequited demand for Fonta Flora’s beer can be replicated on a larger scale with a network of off-site retailers. Bennett has no doubt that Fonta Flora beer will find a distribution audience, however.

“Absolutely,” he says. “When you are making a very high-quality product, you can always find a market. We don’t really distribute at all right now and that’s been our issue. This allows us to extend what we have to offer.”

It’s capacity clearly tapped out, Fonta Flora has been in desperate need of more production space. But the chance to land the historic dairy farm was the tipping point.

“They kind of go hand in hand,” Bennett says of the expansion. “It is an amazing piece of property.”

A fortuitous partner

Fonta Flora couldn’t have saved the historic dairy farm alone. The brewery partnered with Foothills Conservancy, a land trust, to protect the vast, rolling pasture land surrounding the farm buildings ­— some 48 acres in all. Fonta Flora couldn’t afford the entire tract. That’s where Foothills Conservancy stepped in, purchasing 40 acres of the farm, which are being deeded to the adjacent Lake James State Park.

“We knew we wanted to build our second brewery out in the country, but Whippoorwill always seemed like an unattainable dream. Thanks to our partnership with Foothills Conservancy it has become a reality,” Boera says.

Foothills Conservancy, in turn, owes its role in the historic farmland preservation and state park expansion to private donors and a grant from the N.C. Clean Water Management Trust Fund.

To honor the partnership, Fonta Flora did what it does best. It created a special beer called Land Trust, an Appalachian Apple Saison brewed with locally foraged spice bush twigs, hand-pressed apple juice from Fox Gap Farm in Burnsville, North Carolina, and local grain from the Riverbend Malt House in Asheville, North Carolina.

Despite its big, new digs on the horizon, Fonta Flora will keep its tap room in downtown Morganton humming. For starters, the downtown taproom will remain the hub for recipe innovation. It’s got a strong local following, a willing and loyal bunch who never shirk their duty as tasters for the latest brews.

Fonta Flora is an anchor in Morganton’s downtown scene, and that’s an important role to Bennett. 

“It is a cornerstone of who we are,” says Bennett. 

Bennett and his brother, Mark, also a co-owner of the brewery, grew up in Morganton, and value their role in its downtown revival.

“We are very closely tied to the downtown community and everything that is going on there,” says Bennett. Morganton’s downtown was already on the upswing when Fonta Flora opened in late 2013, but like any craft-brewery worth its hops, it boosted the vibrancy factor. But it’s also a destination in its own right.

“Our brewery brings in a lot of out-of-town visitors strictly to come see us,” Bennett said.

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Back from the dead: Burial Beer Co. to restore the legacy of former CCC camp as destination brewery

Jess Reiser sidled up to the stoop of a rustic, clapboard building, riffled through a key ring and opened a door to history.

“It has a lot of soul and character,” Reiser says, her eyes drifting upward to the giant lag bolts and sturdy, hand-hewn beams buttressing the story above.

For decades, this historic Civilian Conservation Corps camp has been hidden in plain sight. It’s spitting distance from the hustle-and-bustle of the posh Biltmore Village district of Asheville, North Carolina, yet worlds away from the throngs of tourists strolling the boutique shops and upscale restaurants.

Burial Beer Co. has a vision to revive the legacy of this forgotten historic site as a destination brewery. 

“An opportunity to bring back something that was important to this area once upon a time, that just really fits with our brand,” says Reiser, co-owner of Burial Beer Co. “It’s a tribute to something that once was.”

Legions of men were based at the CCC camp while building the Blue Ridge Parkway in the 1930s. They lived in dorms, ate in a mess hall, and were trucked back-and-forth daily to the parkway grade, where they toiled by hand to cut the scenic motor road through the remote and rugged mountains above Asheville.

“This property pretty much went dormant,” Reiser says. “It was abandon and over-grown.”

The repurposed buildings on the two-acre site will not only house brewing operations, but also a two-story craft beer bar and stand-alone restaurant. 

At its heart, however, the CCC camp restoration project is driven by the raw need for more space. Maxed out at its downtown tap room, the Burial team was eager to expand its production capacity. 

The old CCC camp sits on two-acres, with a sprawling collection of buildings. One seems to be an old dorm. One was some sort of machinery shed. Another was a sign shop where the Parkway’s first signs were made. But much is left to conjecture.

“We don’t know the full history of each building,” Reiser explains.

The important thing now is what each building could be retrofitted for. Aside from the bar, restaurant and brewing operations, site schematics had to accommodate a warehouse for finished kegs and cans awaiting shipment and a storehouse for grain and raw ingredients.

With Burial’s large, new brewing system now humming full tilt, the focus has now shifted to the build-out of the accessory buildings. It’s been an all-hands-on-deck affair. The team has left their comfort zone of fermenting tanks and hoses and taken up circular saws and nail guns.

“Burial is so bricks and mortar that every employee has literally helped build it,” says Erin Jones, Burial’s marketing director. “The brewers have been able to build their own space. So it forged a real connection to what we’re creating.”

Doubling as brewers and construction workers has been taxing, but the team has grown closer to each other, as well as the brewery’s mission. 

