8816 Gulf Court, Suite 100
Raleigh, NC 27617
919-442-8004
Website: http://www.loneriderbeer.com
Hours: Thursday–Friday, 5 P.M.–9 P.M.; Saturday, 2 P.M.–7 P.M.
Tours: By request
Owners: Steve Kramling (VP of brewery operations), Mihir Patel (CFO), and Sumit Vohra (CEO)
Head brewer: Ian Van Gundy
Opened: 2008
Regular beer lineup: Shotgun Betty Hefeweizen, Sweet Josie Brown, Peacemaker Pale Ale
“Outlaw” releases: Deadeye Jack Porter, Sundance Kid Pilsner
“Most Wanted” releases (22-ounce only): Belle Starr Belgian Holiday Ale, Breakfast Stout
“Brew It Forward” releases: Gunslinger Pilsner (Brew It Forward 1), Grave Robber Black IPA (Brew It Forward 2), Bucking Bronco Kölsch (Brew It Forward 3), Brew It Forward 4 (March 3, 2012)
Awards: 2010 GABF Gold Medal for “Sweet Josie Brown” 2011 GABF Silver Medal for “Deadeye Jack”
LoneRider Brewing Company is the brainchild of three colleagues: Sumit Vohra, Mihir Patel, and Steve Kramling. All three worked as software quality-assurance engineers at Cisco Systems, Inc., in Research Triangle Park. (In fact, two of them still do.) For a while, they were all on the same floor, within a five-second walk of each other. They’ve even been on each other’s teams at different points in time. To say that they had experience working together would be an understatement.
Kramling and Patel had been homebrewing together when Vohra started working on Kramling’s team. “He was just getting into beer at the time,” Kramling remembers, “and he was very excited about the homebrew.” Together, the three talked about the possibility of opening a brewery, but nothing came of it until a friend let them know that the Mad Boar Brewery in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, was ending operations and putting its equipment up for sale. They were offered a good deal and decided this was their chance.
Preparations being made for a special keg of brown ale with raspberries
Raspberry juice is squeezed from frozen raspberries into a special keg of brown ale.
They bought the equipment and found a space in North Raleigh that would accommodate it. Unable to afford a general contractor, they did most of the work themselves on nights and weekends. By November 2008, they were ready to open their doors.
They needed only one thing: a full-time brewer. Kramling was ready to do a lot of brewing, but the trio decided that the best strategy for their bottom line was a staged exit from Cisco. So they set out to find someone who could make beer all day.
Enter Ian Van Gundy, a homebrewer and a student of the craft. In fact, Van Gundy had worked for years at a local homebrew supply store, American Brewmaster, quietly honing his craft until he saved up enough money to head to brewing school. He enrolled in the Siebel Institute’s Master of Brewing program and spent the better part of a year in Chicago and Munich learning the best practices in brewing. He returned from his training just in time for LoneRider.
Van Gundy joined the staff and immediately started working on the recipes, building what were already fantastic recipes into brilliant beers that not only showcased their ingredients but were also excellent examples of their styles. In fact, in the three years LoneRider has been open, it has already brought home two medals from the Great American Beer Festival, the largest and most prestigious beer competition in the country.
It might seem odd that a brewery owned by two Indians and their Southern white friend (“I’m the token white guy,” Kramling jokes) should be called LoneRider Brewing Company, something that celebrates the Wild West, but there’s more to the name than might appear. In their original concept, LoneRider was going to be called Outlaw Brewing Company.
“We’re the guys who said, ‘We don’t want to do what we do. We want to do what we like,’ ” says Vohra. “It’s always something that resonates with everybody. If I asked you, ‘Have you ever done something in your life that somebody else thought you shouldn’t have done?’ the answer is usually yes. There are very few people who say no. In some sort of fashion, every one of us tries to do something different and is some sort of an outlaw.”
