Drink up!

Story and photos
by Kathleen Walls

Distilleries, wineries and breweries in the Carolinas are great spots to visit on your next road trip. They have some very unique ones. Here are a few of my favorites.

South Carolina

Steel Hands Brewery

Steel Hands Brewery in little Cayce, South Carolina, near the capital of Columbia is an example of a brewery helping a town revitalize. We met with Mayor Elise Partin at Steel Hands Brewery taproom, where we had a fantastic lunch from wings to pretzels and some tasty hamburgers. Their food menu is as varied as their brews. Of course, we sampled a flight of their beers.

Mayor Partin told us about using art to revitalize Cayce. The brewery is doing its part with live musical artists performing in their outdoor space regularly. Even the brewery logo, a strong hand holding some steel rebar, recognizes the hard-working people who work in local industries like CMC Steel, one of the nation's largest rebar manufacturing plants, just across the street from the brewery.

They support the community in other ways, too. Their Folds of Honor Lime Lager honors Palmetto State's fallen, disabled service members and their families, and first responders who deserve respect. Part of the sales of this product benefits Folds of Honor of Palmetto State. Their Steel Paws Wheat Ale aids local canine projects.

Enoree River Winery and Vineyard

Enoree River Winery and Vineyard in Newberry offers guest a chance to taste wines made with locally grown grapes. Richard and Laura LaBarre and their family began the winery in 2006 when they planted 8 acres with Carlos and Noble Muscadines. In 2009, thanks to their acceptance by the community and visitors, they planted Herbemont and Lenoir grapevines.

They have an outdoor patio overlooking the beautiful vineyards, but when we visited, it was too hot to enjoy the view. We settled in the comfortable tasting room and enjoyed a tasting of 11 of their wines.

They host an annual fall Newberry Harvest Festival and various events throughout the year, including live music and karaoke.

The winery is pet friendly and welcomes well-behaved dogs on the porch or grounds. There is a resident cat, but she didn't come out to meet me, cats being pretty independent.

Newgrass Brewing Company

Newgrass Brewing Company is  Shelby's first craft brewery.  The brewery in a renovated Hudson's Department Store dating from 1946 to 1948 with a fantastic Earl Scruggs mural on the outside wall. The wood inside the brewery was reclaimed from the old Dover Mill, at one time the largest employer in Cleveland County. Shelby is the home of Scruggs and has the Earl Scruggs Center you do not want to miss when you are there.

Besides their craft beer, they make a tasty hard-seltzer. Guava Colada, a delicious hard seltzer made with guava, pineapple, and coconut cream, is my favorite.

They serve some delicious bar food to go with their brews. Lots of burgers, and chicken, both Nashville hot and not. One unique item you need to try is livermush. I hesitate to call it a delicacy, but it is a regional food common to Western North Carolina made of pig liver, parts of pig heads, cornmeal and spices. This is made into a loaf, then sliced and fried. It's manufactured mainly in Shelby. It is believed to originate with the German settlers moving into the Appalachian in the 1700s. I tried it and it is pretty good, a bit like fried liver cheese.

North Carolina

Baker Buffalo Creek Vineyard

Baker Buffalo Creek Vineyard and Winery, just across the state line from Shelby in Lawndale, North Carolina, is a friendly family-owned winery. We met Ann and Charles Edwards, the owners, who began producing wine in 2003 after visiting California wine country. The century-old farmhouse, beautifully restored mule barn, and the original milk house where they produce the wine and the tasting facility, has been in the Baker family for over 100 years.

It's in a beautiful rural setting, and the wine is delicious. They create many of the traditional wines, like Cabernet Sauvignon and Riesling, but experiment with new versions. BE Baker, a brandy barrel-aged merlot with a hint of brandy flavor, is their latest. Ann gave me a tasting of a red, white, and rose.

You can bring your pet along. It's pet friendly and you may meet one of the family dogs. Do check out the event center; it is precious.

