726 Rigsbee Avenue
Durham, NC 27701
919-682-BEER (2337)
E-mail: sean@fullsteam.ag
Website: http://www.fullsteam.ag
Hours: Monday, 4 P.M.–10 P.M.; Tuesday–Thursday, 4 p.M.–midnight; Friday, 4 P.M.–2 A.M.; Saturday, noon–2 A.M.; Sunday, noon–10p.M.
Tours: Details available via brewery’s website and social media
Owner: Sean Lily Wilson
Brewmaster: Chris Davis
Opened:2010
Regular beer lineup: Southern Lager, El Toro Cream Ale, Carver Sweet Potato, Rocket Science IPA, Working Man’s Lunch
Seasonals: First Frost and Paw Paw (Forager beers); Hogwash Hickory-Smoked Porter and Summer Basil (Southern Apothecary beers)
Sean Lily Wilson had no plans to start a brewery when he was the Pop the Cap spokesman.
“I don’t know the exact date,” he says, “but when the law was looking like it was going to change, I thought, I like this. I like the industry. I like the people.” And he saw an opportunity.
Fullsteam
After the law changed and beer with an alcohol content of over 6 percent was finally allowed in North Carolina, he asked himself, So the law changed. So what? He was excited by craft beer and enthused to tell people about it. “You become this evangelist of sorts,” he says. “So the mission of Pop the Cap after the law changed became celebrating craft beer in North Carolina. I did beer dinners and tastings, and I did it for fun, with the main goal of spreading the word about North Carolina craft beer and helping to rally and centralize the North Carolina brewers themselves and then, finally, to figure out what I was doing in this space.”
Pop the Cap was never really a job for Wilson. He didn’t get paid. He talks about it more as a labor of love, but it also turned into a good way for him to get familiar with the industry. I can do this, he thought.
“I was kind of a late bloomer getting going on starting my own business,” says Wilson, “sort of conceiving this in my mid- to late 30s. And for a business called Fullsteam, it took me quite a while to get it done.”
What he felt was missing from the market was a brewery that celebrated local ingredients and Southern agriculture. He had developed his love for Southern seasonal food and drink as a waiter at Magnolia Grill, the iconic Southern restaurant in Durham, when he was 21. He learned about Southern food traditions and what would grow in the Southern soil. Thinking back to those days, it became obvious to Wilson that this niche wasn’t being served in the beer world.
A view of the bar at Fullsteam through doors made from tanks at an old Falstaff brewery
Wilson is not from North Carolina, and some have challenged his championing of Southern ingredients, but he defends himself vehemently, “I’ve lived in North Carolina longer than any place I have ever lived,” he says. “I am raising two daughters who were born here, and I am going to live the rest of my life here. This is home. I am from here.”
So Wilson began to close the doors on Pop the Cap and to start work on his brewery. In a case of serendipitous timing, he met Chris Davis at a Pop the Cap beer dinner at the Carolina Brewery in Chapel Hill. The dinner was held to celebrate all the gold medals North Carolina won the year after the law was lifted. As the host of the dinner, Wilson ended up sitting down last. He found himself next to an enthusiastic homebrewer, to whom he talked about his idea for a Southern agricultural brewery. Little did he know that he had met his brewer. “It just clicked,” Wilson recalls, “It felt right with Chris. It’s not because we’re perfect personalities together, because we clash, you know, like we should. But he just got it. Later, I got to try his beers, and they were so good from the cobbled-together homebrew system that he had that I thought, I know that with the right training and equipment that this is the guy.”
Together, they have formed exactly what Wilson envisioned: a brewery that celebrates traditional Southern ingredients. They make a cream ale with corn grits and an amber lager with sweet potatoes. They’ve made beers with pawpaws, persimmons, and local pears. The names of many of their beers celebrate the South or Southern culture. Their sweet potato beer is called Carver Sweet Potato, after George Washington Carver, the famous inventor and agriculturalist. They have a dark ale named Working Man’s Lunch, after the classic Southern fast-food lunch of the 1950s—a MoonPie and an RC Cola. El Toro Cream Ale is named to honor Durham, the Bull City, where the brewery makes its home.
