Kinston has been known for several things over the years — tobacco, basketball talent, a failed foray into Confederate naval operations.
And beer.
Mother Earth Brewing made the U.S. Open Beer Championship Top 10 list over the weekend in Atlanta, taking home medals in four categories. It led to a post on The Atlantic’s Cities website calling Kinston one of “the cities that brew the best beer in America.”
“Since we’ve been brewing, we’ve entered the U.S. Open three times and won a total of 14 medals,” Mother Earth co-founder Trent Mooring said.
Brewmaster Josh Brewer said the key to producing beer that compares well to similar competitors comes down to the basics — ingredients and water.
“Water source is a big thing,” Brewer said. “When people replicate formulas and certain beer styles, and they try to do something from Germany, generally they try to replicate the water to make it true to style, too. We haven’t gone that far here, but from an ingredients standpoint — malt and hops and everything — and these profiles, sometimes it’s hard for a lot of breweries to have different strains of yeast to keep them going.
“So they might say they brew a culture, while it may not be the exact same yeast, which makes a huge difference in the finished product.”
Of the four winning beers, Sunny Haze took bronze in the German Hefeweizen category, silver medals went to Dark Cloud (Munchner Dunkel) and Silent Night Imperial Stout (Wood Barrel Imperial Stout), and Window Pane Fig & Raisin won gold in the Experimental category.
“It was something that started a few years ago when someone gave us an apple brandy barrel and told me to put something in it,” Brewer said of the gold medal winner, the fourth beer in the Window Pane series. “It took me a few weeks, because I had never had apple brandy — I never even opened the barrel up to smell anything.
“I woke up this one morning, thinking about a beer I’d never made, never did anything with the yeast strain, never did anything with figs and raisins, and it just seemed to work inside an apple brandy barrel.”
The barrels come from the western part of the state — Carolina Distilling in Lenoir.
Mother Earth continues to look at new beers to put on the market, using a pilot program to put new varieties on tap in the bar adjacent to the brewery.
“Serve them up here in the taproom, see what people think,” Mooring said.
More than 20 breweries medaled in the competition, featuring younger American craft breweries, to a German brewery founded in 1050.
“This competition is significant because it accepts entries from breweries around the world and allows national, winning homebrews to compete,” said Dow Scoggins, director of the U.S. Open Beer Championships, in a statement.
The competition was co-sponsored by The Beer Connoisseur magazine and BeerInfo.com.
Wes Wolfe can be reached at 252-559-1075 and Wes.Wolfe@Kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter @WolfeReports.
