Fullsteam is rewriting the rules about beer in the South.

Founder Sean Wilson was co-founder and president of Pop The Cap, a lobbying organization that, in 2005, successfully lobbied the North Carolina legislature to amend the legal definition of beer. Hundreds of beers can now be brewed and sold in North Carolina — beers that were illegal for 70 years. The powers that be said it couldn’t happen. We wrote a new definition.

Our brewery will experiment with local farmed ingredients and heirloom grains to develop a distinctly Southern style of beer.  While Fullsteam respects the historical traditions of beer making, we are by no means bound to them. We’d rather craft a new tradition.

Beer deserves a place at the Southern table. The family table. Brewers and beer lovers have tolerated the bottom rung for far too long, allowing factory beverage titans, politicians, and teetotalers to manage the definition of beer. We will climb to a better position.

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• Southern agri-brewing
  
• analog craft for a digital age
• investing in Fullsteam

Put simply, I’m inspired and intruged by oddities, and I like to share them. You’ll find some steampunk stuff, some music favs, and a few digitial/analog curiosities. Like the Tenori-On, a new instrument from Japanese inventor Toshio Iwai. Most of these videos will have the tension between analog and digital as a common theme. (Some will be just plain funny.)

Music has always been an analog art…full of imperfections, unintentional half-tones, white noise, and layers of nuance. Today’s digital age produces music of pure precision, binary data, and predictability. Even thought it’s a digital machine, I like the Tenori-On not just for its visual appeal, but for the analog touch (Iwai’s hands) as it manipulates binary music in 4/4 meter.

What’s this have to do with beer? On a recent brewery tour, our guide mentioned that the head brewer could literally make the beer from home, using his laptop to patch into the brewery mainframe. Is this craftsmanship? Precision and consistency is the pinnacle of good brewing, but does it undermine the craft of the laborer? Call us crazy, but Chris and I are excited about the physical demands of brewing: moving kegs, unloading grain, even cleaning tanks. A fully digitized brewhouse doesn’t appeal to either of us.

But, being realistic, an inefficient brewhouse can quickly break a business. And break your back.

So we’ll have our own decisions to make about our own analog and digital philosophy. In the early days, it won’t be an issue: we simply won’t have the resources to invest in automated systems. But as we grow, I expect we’ll stick close to our analog roots.

Chris and I have both had enough of our own digital age (essentially, the office cubicle). Let’s face it. We’re damaged goods. The Big Lots and Tuesday Morning of corporate America. But I bet a good number of you are just like us — down or done with the cube and ready to labor, ache, and toil.

We’ve found our analog craft. What’s yours?

We bet you don’t know. Truth is, neither do we.

The West Coast style of beer has been all the rage for the last several years, for good reason. The crazy hoppy, aggressive-yet-balanced beers of Washington, Oregon, and (in particular) Southern California are often amazing, rarely underwhelming.

The Northeast brewing scene typically values more subtle, balanced beers that reflect the region’s British and Germanic roots. Sure, we know there are exceptions to this rule. But just like the West Coast / East Coast music scene, there’s a fun-and-sometimes-serious battle for style supremacy: the West Coast Xtremes versus the East Coast Ivyies.

Lost in the mix: the South.

In the backyard and ultimately in the brewery, Fullsteam’s brewing process is a mad science. A southern mad science, as we experiment with local farmed ingredients and heirloom grains to create a distinctly southern style of beer. A what? A Southern style of brewing?

Yes, a Southern beer style. Southern Experimental Beer.

As the South’s population grows and becomes more and more cosmopolitan, we’re losing a bit of our own identity. Don’t get us wrong: it’s great to have access to international cuisine and culture. But so many new businesses in the South are all about importing culture to us Southerners, filling a gap we didn’t really know was missing.

Let’s face it: we’re never going to have New York‘s best pizza here in North Carolina. That’s why we like to travel to New York City. If I want the world’s best bagels, I will go to Montreal. I can’t get crabby about the world’s best bagels not being in Fuquay-Varina. That’s not what Fuquay-Varina is known for.

For the people that live in the South — and for those who visit — Fullsteam will craft beers that reflect and celebrate our Southern tradition and the region’s agricultural splendor.