Broad Ranch Distillery

Broad Ranch Distillery in Winston Salem was the dream come true of John Fragakis. Frafakia and his friend Nick Doumas spent years planning the distillery and in 2014, their dream came true when they opened Broad Branch Distillery in Big Winston Warehouse, an old tobacco warehouse, on historic Trade Street. It's an area of entrepreneurs–restaurants, bars, music venues, and the downtown Arts District.

Doumas died in 2016 and Frafakia's health deteriorated, so he brought in his daughters, Anna Windham and Natalie Spinosa, to run the business.

They are doing great as the distillery was featured on an episode of Discovery Channel's Moonshiners: Whiskey Business in 2019. Broad Branch follows old time Appalachian moonshiner traditions. They buy non-gmo heirloom whole grain from local farmers and growers and distill using the recipes passed down through generations of moonshiners.

Fiddlin' Fish Brewing Company

Fiddlin' Fish Brewing Company is just down Trade Street from Broad Ranch. It shares some of the traditional Appalachian traditions. It was founded by Stuart and Lindsay Barnhart, and Stuart's cousin, David Ashe. The cousins grew up spending their summers in the Blue Ridge Mountains and have a love of the outdoors, hiking the woods, and paddling the creeks, combined with a love of old-time mountain music, thus the name, Fiddlin' Fish.

They have a 15-barrel brewhouse and produce traditional styles and an ever-changing cast of seasonal experiments.

Outer Banks Distilling

Outer Banks Distilling, the distillers of Kill Devil Rum in the Outer Banks city of Manteo, carries on a long tradition in the Outer Banks. Rum, as a pirate's favorite drink, was always popular there, but Kill Devil Rum is the first distillery to produce it legally. They opened in 2015.

We took a tour of the distillery with Scott Smith, one of the four owners. He explained the name because rum was once believed to be "strong enough to kill the devil."

They offer tours and tastings during the week, and tell how they begin with molasses, and depending on the rum they are producing, go from there. Their motto is "From molasses to glasses." They make their rum completely from scratch in a custom-made 300L—9 plate rectifying column, copper still from Germany.

I'm a big rum fan, so when Scott invited us into the tasting room to sample some products, I was thrilled. The bar is spacious and well-lit and there are artifacts from local shipwrecks, including a ship's wheel from the wreck of the Irma in 1925 and many other items. I loved getting a taste of local history along with the rum! My favorite was the Rum with Pecans and Honey since I am a fan of sweet drinks. Of course, there are lots of other choices to suit any taste.

Southern Grace Distilleries

Southern Grace Distilleries at Mt. Pleasant Prison is the first distillery in the US to be located in a former prison.

Leanne Powell was a Southern girl who had a bootlegger grandfather. She lived up to her heritage by heading up a unique concept at Southern Grace Distillery, AKA Whiskey Prison, at Mount Pleasant, North Carolina. Before Powell became president and co-founder of Southern Grace, she had the most unlikely job imaginable for a moonshiner; she was North Carolina Congressman Larry Kissell's chief-of-staff.

Powell and her co-founder began the process in January 2014. Despite her heritage, Powell wasn't a distiller and didn't have a family recipe. What she had was the desire to have a product that would be "made in America." She started with the idea of eventually producing bourbon, which they did. In November 2017 they released Conviction. She passed away in July 2019, but her co-founder, Thomas Thacker, is carrying on the tradition.

I had the good fortune to meet Ms. Powell before her death and she told me, "Bourbon is one of the few things that, to be bourbon, has to be made in the U.S.A. so small-batch bourbon that was made and aged in here in North Carolina was our aim." The name choice was based on the fact they aged the whiskey carefully, so "Southern Grace just seemed to fit."

The distiller is Sebastian Correa, a graduate of Appalachian State University with a degree in Fermentation Science. Besides his distilling skill, Southern Grace depends on an unusual action to help the aging process; they blast it with very loud rock music. Besides bourbon, they make several corn whiskies.

Another unique fact about Southern Grace's spirits is that besides their usual tours on Wednesday through Sunday at 12:30, 2:00, and 3:30, they offer night time paranormal tours. After all, this was a prison in the early 1900s.

