2033 North Center Street
Hickory, NC 28601
828-781-5761
E-mail: stephen@loesbrewing.com
Website: http://www.loesbrewing.com
Owners: Stephen and Robert Loe
Brewmaster: Stephen Loe
Opened: 2010
Regular beer lineup: Altered States IPA, Chocolate Moose XS Stout, Raspberry Wheat, Purple Thai Pale Ale, Fruitcake Stout, Pumpkin Ale, Vienna Zinger Lager, Pull Out Red Couch Pale Ale, Southern Divinity, Kilt Dropper Scottish Ale, Loe’s Lager, Loe’s Light, Southern Pecan Brown
Loe’s Brewing Company is one of the few truly family-operated breweries in North Carolina. Robert Loe has been homebrewing for about 40 years, says his son Stephen. “I’m 33, so I’ve been helping him homebrew since I was pretty little.” Stephen himself started getting into homebrew around 2006. Stephen is a Culinary Institute of America graduate, and he credits that experience for pushing him toward the brewing industry. “Culinary school helped me develop my palate,” he says, “and we were starting to make some pretty good beers, so I kind of went ahead with it.”
The Loes of Loe’s Brewing Company
Stephen put out “maybe 75 to 100 applications” to different breweries around the country, hoping his experience as a homebrewer and his Culinary Institute degree would get him in the door somewhere. But he didn’t hear back from any of them, so he decided that doing it himself—or rather, with his family—was the way to go. Today, three members of the Loe family—Robert, Stephen, and Bobby—run the brewery, all using skills they picked up through different careers to help the operation grow. All three take time on the kettle.
The brewery is tiny—just a few hundred square feet of space, with a small bar and barely enough room for the family to do the brewing. The Loes constructed most of the brewery themselves. “The idea was to partner up with the restaurant next door,” says Stephen, who is still the chef for that restaurant, Bistro 127. “We were moving from a 1,000-square-foot restaurant to a 6,000-square-foot restaurant, and I was going to lease space for a brewery. The space was set up as a nightclub, and we had to spend three days in there with a jackhammer remodeling.”
The bar in the tasting room of Loe’s Brewing Company
It’s not a full-time job for any of the family—yet. The brewing system reflects the size of the brewery—namely, it’s small. The family brews 1.5 barrels (roughly 45 gallons) at a time into five 3-barrel fermentation tanks and a couple of 1-barrel fermenters. “We tend to do large batches of the pale ale and the Vienna lager, since they’re popular,” Stephen says, “but we keep the rest in small batches. It keeps us flexible.”
He says the family uses “overdone homebrew equipment,” but it’s all part of a larger plan. “We definitely want to grow,” says Stephen. “We’re starting to do some hand-bottling now to get into stores, and we’ve considered doing some contract brewing in the future until we can get our own 20-barrel system or something.”
The family plans to build a restaurant with a pub-type atmosphere, which will let it put Stephen’s culinary skills, Bobby’s marketing skills, and Robert’s brewing to work. It then hopes to get the brewing system into place once the pub is up and running.
“It was a little rough starting up,” says Stephen, “but now that we got going, it’s been pretty smooth sailing.”