Despite being dormant for decades, the hodge-podge of buildings scattered across the two-acre site were in surprisingly good shape. The buildings have good bones, both structurally and aesthetically. 

The rustic beams, hewn plank siding and gnarled wooden floor-boards were prized assets to be showcased.

While the property has been vacant, it has had a caretaker. A local church bought the site from the U.S. Forest Service in the 1990s in hopes of renovating it for a retreat center. It never came to be, but the church kept the buildings stable and in good repair over the decades, before eventually selling to Burial last year.

The climb from upstart to self-actualized has happened quickly for Burial, but it wasn’t happenstance. Since tapping their first batch four years ago, the Burial team has worked toward the vision now coming to fruition.

“We always planned to expand but our goal was to grow organically and get to this size eventually,” Reiser says.

This isn’t Burial’s first growth-spurt. Ask the brewers about their expansion, and they’ll clarify first before answering: expansion I or expansion II?

It’s not the first revitalization under Burial’s belt either. Breweries ignited the renaissance of Asheville’s South Slope over the past few years. But the downtown fringe district was still tagged with “up-and-coming” status when Burial opened its tap room there in 2013.

Burial’s non-descript downtown brewery, housed in an industrial-chic former HVAC repair shop, was an easy retrofit for their humble brewing equipment.

“We opened for less than what my wedding cost,” Reiser recalls.

At first, Burial was just another small-batch start-up in the crowded Asheville beer landscape. But it’s following soon outpaced its capacity. Burial only had enough beer to be open three days a week.

By the end of their first year, Burial was already eyeing an expansion, and soon grew from its one barrel system to 10. It finally had enough beer to can, and for bars and restaurants to have on tap.

Expansion II has been a far greater undertaking. From the dedicated 20-barrel production facility to extensive renovations of the rambling historic buildings, Burial gambled that the demand for their beer would justify the investment.

“If it were free and easy then everybody would do it,” Reiser says.

Since cranking up their new production system, Burial hasn’t had to shop around for distributors willing to stock their beer. They’ve been lucky to have a wait list, Reiser said.

“A lot of our relationships with retailers is built on something much purer than ‘I have product, take it from me, I need to sell it,’” Reiser says. “Opening small and growing from that size allowed us to form a lot of relationships.”

Reiser’s business partners and co-owners include her husband, Doug, and head brewer Tim Gormley. They moved to Asheville from Seattle a few years ago with the goal of starting a brewery. The chose Asheville intentionally for its sense of community

“Starting so small, we are very community-based. Doing everything ourselves from brewing to running the tap room, that gave us a foundation of getting to know our patrons,” Reiser says. “We have regulars, which I feel like is a dying breed. It is a place people come and feel like they belong. It is a much bigger thing than just a brewery.”

Ask craft beer connoisseurs what brew Burial is known for, they’ll be hard pressed to pinpoint a single signature beer. There are some favorites — Skillet Donut Stout and Bolo Coconut Brown Ale come to mind. But Burial doesn’t churn out the tried-and-true brews at the expense of experimentation.

“We don’t have any dedicated beers,” Reiser said. “We are always what rotating brands and circling back to them.”

It’s a conscious decision to stay inventive.

“With a production brewery, you can get pigeon-holed into brewing three or four beers,” Reiser says. “We could easily sell Skillet 365 days a year, but we decide that wasn’t what drives our passion. At least once a month we will be brewing a brand new beer here.”

During a canning day in late winter, an army of shiny cans shuffled along conveyor belts overhead. Stacked and cinched into six-pack rings, they slid down a stainless steel shoot.

True to the all-hands-on-deck mantra among the Burial team, marketing director Erin Jones threw back her scarf and pushed up her sleeves. Grabbing a spare rag, she jumped onto the assembly line and scooped up six-packs to wipe down before they went onto cardboard flats. 

“We have brands that are our tried-and-true favorites, but we still like to play and experiment,” Jones says.

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Laying tracks: Yee-Haw Brewing turns abandon railroad depot into flagship for Johnson City

Yee-Haw Brewing has a unique origin story for a microbrewery. It doesn’t start with a garage homebrew experiment, nor a drunken bet over a game of cards. 

No, Yee-Haw has far tamer roots. It started with a bike ride to preschool.

“I would ride my bike down through town to take my children to preschool in the morning and pass the old train depots,” says Joe Baker, the founder of Yee-Haw Brewing in Johnson City, Tennessee. “It was just sad to me that these beautiful old train depots were just sitting there in disrepair. For a million reasons, it was calling to us to renovate them and create something special.”

Johnson City is anchored by two historic train depots. They were the hub of commerce and travel in their heyday, and the development of Johnson City hinged on them.

When they were shuttered and abandon, downtown slipped into an era of long, slow decline — a fate shared by so many downtowns across America. Luckily, Johnson City had Baker in its corner.

“They were both distressed and in such disrepair they would have been lost if something hadn’t been done,” Baker recalls. “This spectacular corridor of Johnson City was once bookmarked by these beautiful old train depots. It didn’t make sense to me, especially for a town like Johnson City that was built on the rails.”

