600 South Croatan Highway
Kill Devil Hills, NC 27948
252-449-BREW (2739)
Website: http://obbrewing.com
Hours: Monday–Thursday, opens at 3 P.M.; Friday–Sunday, opens at 11:30 A.M.
Owners: Eric Reece and Aubrey Davis
Brewmaster: Scott Meyer
Opened: 2001
Regular beer lineup: Olsch, Standard Issue Pale Ale, Conquest IPA, Abracadabra Brown Ale, Briney-Deep Porter, Dog House Tripel
Seasonal: LemonGrass Wheat Ale
Awards: 2002 GABF Bronze Medal for “LemonGrass Wheat”
2006 World Beer Cup Bronze Medal for “Smolder Bock”
2010 World Beer Cup Silver Medal for “LemonGrass Wheat”
On an island in the Atlantic Ocean, just a few hundred yards from where the Wright brothers’ home-built flying machine made the first controlled, powered, and sustained human flights, is the Outer Banks Brewing Station. It’s hard to miss. The large red-and-white building stands out among the businesses surrounding it on the main strip of the island, and a wind turbine—taking advantage of the blustery winds on the northern Outer Banks—looms overhead.
The bar at Outer Banks Brewing Station
Head brewer Scott Meyer has been involved in fermentation for a long time. He was working as a vintner in the wine industry in Northern California when he started seeing tap handles in bars from new breweries—microbreweries. Intrigued, he sought out a local microbrewery—Bison Brewing—and started volunteering and learning how it all worked. He was hooked.
Soon afterward, the head brewer and assistant brewer both left the company, and Meyer was promoted to head brewer. He hired Eric Reece—a lab tech at nearby Bear Technologies—as an assistant brewer. Or, as Reece puts it, “I tasted Scott’s beers, and I quit my job.”
As luck would have it, though, Bison Brewing (now Bison Organic) was bought out, and the new owners were brewers. Meyer and Reece found themselves out of their jobs. Meyer went back to the wine industry, and Reece went with him, working at Rosenblum Cellars.
Meanwhile, Aubrey Davis, an old friend of Reece’s, got tired of his job. Soon afterward, he convinced Reece to return to an idea they had come up with while they were in Thailand in the Peace Corps together: starting a brewpub.
Davis had grown up visiting his grandparents’ house on the Outer Banks. He felt it would be the perfect location—and it was, except for actually getting everything built.
“It’s hard to find contractors out here,” says Meyer, echoing Reece’s early frustrations. “Plumbers and electricians don’t move out here to work. They move out here to surf or to fish. They’ll get work done, but they’re doing it on beach time, and nobody’s really prepared for any sort of industrial setting. These are residential guys that are here for the lifestyle. It’s hard to fault them, though. When you live in paradise, it kind of infects you.”
The comfortable entrance of Outer Banks Brewing Station
Eventually, they got their brewery built—all except for the windmill, which was in the original business plan. It took five and a half years of fighting with the city’s mayor and zoning board before they finally got it through. Now, as the state of North Carolina considers a wind farm offshore, the Brewing Station’s turbine already offsets about 8 percent of its power needs. “It would be a lot more if we didn’t have a brewery,” says Reece, “but then we wouldn’t have the great beer.”
When Reece and Davis opened the brewery, they called Meyer to see if he was interested in helping them. Meyer eagerly accepted. They’ve been together ever since.
The brewing system is an amalgam of used equipment. They found a brewery in foreclosure and got a trailer full of equipment. In fact, they ended up selling equipment they didn’t need in order to finance the rest of what they required. The result is a quirky brewery tucked into a seemingly impossibly small space away from the restaurant. Patrons can see it from the dining room. It is situated half a story below floor level and stands two stories tall. A catwalk runs across the brewery at restaurant level. The only entrances to the brewhouse are outside around the back of the restaurant and a secret-wall-type access through the back of the cold room.
Brewing on the Outer Banks poses some interesting challenges, says Meyer. “The water is horrible out here.” He jokingly refers to it as “the three threads of the Outer Banks,” in reference to traditional beer in England, which was a blend of three different types of ale. “What we have is basically a mix of desalinated ocean water, water from a coastal aquifer, and good ol’ swamp water. The blend changes constantly, and I can’t get a reliable idea of what the water is like, chemically, until weeks after the blend changes. So we just strip it down entirely and rebuild it using brewing salts.”
The salt air also poses a problem for the brewery, corroding motors and any metal that has to spend time outside. “We have to keep a close eye on our air compressor,” says Meyer. “If we don’t change the filter about once a month, the entire thing becomes jammed up with salt crystals.”
The final challenge is the seasonality. Both Meyer, the brewer, and Reece, the owner, talk about the challenges of having such an intensely seasonal customer base. For Reece, the issue is making sure they capitalize on the four months of tourism to keep the restaurant and brewery open the rest of the year. For Meyer, it’s making sure he can keep up with beer production when tourists are in town. “It’s not just seasonal,” Meyer says. “We actually see fluctuations week to week on the rental schedule. It’s impossible to predict what one week will bring over another.”
The restaurant is magnificent. It boasts vaulted ceilings and a long, beautiful bar running the length of its back half. “What really sets us apart,” Reece says, “is that we care about the food.” In fact, Reece’s wife, Christina McKenzie, a graduate of the California Culinary Institute, works in the restaurant as well. “You’ve got to try her carrot cake,” says Reece. “It’ll make you cry.”
The Brewing Station has been in operation over a decade now. Its continued success is a testament to the determination and skill of the old friends. “We have to continually try to reinvent ourselves to keep things fresh,” Reece says. “Scott is always trying to find new flavors in the beer, and he’s constantly dialing things in, and we do the same with the food, or with entertainment and events. We’re very involved in the community, and we like to try to keep the community involved with us. It’s very important to us.”