Deep River Brewery

Deep River Brewery in Clayton is Johnson County's first legal brewery. Paul and Lynn Auclair opened the brewery in April 2013 in a 1902 cotton spinning mill building. The wall in the taproom is made from an old tobacco barn built in 1949. It's a hop in the right direction. Most of their beers include locally sourced vegetables, fruits, hops, and grain. They named the brewery for the Deep River in the Adirondack area near where Paul grew up. They're open daily except Mondays, and bring in food trucks and music most nights.

Two things make their beer remarkable. First, and least important, I rarely find a beer I enjoy. I have a love/hate relationship with most hops. I think they're beautiful plants, but I don't like their bitter taste. I was delighted to find Double D's Watermelon Lager, one of their seasonal beers, tasted delicious. If I liked it, anyone who doesn't like hops, whether they are a beer drinker or not, will enjoy the sweet watermelon taste of this beer. Yes, it has real local watermelons infused into it. Secondly, several years ago, N.C. University discovered/created the first new yeast in 600 years capable of making a good sour beer. Nicknamed Bumblebeer, these are a new type of beer that's a cross between a sour beer and ale. Deep River Brewing was the first brewery to make beer from bumblebeer yeast. They now make four beers from it. One is Limoncello, an ale that looks and tastes like the freshly squeezed lemonade that is part of the concoction.

I noticed their cute delivery truck and asked about it. They do their own distribution since under present law, if a brewery produces less than 50,000 barrels of beer annually, they can do their own distribution. A deliveryman for Deep River proudly showed off the Deep River Truck.

Hinnant Family Vineyards & Winery

Hinnant Family Vineyards & Winery has been a North Carolina tradition in Pine Level since 1972. Like excellent wines, Hinnant Family Vineyards are well aged.

Its story began in 1971 when Hinnant siblings, Jacqueline, Freddie, Douglas, and Willard decided to plant a vineyard in Johnston County. Tobacco had been the main crop in the area, and it was fast becoming unprofitable. Those first batches of grapes were sold to markets, the public and later other wineries.

Things took a different turn in 2003. Williard and his son, Bob, decided to start producing their own wine and the vineyard now became Hinnant Family Vineyards & Winery. They bought out their siblings, eventually. After Williard passed away in 2013, Bob expanded farther. Today, he has about 100 acres of grapes and sells some to other local wineries. The Hinnant Family Vineyards & Winery is the oldest and largest commercial Muscadine vineyard in the state of North Carolina. Some vines are 45 to 46 years old.

Bob is totally involved in both the growing and the wine processing. Everything is done onsite from picking to crushing, juicing, and bottling to the winemaking. Everything is grown on site or locally.

Norton is a Virginia native grape grown at Hinnant. It takes up approximately 2 acres in their vineyard.  One variety, American hybrid Blanc du Bois needs to be harvested by hand so they only grow a few acres of it. Even so it takes about a month. The rest of the 100 acres takes only about 6 to 8 weeks to harvest. My favoriet her and their bestselling white wine is a Carlos Sweet Muscadine.

Aside from traditional wine, Hinnant produces fruit wines. My favorite of these is a blackberry wine made from Johnson County blackberries. Their other fruit wines include strawberry and blueberry.

Their Carolina Wildflower, made from Carlos Grape and sweetened with wildflower honey, won Best of Show and Best of Muscadine Cup at North Carolina State Fair in 2014. This was the first time a Muscadine wine ever won Best of Show. They beat out 437 entries.

They offer tours and have a small choice of foods available.

Gregory Vineyards

Gregory Vineyards in Angier is a picturesque 140-acre family farm that now showcases hills of planted vineyards, a winery, and a tasting room where you can sip on double gold winning Mary Elizabeth and Lee Love wines. They now produce seven varieties of unfortified wine and three brandy wines.