So Baker bought them. He tackled the Clinchfield Railroad Depot first, renovating it to house the signature Southern diner Tupelo Honey Café, a regional chain with Asheville, North Carolina, roots. It became a formidable draw and a boon to downtown, but Baker was nagged by the feeling the job was only half done. 

“Why didn’t we renovate both of them?” Baker says.

So he scooped up the old Tweestie depot next, and the vision for Yee-Haw brewery crystalized.

“We bought it with the specific intent of rehabilitating the building and bringing it back to life,” Baker says.

“It’s a demonstration to our commitment to building communities rather than a place that just makes and sells beer.”

The Tweetsie depot closed in the mid-20th century, but was occupied for the next 50 years by Free Service tire and auto shop. The railroad leased the property all those decades, and this is where Baker played another historic role: Negotiating a sale.

“It took some convincing to get them to sell it,” Baker says. “But I think they saw the value of preserving the historic element.”

No doubt a bargaining chip in Baker’s corner, the railroad depot was on its last leg.

“It was in total disrepair. Water was flowing freely through the roof into the building,” Baker recalls.

Renovating the 1891 depot would ultimately be a multi-million dollar project with lots of heavy lifting. Aside from housing the massive brewing equipment, it would need a bar and taproom, plus a commercial kitchen and restaurant — a spot ultimately claimed by the famed White Duck Taco of Asheville origins.

But Baker wanted to be compassionate toward the original structure, despite the added cost.

“If you look at the walls and the roof lines and the rafters, it took a lot of work to refurbish the roof system as it is, but the beams and the trusses that are in the building are the original materials that built that depot,” Baker says.

SEE ALSO: Full-Steam Ahead

While Baker had some business ventures under his belt — most notably the start-up Ole Smoky Moonshine and Whiskey Distillery in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee — he was an attorney by trade.

Meanwhile his wife was in medical school at East Tennessee State University. With three small children to boot, their lives were clearly full, but they went for it. Baker credits his wife as a business partner, supporting the endeavors every step of the way as his rock and his sounding board. 

Leap of faith

When Yee-Haw opened in summer 2015, it was a magnet for downtown. Foot traffic increased, not only among locals on a business lunch or night out, but travelers who gave Johnson City a second-look as a destination and, of course, craft beer connoisseurs.

 “As our brand and distribution has grown. There are folks coming from Chattanooga and Knoxville and Asheville to see the brewery and what Yee-Haw is doing,” Baker said. “You’ve got another crowd of people coming to experience the town, and it creates that snowball effect.”

But Baker, a humble guy by nature, claims he was just a piece of the puzzle in downtown’s revitalization.

“When we started these projects we really hoped to be a catalyst for improving and growing the community. I am proud that we could be a part of that. We certainly can’t take credit for more than our little part of it,” Baker says.

City leaders were actively pursuing downtown revitalization as well, setting the stage for redevelopment with public projects.

“The city at that point was serious about improving the parks and public spaces downtown, and with that kind of added infrastructure it made successful development more achievable,” Baker says. “This was probably the best example of creating good synergy between private and public investment, and a real win-win for the residents of Johnson City and the businesses. It has all come together just at the right time.”

Still, Yee-Haw, like any entrepreneurial venture, was a leap of faith.

There was risk that revitalization was going to take in downtown Johnson City. There was risk that the old train depot would be a remodeling nightmare, full of hidden faults.

Perhaps the most risky move: Launching the brewery with a 30-barrel brewing system. It’s far bigger than your typical craft brewery start-up. But Baker banked on Yee-Haw making it big.

“We entered into it with some degree of risk that we would not get our investment back. It is a difficult business. The beer industry is not easy,” Baker said.

“But with the right group of people we have created a product that’s been warmly embraced.”

Leading that right group of people is Brandon Greenwood, Yee-Haw’s head brewer. He was undaunted by the go-big-or-go-home approach.

“We built the brewery out right out the gate to do its maximum capacity,” Greenwood says.

As for that leap of faith?

“Truthfully, I was never really worried about it,” Greenwood says.

Nor was Jeremy Walker, Yee-Haw’s sales and distribution guru. 

“I’m good at what I do so I wasn’t worried about it. Plan your work and work your plan,” Walker says.

Yee-Haw has 30 employees between the taproom, brewery production and business operations. And that’s the biggest reward for Baker.

“Some of the great benefits of entrepreneurship come not from the profits we create but the opportunities we create for other people,” Baker says. “Absolutely we are in business to create revenue and generate a profit, but the success is measured on a lot of different levels.”

Walker is prone to pontifications of his own, and likes to remind people that America’s founding fathers met in a bar to launch a country.

“From a philosophical sense the one thing people do all around the world is to sit down and share a beer. It is a corner stone of our society. I just love beer.”

But Yee-Haw’s legacy will be remembered in Johnson City for generations — not just for its beer, but as the savior of the old depot and a force for downtown revival

“I think it represents the craft element of our brand,” Baker said. “You look at the building and see the commitment we made. That’s a representation of who we are as a brand and a business.”