311 North Heritage Street
Kinston, NC 28501
252-208-BIER (2437)
E-mail: info@motherearthbrewing.com
Website: http://www.motherearthbrewing.com
Hours: Thursday–Friday, 4 P.M.–10 P.M.; tour days, 1 P.M.–6 P.M.
Tours: First and third Saturday of each month
Owners: Stephen Hill and Trent Mooring
Head brewer: Josh Brewer
Opened: 2009
Regular beer lineup: Endless River Kölsch, Weeping Willow Wit, Dark Cloud Munich Dunkel, Sisters of the Moon IPA, Second Wind Pale Ale, Sunny Haze Hefeweizen
Seasonals: Tripel Overhead, Tripel Overhead (Bourbon Barrel Aged), Old Neighborhood Oatmeal Porter, Silent Night Imperial Stout
Mother Earth Brewing might be one of the most beautiful packaging breweries patrons will ever see. It is located in downtown Kinston, a city that was once a center of textile production and is now seeing a revitalization, thanks in no small part to Mother Earth.
Fresh beer at Mother Earth Brewing
Mother Earth was started by Trent Mooring and his father-in-law, Stephen Hill, both of whom were born and raised in Kinston. Hill had been a homebrewer and a lover of beer in the past but hadn’t touched it in years. Mooring had been interested in beer since the first craft beer renaissance of the 1990s, when he clerked in a grocery store that had a good selection of beer. But it wasn’t until Hill introduced his new son-in-law to an old family recipe—a “Red Eye,” a mixture of beer and spiced tomato juice—that Mooring caught the bug. “I was hooked,” says Mooring, who began to try his own hand at homebrewing.
They batted around the idea of starting a business that would combine the passions they held in common: beer, agriculture, and, most importantly, Kinston. They both saw a new business as a wonderful way to give back to their hometown. Soon, they had a plan and went in search of a brewer.
After posting an ad on the website ProBrewer.com, they located Josh Brewer, who likes to joke about the way he found the brewery. “That’s our shtick at beer dinners or events when people ask us how we met. We say we met on Match.com.”
Brewer had a long history with beer. Back in 1997, a friend of his had received a homebrew kit for Christmas, and they brewed their first batch of beer together. “That first batch had a whole bunch of muck turning around in the fermenter, and we looked at that and thought that it probably wasn’t supposed to be like that, so we dumped that batch in the backyard. But I figured I still wanted to do something with it, so I took the kit from him, and it started from there. He never made another batch of beer in his life, and I kept going.”
Brewer worked a few “odds and ends” jobs in the late 1990s. At first, his brewing experience came in dribs and drabs. He used to pass a brewpub on his way home from a job at Sears and kept bringing homebrew to the brewer there. After a while, that brewer got to a point where he needed help cleaning kegs, taplines, and even the occasional tank. “I never got to brew there,” Brewer remembers, “but I got to put in three or four hours, three days a week.”
The brewhouse at Mother Earth Brewing
Mother Earth Brewing in Kinston
Finally, he got a job in Georgia as head brewer at Hilton Head Brewing Company, an all-extract seven-barrel brewpub, where he ended up having to do extra work to make beer of the quality he wanted. “It was a good step into brewing,” he says, “but it was the most hodgepodge system ever.”
While at Hilton Head Brewing Company, he started working part-time at Moon River Brewing Company in nearby Savannah. He calls his time there his “big foot in the door” in the brewing industry. After a couple of years, he moved on. “I got a wild hair to move to Hawaii at that point.” He and his fiancée packed up everything they had, sold their cars, and headed to Hawaii. There, Brewer worked as a cellarman for Kona Brewing Co. before buying a defunct bicycle tour business, building it back up, and running it for a few years. Eventually, though, he and his fiancée found themselves back in Georgia, where he picked up exactly where he had left off at Moon River.
A couple years later, Brewer and his now-wife took another step toward every brewer’s dream and started their own brewpub, Brewer’s, in Beaufort, South Carolina. The concept was a good one—a small brewery with an 80-seat restaurant serving organic food—but they just didn’t have enough money, and the restaurant ended up going out of business. Once things settled down, Brewer found the listing on ProBrewer.com. Soon, he was a part of the Mother Earth team and, what’s more, in full charge of building the brewery from scratch.
“The cool thing was, I came here before they even bought the building,” he says. “Trent and Stephen have the business background and no real brewing background, so everything was up to me. ‘What kind of equipment do you want? Where’s it going to go? Where’s the bottling line going to go? Where does the walk-in go?’ I got to do the full design. I was here for the full build-out, and the construction and everything. We have the equipment and the backing to do things the way they’re supposed to be done.”
The Mother Earth building was actually a suite of businesses—an old drive-through pharmacy, a stable, and a barbecue restaurant. The new owners gutted the building and gave it a completely new life. Today, most of a city block is connected via the building’s interior, even though many of the storefronts have been retained. The owners installed large, open windows and cut away portions of the floor, not only to accommodate large brewery tanks but to flood the interior with bright, natural light. The bottling operation rests in what used to be the barbecue restaurant. The canning line is in a gallery “next door,” even though they are feet from each other inside. A small, dark barrel room connects the brewery warehouse to the taproom, located in yet another former storefront, this one repainted and redecorated with modern lights, chairs, and a high, white, square bar in the middle of the space. Mother Earth also has a beer garden and a roof deck. A spiral slide taken from an old playground Hill used to visit as a child leads from the upstairs offices to the canning room downstairs. All of the design and renovation was handled by Hill, Mooring, and Brewer. The result is a testament to how well they work together.
They still haven’t figured out how to do the “Red Eye,” though. Mooring notes that they’re still working at it, and getting closer. “We haven’t been able to perfect it the way we want it yet. We’ve done a couple of small batches of it, but we haven’t been able to get big batches done. Josh just doesn’t want those tomato skins going through his heat exchanger,” he says with a laugh. “But it’s one of the reasons we wanted to get the canning line, because it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing for a bottle.”
Brewer is working on creating a cream ale specifically for the “Red Eye,” and they’ve considered dosing cans with the spiced tomato juice while it’s being packaged. They’re confident they’ll get it right eventually.
Mooring predicts a bright future for Mother Earth, but all in due time. “We want to grow to be a regional brewery. We just have to make sure we grow at a controlled pace so that our quality doesn’t dip.”
Eastern Carolina barbecue, to take the romance out of it, is hickory-smoked whole hog with sauce (consisting of vinegar, salt, and red and black pepper) either on the side or drizzled on top. A typical barbecue plate includes coleslaw, hushpuppies, and a choice of many, many sides.
Most barbecue restaurants don’t serve beer, but that doesn’t mean patrons can’t plan to have some with their ’cue at home. Eastern Carolina barbecue basically showcases pork and hickory, the two main flavor components—and they’re two flavors beer goes especially well with because of the caramelization that occurs during both smoking and boiling.
Check out brown ales and porters—particularly those with a touch of sweetness that are light on roast—for an excellent pairing with eastern ‘cue. LoneRider’s Sweet Josie Brown and Big Boss’s Bad Penny both pair excellently with pork. For a special treat in the right season, look for Hogwash from Fullsteam, a hickory-smoked porter that pairs intense smoky flavor with the smoke in the ’cue.
