208 Queen Elizabeth Street
Manteo, NC 27954
252-473-MOON (6666)
E-mail: fullmoonmanteo@msn.com
Website: http://www.thefullmooncafe.com/gallery.html
Hours: During tourist season, noon–10 P.M.; off-season hours vary
Owners: Paul Charron and Sharon Enoch
Brewmaster: Paul Charron
Opened: 2011
Full Moon, nestled in the middle of historic Manteo, has been around since Paul Charron and Sharon Enoch started their café in 1995. At the time, it was a small sandwich shop serving tourists during Manteo’s busy season. Soon, though, the café started expanding into the shops around it, creating a larger and larger presence. Enoch even opened a small pottery gallery next door.
Through that time, Charron—a former airline pilot and a longtime disciple of great beer—was homebrewing. “The batches just kept getting bigger and bigger,” he says. That’s when he considered making beer for the café.
Full Moon Café & Brewery in Manteo
“I thought we could just make one beer and put it on tap, and we could probably make it in the kitchen,” says Charron. “We don’t really get year-round business, so I figured we could carry all North Carolina beer, and ours would be a complement. But we were quickly overwhelmed.”
They decided to open a small brewery in the space that was once Enoch’s pottery gallery. And so their brewery was born. It uses a “Brutus Ten” system that Charron built with plans from Brew Your Own magazine and small Blichmann fermenters. He currently has the ability to make about one barrel of beer at a time. “I’m overjoyed to say that it is way too small,” he says. “We haven’t even advertised. We just put a sign up outside, and we can’t keep up.”
Charron came to the industry with no professional credentials. “It’s all homebrew experience,” he says. “People come in all the time and ask if I’m the brewmaster, and I tell them, ‘No, I’m the guy who brews the beer, but I’m not the brewmaster.’ I have an enormous amount of respect for guys with loads of schooling.” He notes that the brewers from the other area breweries—Weeping Radish and Outer Banks Brewing Station—were “beyond helpful” while he was getting his brewery up and running. In fact, they are even planning to come over to brew with him in the winter—“the slow season.”
Charron currently brews and ferments in the same room that serves as his tasting room and pub. It’s a small taproom with a bright, polished copper bar gleaming in front of the brew kettles and fermenters. Full Moon doesn’t have temperature control like most large breweries. “We’ve got central air and some other air-conditioning units,” Charron says. In the summer, it gets hot. “Sometimes, to try to control temperature, we have to brew at three and four o’clock in the morning, when it’s cool outside and easier to keep the room cool.”
Down the road, Charron hopes for continued success. But his plans are really only to supply his own café. Plans for the next year include expanding from a one-barrel system to a two-barrel system and increasing the fermentation space. “If it keeps going this way,” he says, “I’d like to move to a bigger site and move up to a seven-barrel system and just brew for the restaurant.”
A view of the taps at Full Moon Café & Brewery