Fullsteam’s location in the “DIY District” of Durham is a sight to see. The building is an old Pepsi bottling plant just a couple blocks from Durham Athletic Park, best known as the former home of the Durham Bulls and for the starring role it played in the movie Bull Durham. Wilson feels incredibly lucky for the find. “I consider it a series of fortunate events that the area that we are in was ready for a renaissance, and that we found a space that was ready to be that. It took me and Chris a year to find the space that was right for us. We always asked the same two fundamental questions. One, will it fit a forklift? Two, will they show up on a Tuesday? The plan was always to have a community gathering spot and to have a manufacturing environment that would allow us to scale, and luckily enough we found it.”
The stage at Fullsteam
That is a bit of an understatement. The building has bloomed. Artwork lines the walls as patrons walk in through the giant metal door graced with Fullsteam’s distinctive backward F. The open space in the brewery’s taproom (nicknamed “R&D”) is filled with picnic tables, Ping-Pong tables, and old-school pinball machines. Behind large wooden doors built from fermentation tanks from the old Falstaff Brewery is a neat, sleek taproom with taps sticking directly out of the brick wall. Large chalkboards on each end display each day’s taps and North Carolina guest taps. A strip of dry erase board runs down the center of the bar from one end to the other. Patrons are encouraged to draw on the bar.
The brewery part of Fullsteam is partitioned off from the taproom by a giant glass wall that affords visitors a clear view of the brewing operation, starting front and center with the oddly shaped brewhouse/lautertun, nicknamed “Mir” for its resemblance to a space station. Two rows of fermenters lie beyond the glass wall. Patrons who come early enough in the day can watch brewers at work making new batches of the beer that they’re enjoying.
Wilson has plans for the future but is hesitant to lay them out. Full-steam is, after all, still a young brewery. “We definitely want to package. I’m not sure what that means just yet, but we definitely want to get into some sort of packaging. In terms of our goal, we want to be a landmark brewery for the South. I don’t know what that means for the size—if that means small and sought-after or if it means sizable and prominent. We’re just getting started. But this is my life now. It’s my career, and I want to build a multigenerational brewery. Something that will last longer than just me.”
All About Beer has been a mainstay periodical for beer drinkers and brewers alike for decades. It was first published in 1979 as a pop-culture magazine that celebrated drinking culture. The original editor wrote, in his inaugural editor’s note, that tastes in America were trending toward light beers. He promised to keep the content “equally light.” Many of the magazine’s early issues were filled with babes in bikinis, celebrities, and the kind of drinking man’s content found in today’s men’s magazines.
However, the same year that All About Beer began publishing, homebrewing was legalized by the Carter administration, and interest in beer that wasn’t so light began to grow. Alongside articles about Mr. Universe and Schlitz, the magazine featured stories about how to make beer, profiles of imported beers from Europe, and articles about the tiny breweries that were popping up all over the country—original craft brewers including New Albion, Sierra Nevada, Anchor, and others.
A recent cover of All About Beer magazine
In 1993, the magazine was acquired by Daniel Bradford and moved to Durham. Bradford was already well known in the beer industry. He had worked with Charlie Papazian as a literary agent on his homebrewing manifesto, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. He had spent a decade as marketing director for the American Homebrewers Association, the Institute for Brewing Studies, and Brewers Publications. He was involved in Zymurgy, a magazine for homebrewers, and helped launch New Brewer, a trade magazine for brewers. He was also the director of the Great American Beer Festival from 1985 through 1991, helping to create the festival and competition as they stand today.
When Bradford took the helm at All About Beer, the magazine blossomed with information about craft just as the market was exploding. It covered the growing craft industry with fervor, publishing articles on women in brewing, the early years of “extreme” brewing, and homebrewing, among many other topics. At the same time, Bradford brought more and more of the industry into the All About Beer offices. All About Beer’s Durham offices became the headquarters of the Brewers Association of America (which merged into the Brewers Association in 2005), the North Carolina Guild of Brewers, and the North American Guild of Beer Writers. By 1996, Bradford and All About Beer created the World Beer Festival—a group of annual beer festivals in the style of the Great American Beer Festival. All About Beer was instrumental in the effort to raise North Carolina’s alcohol cap, acting as the headquarters of the Pop the Cap movement.
Daniel Bradford, president of All About Beer magazine, getting ready to enjoy a beer
All About Beer is now a front runner in the beer industry. It has a distribution of over 35,000 and boasts a readership of well over 130,000. It hosts the World Beer Festival in four cities around the South—Durham; Raleigh; Richmond, Virginia; and Columbia, South Carolina—as well as an annual cask beer festival. Through the festivals, it has raised well over a quarter-million dollars for local charities. The magazine continues to support North Carolina craft beer by hosting educational events at libraries, museums, and other venues.