 The interesting thing about Muscadine grapes is that they only grow in the southeastern states. The Muscadine grape produces a wine that tastes like you went out and picked a grape and popped it in your mouth. Muscadine family consists of over 350 varieties. Scuppernong is a bronze variety of Muscadine that was discovered along the Scuppernong River in North Carolina. The original mother vine is still alive on Roanoke Island, where it has been growing and producing for about four hundred years. Noble is the most common type of Muscadine used for wine.

The Gregorys began with Lane's Seafood and Steakhouse on Feb 7, 1987, and in 2009, opened Gregory Vineyards under the care of winemaker Lane Gregory. They offer catered picnics on the farm grounds.

Broadslab Distillery

Broadslab Distillery in Benson is North Carolina's 1st "farm" distillery on land that had been in the family for many generations. Jeremy Norris is another moonshiner who turned an old family recipe for moonshine into modern-day whiskey. Johnson County, where Broadslab is located, was once the state's biggest illegal moonshine area. Jeremy not only is using his grandfather, Leonard A. Wood's, recipes; Broadslab Distillery is on the same land where his grandfather once built his stills.

Norris was raised by his grandfather. They had a roadside produce stand which was pretty sustainable before the interstate. They spent a lot of time together and that was how Morris learned his family history. He told me, "My grandfather told me his grandfather bought this land, about 400 acres, back in the 1840s. They were farmers but also made whiskey. His granddaddy used to make whiskey here and put it on wagons and carry it down to the Cape Fear River and export it downriver."

Norris's grandfather, who was born in 1923, carried on the tradition. Norris said, "He used to tell me he had a doctor's degree in bootlegging. He ran a still with his brother when he was around five. He started running his own still at age 13 and got married at 19. In the 1950s, federal agents decided he needed to retire his bootlegging operation."

 In 1990, when they opened up I-40, Norris was about 14 years old. That dried up their produce business. His granddaddy kept telling him, "I'm too old to do it, but you ought to open a moonshine museum. It would bring people back out here to the farm."

Norris never believed he would do anything like that. Then in 2005 he got the opportunity to buy back 60 acres of the original farm that were sold off over the years. First, he tried small farming and found it wasn't working. About that same time, North Carolina licensed its first craft distillery. They advertised handcrafted North Carolina moonshine. He tried a bottle, and it didn't taste like what he thought of as North Carolina moonshine. He found out the distillery was using a product bought in bulk. He shook his head, "They just bottled and slapped a label on it." He felt, "That seemed kinda' wrong. It would be nice if someone from North Carolina would put an authentic, handcrafted product on the shelf to offer to the consumer."

That someone turned out to be Norris himself. In 2007, he decided to use the land to a distillery and grow his own grain and non-gmo corn. With the help of his grandfather, it took four years to put it all in operation. He had no partners or investors. He pointed to the copper still, "My grandfather helped design the still, and we had it built by a local welding shop. In November 2011, Broadslab Distillery became the fifth licensed distillery in North Carolina. The first product came out in August 2012."

His grandfather passed away before the first product hit the marketplace, but his legacy lives on. On the way from the gift shop, his grandfather's former home, to the distillery, Norris pointed out a tiny still with a few barrels just visible from the road. That was where his grandfather had a still. Throughout the property, there are numerous artifacts dating back to the heyday of moonshining like an old truck with a small still and some antique farm implements. Norris's corn whiskies are named Legacy Shine, Legacy Reserve, and Legacy Appleshine in his honor. The recipes were his grandfather's. Morris said he asked his grandfather, "What'a you think I should make?"

He recalls his grandfather told him, "'I used to make two different kinds of liquor.' He made one to sell and one to drink. The one to drink took a lot of time and trouble, so he only made small batches. You had to soak the corn for a few days to let it swell up, then you had to wrap it in burlap sacks until it germinated, then they would spread it on a piece of tin in the sun to dry."

