6901 Konica Drive
Whitsett, NC 27377
336-447-2055
E-mail: office@redoakbrewery.com
Website: http://redoakbrewery.com
Hours: Monday–Friday, 9 A.M.–5 P.M.
Tours: Friday at 3 P.M.
Owner: Bill Sherrill
Brewmaster: Chris Buckley
Opened: 1991
Regular beer lineup: Hummin’ Bird, Amber Lager, Battlefield Bock
Seasonals: Big Oak Vienna Lager, Black Oak Double Bock
In 1979, on a dirt road across the street from Guilford College, Bill Sherrill started his first restaurant. Called Franklin’s off Friendly, it was Greensboro’s inaugural fine-dining establishment, offering the freshest possible food and a million-dollar wine list. Shortly afterward, Sherrill began opening a chain of restaurants around central North Carolina. The Spring Garden Bar and Grill had locations in Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, and Chapel Hill. The effort proved to him that the trend toward casual dining was far outstripping fine dining.
The brewhouse at Red Oak Brewery
Sherrill was no stranger to beer. He had lived a large part of his youth in Europe, graduating from high school in Switzerland and spending time in Cologne, Germany. After college, he experienced the Pacific Northwest and saw firsthand the first microbreweries opening their doors.
He decided to make the switch to casual with Franklin’s off Friendly. He closed the restaurant in 1988 and began renovation. Sherrill turned the piano bar into a brewhouse and renamed the establishment Spring Garden Brewery. Its flagship beer was Red Oak, a Vienna-style amber lager created by the original brewmaster at Red Oak, Christian Boos. It was so popular that by 2002, the name of the brewpub was changed from Spring Garden to Red Oak.
Chris Buckley, Red Oak’s current brewmaster, grew up in Bonn, Germany, and has the perfect background to work at a brewery specializing in German-style lagers. Through an apprenticeship at one of the oldest breweries in Germany, he is a certified brewer and maltster. He elected to go into brewing rather than malting. “I’m still in contact with most of my fellow graduates,” he says of his apprenticeship and brewing program. “There were 27 that graduated that year, and only one went into malting. It’s a dusty job, and it’s just not as sexy as brewing. At the end of the day, well, a lot of the breweries that you’re delivering your malt to will give you beer, but it’s not the same as going to your own tanks and getting it directly.”
After his apprenticeship, he worked at Paulaner for a couple of years and then moved to the United States, getting a job at Native Brewing Company in Alexandria, Virginia. That job eventually brought him to Red Oak. Both brewing companies used the same German brewing system, so Boos and Buckley were often in touch. “We shared a lot of spare parts,” says Buckley, “and we helped each other out in a pinch on more than one occasion. As a matter of fact, when I first took the job, there was still a Post-it note on the desk saying that I had called one day.” In 2002, Boos left the brewing industry to take care of a family medical emergency. When he moved back to his native Canada, Red Oak had to look for a brewer.
It employed Henryk Orlik of Abita Brewing Company for a brief stint, but Orlik missed New Orleans and soon had an opportunity to start his own brewery, Heiner Brau, in Louisiana. Left with a German-style brewhouse, an incredibly successful brewpub, and no brewer, Sherrill contacted the brewhouse manufacturer for a recommendation. It put him in touch with Buckley at Native Brewing Company.
For Buckley, the timing was perfect. Native Brewing Company was in the process of moving to Dover, Delaware (becoming Fordham Brewing Company in the process), and it wasn’t a shift he was sure he wanted to make. “I came down here and saw the potential for this brewery,” he says. “I remember passing those same weathered signs on I-40 that people talked about for years, the ones that said, ‘Future Site of Red Oak Brewery.’ There was no plan at the time, no blueprints, but I took the job on the premise that they would follow through and actually open up their brewery here.”
Buckley soon took over brewing operations at the brewpub. “The brewpub was a fun challenge for me, because I went from working at Paulaner, which was a high-tech, fully automated megabrewery, to Native in Alexandria, which was a semi-automated system, to Red Oak in Greensboro, the brewpub, which was entirely manual. It was a real challenge because of the volume that was coming out of there. We had almost 500 accounts. We were doing 16 brews a week, every week. We had just under 1,100 square feet of brewing space, and we made close to 5,000 barrels per year in that facility.”
The bottling line at Red Oak Brewery
Just a few years later, though, Buckley was able to design, from the ground up, the new brewing facility now in place at Red Oak, in the spot where it had long been advertised. The move to the facility started in April 2007. By July of that year, Red Oak turned out its first batch.
Having closed the brewpub when it made the move, Red Oak is now a state-of-the-art production facility that self-distributes its beers around the state. It started bottling its beers shortly after the production facility opened.
Buckley notes that it’s been a bit of a challenge. “We’re experts in selling kegs,” he says, “but bottles are a totally different market. We make an unfiltered, unpasteurized lager, and when we started pitching bottles to grocery stores, the chains didn’t want to keep our bottled beer refrigerated. They all said no. The smaller chains and stores were into it, so we started with them. They care more about what they sell.”
Currently, the brewery bottles only one brand—its flagship, Red Oak. Buckley notes that because of the way Red Oak chose to bottle, moving more than one brand is a significant challenge. “All of our bottles are preprinted,” he points out. “So, in order to do multiple brands, we would have to have the storage space to hold empty bottles for each single brand, rather than just switching out labels.”
In the past few years, Red Oak has finally started to make seasonal beers. It now brews Big Oak each spring and will soon release its first batch of Black Oak, a double bock. But the most exciting thing for Buckley is simply working at Red Oak.
“It’s just such a great company,” he says. “Around five o’clock, the drivers all start coming back, and there’s a huge camaraderie, where we all hang around and talk about the day and talk about new accounts. It’s like a big family. We all take pride in what we do, and I think it shows. Running this state-of-the-art brewery is just a dream come true.”