After over a decade in craft beer, Durham’s oldest brewery to expand for the first time
Before starting Fullsteam Brewery, Sean Lilly Wilson already had helped change the course of beer in North Carolina.
These days, there’s a double IPA and a strong stout in just about every bar in the state. About 16 years ago, such a thing was illegal.
Wilson led a lobbying effort that lifted decades-old restrictions on how boozy North Carolina beer could be, ultimately increasing from 6% alcohol by volume to 15%. Called the “Pop the Cap” movement, the effort paved the way to the flourishing beer industry North Carolina sees today, with breweries, bottle shops and beer-centric bars quenching the never-ending thirst of a generation of craft drinkers.
After 11 years at its original Durham location, Fullsteam is planning to expand to a second location, growing into a beer landscape it helped create.
Slated to open its new location in November, Fullsteam will anchor the new Boxyard RTP development, a collection of restaurants and retail shops built out of a few dozen shipping containers in the middle of Research Triangle Park. Fullsteam will be in nine of those containers, building a new restaurant, taproom and upstairs event space.
“We like locations that have a little curiosity built in,” Wilson said.
Durham’s oldest brewery
Fullsteam was founded in 2010 as only Durham’s second brewery at the time, joining the now-departed Triangle Beer Company. After a long search for a location, Wilson opened in a former 7-Up bottling plant in a district best known for vacant warehouse space. Other businesses soon followed, including Cocoa Cinnamon, Motorco Music Hall and restaurant Geer Street Garden. A decade later, Durham’s Geer Street district is one of the city’s busiest nightlife spots and the city is home to eight breweries and more taprooms.
And while breweries much younger than Fullsteam are on their second or third locations — with some of those scattered across the state — Wilson said his brewery will only grow in the Triangle.
“A couple years ago when we were thinking, where do we want our growth trajectory to be, we were thinking mostly geographically,” Wilson said. “We decided we were better served by doubling down in the community in which we live. ... Any further growth will be in the Triangle.”
In the last decade, Fullsteam has picked up a slew of Good Food Awards, which recognize the country’s sustainable and innovative food products. Wilson has been long-listed multiple times for the James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Wine, Spirits or Beer Producer, a national award.
When beer bars and breweries were still a curiosity and not a cornerstone, Fullsteam was featured in the New York Times and GQ magazine.
Fullsteam is known for spinning crops and grains from North Carolina and the greater South into beers, including paw paw sours, persimmon ales and lagers made with sweet potatoes and basil. Its sales have stayed mostly local as well, ending up on draft lines around the state and in cans on grocery store shelves, but not shifting too much into a larger production brewery.
“The more you grow as a production brewery, your margins get slimmer,” Wilson said. “Our model has been slow steady growth. But we’re feeling the pinch.”
It’s a pizza party
For its RTP menu, Fullsteam is turning to one of the great love stories of all time: pizza and beer.
To run its kitchen, Fullsteam RTP hired chef James Johnson, whose most recent job was smoking barbecue at Skipper’s Seafood & Smokehouse in Apex.
Johnson has been working in restaurants since he was 14, busing tables and washing dishes, working the line and running the kitchen at several Triangle restaurants, including serving as a catering chef for Ashley Christensen’s Bridge Club.
Last year Johnson started smoking brisket at Skipper’s Seafood, which added the word Smokehouse to its name as people sought it out for barbecue.
“I’ve been doing my own barbecue since I was at my father’s hip doing whole hog,” Johnson said.
Wilson and Johnson first met six years ago at the industry food festival, Lambstock. They recently linked up as Fullsteam searched for its chef. Johnson said it was easy to leave the smoker behind and take on pizza.
“Sean is just an awesome person,” Johnson said of his new boss. “It really sounded like a phenomenal opportunity.”
The pizza at Fullsteam was created with help from pizzeria owner Teddy Diggs of Coronato in Carrboro. He helped Fullsteam come up with a thick crust square pizza, made from a 48-hour fermented dough. Wilson said the style ends up somewhere in the middle of Detroit and Sicily.
“It’s fluffy in the center and crispy on the outside,” Wilson said. “We’re doing the square pizza thing, it’s a fun way to get creative. I’m really pleased with how darn tasty it is.”
The menu is still in the works, but Wilson expects to see diners go for slices and salads for lunch and share larger pies for dinner.
On the drink side, Fullsteam beer will unsurprisingly be the centerpiece with a dozen taps at the downstairs bar, plus taps for wine, cider and batched cocktail. Fullsteam is doing cocktails for the first time, focusing on nearly all North Carolina spirits.
A different RTP
Wilson used to work an office job in RTP, he said, when the famous tech and research district took great lengths to hide itself away. He said the attraction of Boxyard RTP is seeing that culture starting to shift.
“Corporate campuses were designed to be in the woods, behind security barriers,” Wison said. “You’d go to work, then you’d eat lunch at the cafe, then go back to work until you went home. The nature of work has changed, particularly as we address the pandemic. Workers are looking for a more social experience and want to connect to the environment.”
Boxyard RTP opened this summer with a handful of vendors, including Lawrence Barbecue, Beyu Caffe, Buzzy Bakes and gourmet cotton candy shop Wonderpuff. Still to come are Bulkogi, Carrburritos and a number of retail shops.
The new RTP location won’t solve Fullsteam’s biggest issue, Wilson said. It needs more production space. The brewery was built in a cavernous warehouse that it needed to grow into, but it’s long past that and busting at the seams.
Wilson said the cramped quarters on Rigsbee has led to some recent runs to be contracted out to other local breweries. The RTP spot won’t offer any production help either, as its strictly a restaurant and taproom. The search is on for more brewing space, but the original spot looks to remain as the flagship.
“We are here for the foreseeable future, but the next thing for us is finding more production space we can grow into,” Wilson said. “We’re running out of space here.”
But one question remains, can RTP, a district that’s spent decades without nightlife become a place for dinner? Wilson said Fullsteam will always take the gamble.
“It’s just like when we took a gamble that people would come out on Tuesday nights in a quiet area in Durham that was mostly abandoned warehouses,” Wilson said. “They did and they still do. It’s a leap of faith, but those are the best kinds of jumps.”
This story was originally published October 8, 2021 at 5:55 AM.
CORRECTION: Fullsteam is Durham’s oldest brewery, but not its first, as an earlier version of this story stated. Weeping Radish was the city’s first brewery, but has since closed.