He explained he adapted his grandfather's method to fit a modern distillery. "Instead of a few buckets, I make about 1000 pounds at a time. I use a tobacco barn as a malt house. I soak corn in 55 gallon barrels before I pour it out and I keep it damp in that barn and let it germinate, then turn the fans and heat on and let it dry. It takes about 12 hours. Then we shovel it into the building and run it through the mill. Pound by pound it's the same mash; just bigger batches. It's malted corn and malted barley. We mix the ingredients together, get the temperature right, add the yeast, then we let it ferment for about eight or ten days. Once the fermentation is complete, we pump the beer into the still and that's what we distill."

In addition to the three kinds of whiskey: bourbon, corn whisky, and rye whiskey, Broadslab produces two kinds of rum, spiced and silver.

Mother Earth Brewery and Mother Earth Spirits

Mother Earth Brewery in Kinston opened in 2009. As its name implies, it's the greenest brewery I ever visited. Co-owner, Stephen Hill, is passionate about being kind to Mother Earth. He has several projects in Kinston, all involving revitalizing old buildings. So it's only natural that when he started planning for a brewery and distillery, it would be in a renewed building.

The building he found had been a drive-through pharmacy. Today, it's a state-of-the-art Leeds Gold Certified building. The second highest possible award for a company and the highest ever awarded a brewery. He kept about 95% of the building's original material in the brewery. 

Other things are equally important like none of the used grain is wasted. The byproducts are sent to a local farm to feed the animals. Jeff told us "We were the first brewery in-- I believe the world—to use a 100 Gycol cooling system. The story was the company Stephen was looking at for coolers had an experimental model Gycol system but they said 'It'll be about a year before it is ready but if you want to be a guinea pig we'll do everything to make it work.' Stephen went for it making us the first brewery to use the environmentally friendly system."

The bottle labels are painted by a local artist. Many of the pictures are very personal to Mother Earth Brewery. One label, Sisters of the Moon an India Pale Ale, was painted from a photograph of co-owner, Stephen Hill's three daughters dancing around a fire in the moonlight. Trent Mooring, co-owner, is married to one of Stephen's daughters, keeping it all in the family. Stephen did his one and only art project, a painting that took him several weeks compared to others who completed their art in hours. It hangs in  the taproom.

The facility was spotless as our guide led up through the brewing area to canned and bottled. They produce six year-round beers and another six or seven seasonal varieties. 

When you step out of the large taproom to the patio seating, you still see the green influence all around. There is a garden growing seasonal vegetables. Above the back of the patio, there is a large set of solar panels that produce enough power to run the entire operation.

Tours run Tues-Fri 10am to 5pm and Saturday 1pm-8pm on the hour.

Mother Earth Spirits, founded in 2008 by Stephen Hill and Trent Mooring, was in the process of being moved to its own facility, so we didn't get a tour of it. In 2004, it won several awards from SIP Awards, showcasing their excellence in craft spirits; Mother Earth Carolina Rye Whiskey received Double Gold in the American Rye Malt Whiskey category, Mother Earth Spirits American Botanical Gin won a Gold medal along with the coveted Consumers' Choice Award, Mother Earth Spirits Carolina Dry Gin earned a Double Gold and also claimed the Consumers' Choice Award, and Mother Earth Spirits American Single Malt Whiskey earned a Gold medal, the Consumers' Choice Award, and an Innovation Award for outstanding quality and uniqueness. Pretty impressive results.

Public Disclosure Please Read 
FTC has a law requiring web sites to let their readers know if any of the stories are  "sponsored" or compensated. We also are to let readers know if any of our links are ads. Most are not. They are just a way to direct you  to more information about the article where the link is placed. We have several ads on our pages.  They are clearly marked as ads. I think readers are smart enough to know an ad when they see one but to obey the letter of the law, I am putting this statement here to make sure everyone understands. American Roads and Global Highways may contain affiliate links or ads. Further, as their bios show, most of the feature writers are professional travel writers. As such we are frequently invited on press trips, also called fam trips. On these trips most of our lodging, dining, admissions fees and often plane fare are covered by the city or firm hosting the trip. It is an opportunity to visit places we might not otherwise be able to visit. However, no one tells us what to write about those places. All opinions are 100% those of the author of that feature column.