Tucked away in the bottom floor of Schaub Hall is an NC State facility many students may be surprised to learn exists: It’s a fully functioning brewery, and it’s in production.
The brewery is run by Department of Food, Bioprocessing and Nutrition Sciences professor John Sheppard, and acts as a research facility where he and some of his graduate students work on improving brewing and fermenting techniques. Sheppard moved to NC State in 2006 from his previous job at McGill University in Montreal, where he had also run a brewery.
“It took me awhile to convince the administration that this size of a facility is needed for research,” Sheppard said. “I guess they were afraid of the perception that we were making beer for other reasons besides research. Eventually I did get permission to operate, and for the last three or four years, I’ve been brewing quite a bit of beer here with my graduate students, and we’ve been supplying beer to a lot of campus events.”
Once the brewery was in operation, Sheppard began the process of obtaining an Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) license for the brewery.
“In the last three years, we’ve been limited to providing beer to in-campus events organized by different departments or university administration under the university’s ABC permit,” Sheppard said. “As a result of that, there have been certain rules and restrictions about where the beer can be served. However, last February we [the brewery] received our own ABC permit, which allows us to sell beer in limited quantities to commercial retail establishments.”
Obtaining the license was difficult, due to the lab being located on state property and the need for a change in state legislation, but opens up more locations for the beer to be sold.
The beer is available at the Lonnie Poole Golf Course clubhouse on tap, and there are plans to start serving the beer at the Park Alumni Center on Centennial Campus and University Club on Hillsborough Street, according to Sheppard.
“Currently, I make 12 different styles of beer,” Sheppard said. “Six of these I call year-round styles and six are either seasonal or specialty beers.”
The brewery’s seasonal beers, coinciding with certain parts of the year, are usually only available for two to three months. The beer currently in season is the “Wolf-toberfest,” a lager described by the brewery’s website to have a “sweet lingering caramel flavor and aroma, balanced with moderate bitterness and a nice, seasonal orange hue.”
Then there are the specialty beers, where the brewery starts to get really creative and unique with how they brew or what they brew with.
“A specialty beer is something you won’t find in many places,” Sheppard said. “For example, I have two specialty beers right now that are made with wild yeast and one of the wild yeast species makes a sour beer, it’s called an American Lambic sour, and another makes a special blonde ale that has a honey flavor to it without us using any honey because that wild yeast came from a bumblebee.”
Sheppard said the yeast strain chosen largely affects a beer’s taste. Yeasts, principally, make ethanol and carbon dioxide, which are the two main products of fermentation. They also make a lot of byproducts, known as esters, which enhance the flavor.
The brewery takes a whole day to brew two-and-a-half-barrels of beer but once the beer is brewed, it needs to be fermented. This process can take anywhere from three to eight weeks, depending on the style of beer. After the beer is fermented, it is filtered, carbonated and stored.
For more information on the NC State brewery, check out our video with John Sheppard here.