Their outlaw nature is on full display at the brewery, where their logo—a Clint Eastwood–esque cowboy—graces the side of the building as well as the interior wall just above the beautiful copper-plated brew-house they received from Mad Boar. LoneRider has grown so much and so quickly that they are completely out of room. The fermenters are squeezed in as tightly as possible, and kegs fill every available space. They had to move their cold room into the taproom—where it looms above the bar and the small wooden tables—to make room for the new bottling line, one of the things that’s making their growth possible.
They’re looking to upgrade the facility as soon as possible, but they need to find a new space to do it in. They’ve already outgrown the one they put so much blood, sweat, and tears into just three short years ago. Yet despite all the growth and their happiness with their success, the trio saves their warmest words for the people they’ve hired. “I think we have the best crew in town,” says Vohra. “That’s what keeps the brewery running. We’re very proud of our team.”
Until 2005, the definition of a malt beverage in the North Carolina General Statutes read as it had since Prohibition: “ ‘Malt beverage’ means beer, lager, malt liquor, ale, porter, and any other brewed or fermented beverage containing at least one-half percent (0.5%), and not more than six percent (6%) alcohol by volume.”
All beer in North Carolina was limited to 6 percent alcohol or less. This policy was instituted when the state legislature passed the Alcoholic Beverage Control Act of 1937. It was never revisited. North Carolinians had few options for beer in 1937, just four short years after Prohibition. Many business owners may have greeted a cap on alcohol in beer as a way to control drunkenness in their workers.
In the 1990s, in the midst of the craft beer revolution, the restriction had a stifling effect on the beer industry in the state. In-state brewers couldn’t brew many of the popular styles being produced around the country and the world, and distributors were limited in the beers they could import into the state for resale.
Unfortunately, many people—even those interested in good beer—had no idea a limit was in effect.
Sean Lily Wilson, past president of Pop the Cap, relates how he learned about the law: “A friend of mine from business school took me to a party at Duke back in 2002. In it, they were selling, for a dollar per pint—true pints—barleywines and ‘Batch Number-Ones’ and cored and caged bottles and things I’d never seen before in North Carolina. I just started asking, ‘Why have I never seen this before?’ And my friend said, ‘Well, they’re illegal in North Carolina.’ And my reaction was, ‘That’s really stupid. What can we do about it?’ So it kind of got into my head, and I started researching, and I realized that North Carolina was one of five states with this restriction, and it just got to me a little bit.
“That night was my craft beer epiphany. I was a craft beer enthusiast just starting to explore this world of craft beer that was unavailable in North Carolina. And up to that point, I thought I knew craft beer really well. You know, I had bought Sam Adams on sale at Harris Teeter, and I supported the few local breweries that were here when I had the chance. But it was from that party that I thought, Let’s figure this out.”
Wilson contacted Daniel Bradford, the publisher of All About Beer magazine. Bradford helped organize the movement. By February 2003, some 35 beer lovers were meeting in the offices of the magazine with one goal in mind: lift the alcohol-by-volume cap on beer in North Carolina.
The effort took two and a half years. The nonprofit organization, named Pop the Cap, raised money from thousands of North Carolinians in order to hire lobbyist Theresa Kostrzewa, who eventually shepherded the bill through two House committees, two Senate committees, and both houses of the state legislature. The bill did not pass without argument. It met opposition by those who likened strong beer to “drinking straight vodka” and those who argued that beer with a higher alcoholic content would lead to unwanted pregnancies and academic-related suicides.
In the end, the bill passed both the House and the Senate by comfortable margins and was signed into law by Governor Mike Easley on August 13, 2005—but not without a slight change. The original bill as filed merely removed the cap on alcohol completely. Yet by the time the bill passed the legislature, another artificial cap of 15 percent was imposed, ostensibly to keep the alcohol percentage of beer distinct from that of wine. (Unfortified wine, fermented naturally or with sugar, does not exceed 17 percent alcohol. Fortified wine, which usually has added brandy to stop the fermentation, exceeds 17 percent alcohol.) However, the new cap effectively limits only a handful of specific beers—mostly ultrarare novelties—from entering the state.
“In a way, our 15 percent cap makes those rare high-alcohol exceptions all the sweeter to track down and enjoy,”Wilson says.
