Listen to this story on this episode of Earth Eats

At Fullsteam Brewery in Durham, North Carolina, bartender Jamie White is pouring pints of a Summer Basil farmhouse ale. The brewery makes the usual pilsners, IPAs, and porters, but among the hops and wheat are some more unusual ingredients. “My favorite one on tap is the barrel-aged AVA,” Jamie says. “It’s a beer that we made in 2018 with grape leaf and elderflower.”

Fullsteam Brewery’s mission is to support local agriculture through what it calls a “Southern beer economy”. In a little over 11 years, the company has purchased over half a million dollars worth of Southern-farmed ingredients. This includes a huge amount of grain like wheat, barley, rice, and oats. It also includes the fruits, herbs, flowers, and nuts that add additional color, flavor, and aroma to their beers. And some ingredients come right from the brewery’s backyard. 

“We actually left our building with buckets in hand, walked to the parks that surround us, and found edible ingredients,” says Hannah Parris, who was until recently head brewer at Fullsteam. She’s describing Wild Durham, a beer she and her team made in collaboration with local arts magazine Durham Beat.  “When [breweries] do foraged beers, [they] tend to stick to saisons or more typically fruited beers,” she says of the beer that was flavored by magnolia leaves, cherry blossom, and violet. “And that was so much fun because it was an IPA, and it just came out so wonderful.”

Hannah started homebrewing in college. After college, it became an even more important way to express her creativity. “I took a job in what we in the industry call the ‘real world’ for a little while,” she says. “It just wasn't for me. I sat in a cubicle for eight hours a day, and it was just miserable.” She kept brewing at home while moving into the beer industry for work, and she was always experimenting with recipes. Her first brew was created using pawpaws. “They don't have a long shelf life, so that's why you don't usually see them in the grocery stores,” she explains. “But they're a fun ingredient, kind of like a cross between a mango and a banana … they're really delicious and super fragrant.”

Over the past three years, Hannah has created dozens of beers for Fullsteam. One is a Madeira-barrel-aged barleywine made with chestnut flour. For this, she was interested in highlighting the plight of the American chestnut tree, which is functionally extinct and the subject of restoration efforts. A pre-prohibition-style ale called Common Good features local corn grits, and is modeled on an American beer style called Kentucky Common. “It's an interesting beer,” she says. “It's kind of a historical style. They don't always age well, and then they're hard to sell. But sometimes it's fun to brew them and just educate people.”

Fullsteam has a handful of staple beers in its main collection, but these limited releases, which are available on tap and canned, are where the creativity of Hannah and her team shines.

In the production room, she explains that Fullsteam doesn’t have a formal pilot system for beers. “A lot of times, [piloting is] just us bringing out our own homebrew equipment to test out what we think would be cool flavors,” she says.

Her preferred workspace is on the “hot side” of brewing, at the giant tanks where the milled grain is cooked and its sugars are released. “I just like being in the raw grain and hops,” she says. The hot side is also where many of these additional ingredients are added. Others are added as syrups or purees on the cold side, where fermentation happens. 

Fullsteam’s use of regional ingredients means that some beers act as a history lesson. The lager called Tidewater uses Carolina Gold Rice, a grain with a complicated and painful history. Originally cultivated in West Africa, it was brought to the U.S. as a crop and farmed by enslaved people in South Carolina. The beer’s recipe pays tribute to Japanese brewers, but the ingredient itself hits close to home. Portions of sales of this beer went to the Many Faces Initiative, which funds paid internships for people of color in craft beer.

Hannah came to Fullsteam partially because she was interested in initiatives like this. To her, they showed that the company was willing to engage with the fact that food and drink are political, and personal. She points to her own experience as a woman brewer. “Being a woman in production brewing, it's not common.” she says. “Only 10% of the beer in the United States is made by women, and it’s such a small amount considering that when beer was being made hundreds of years ago, women were the people who made it.” 

“We're using what tools we have, which [are] beer, but we're trying to not just be beer, right? We're trying to be a good member of the community.”

“Fullsteam has a really strong identity,” says Chelsea Amato, the company’s brand manager and graphic designer, of Fullsteam’s distinctive backwards “F” logo. “ [But] when I got here, there were about five different logos that were being used. I wanted to streamline what we were using and why. We wanted the brand to feel inclusive. We wanted it to feel modern.  And we wanted it to focus on agriculture and industry.”

Chelsea moved to central North Carolina 3 years ago. “I worked in museums in New York for a while, and then that kind of grind got to be too much for me,” they say. “My wife and I wanted to have a bit of a slower pace, and get back to nature, so we moved to North Carolina. This popped up, and I love craft beer. And I'm passionate about the environment. So it kind of felt like the perfect fit.”

Chelsea has designed packaging for Fullsteam beers for the last three years, including brews that commemorate Pride Month and Juneteenth. A rare exception is Things We Don’t Say, a national campaign for mental health, for which dozens of companies brewed from the same IPA recipe and used the same artwork. The design of the can includes suicide prevention hotline numbers, and a QR code that leads to mental health resources. Chelsea gestures to the can’s artwork, displayed on a wall covered in Fullsteam’s beer can stickers. The wall is vaguely chronological, with the last few years of limited release beers showcased on the right. Many of Chelsea’s colorful and botanically-inspired designs are sourced from public domain images, and then edited in Photoshop to “bring it up to 2021.” 

Chelsea points to the playful artwork for the Kentucky Common ale. “It was often sold and consumed at horse races,” they say. “So we took historical horse images, and then I drew these little vector beer mugs and kind of overlaid them on the horse's face to make it seem like all these horses were drinking the beers … [to] meld these two worlds of agriculture and industry.”

Due to the lead time it takes to create labels, Chelsea doesn’t usually try a limited release beer until they’ve already created its visual imagery. And so they’re always curious to see how the look, taste, and story of a beer work together. “Delicata, our farmhouse lager synced up really beautifully with the label,” they say. “The label has different grains on it in oranges and purples. And the beer itself had just like this delicious, summery, earthy flavor ... when I was drinking that beer and saw the label, it just felt like that was the flavor.”

As we leave, Chelsea tells me about an upcoming release - a muscadine grape IPA, made in collaboration with a brewery the town over. It came about when a local environmental group asked if Fullsteam would like to harvest some overgrown wild grapes from one of their properties. In exchange, the beermakers will help to rebuild the trellises next year. It’s a perfect example of Fullsteam’s dream of the Southern beer economy. 

“It's just amazing that we can work with different vendors and suppliers and farmers and other breweries in the area. It feels like a really beautiful place to be.”