We caught up with the brilliant and insightful David Thornton a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, David thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

Carolina Bauernhaus Brewery & Winery – Anderson & Greenville, SC Founded in 2015

Our fermentory was founded on the premise of creating a resilient local agricultural economy that could help create, grow with, and support craft beer, cider, mead, wine and other products with a regional identity. Regional identity, by means of terroir — the unique flavor of the earth on which our ingredients are grown, and historic foodways — has allowed us to revive some of the earliest grains and native fruits to produce fermented beverages and preserve seasonal harvests. With so much saturation in the brewing industry, this identity sets us apart.

Carolina – because our regional ingredient footprint covers the Carolinas. Our main two sustaining farms, the Reid Homestead, operated by my wife and myself, and Oconee Hop Farm which we co-manage, are situated in the foothills of Oconee County, South Carolina. While our two brewing locations and taprooms are in more urban environments, Greenville and Anderson, SC, we source from 30 farms across the Carolinas to produce beer, cider, mead, wine, pickles, jams and more.

Bauernhaus- German for farmhouse. This represents our philosophy of regionally grown, seasonal ingredients in all of our beers. We chose a German word for two reasons: Co-Founder/ Head of Brewing Operations, Keston Helfrich and I are of German and Czech/German descent. German brewers are often considered the scientific masters of beer.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?

My background is in sustainable building design, land use planning and biofuels engineering. At first glance, the entrance into brewing may not seem a logical transition, but hear me out. Core to my mission is creating a resilient agricultural economy through value added processing and principles of biosystems engineering. I like to say that “waste is a resource misused.” If you have waste, then you have an inefficient process. Once every output of a system becomes a sustainable input into another system, we have a well engineered, healthy and sustainable process. The “Sustainable Biorefinery” is a bio-based process utilizing agricultural inputs to produce value added products and co-products like food, fuel, medicine, renewable energy and soil amendments. Sounds a lot like a brewery to me!

While my career began in engineering sustainable biofuels from local agricultural and various industrial and municipal waste products, I continued my education at Clemson University in Biosystems Engineering where I worked as a research associate alongside a team of graduate researchers to develop sustainable processes for second generation biofuels. Part of the three legged stool of sustainability is profitability. We would joke that the ethanol we made was more valuable as vodka than fuel, and we should “drink the best and burn the rest.” This made a pretty good case for my PI and department to look into expanding our lab research into innovations in beverage fermentation.

Eventually, in 2012, I drummed up enough support to offer a new class at Clemson to prepare biosystems engineers for the brewing industry, hence, The Science of Beer was born! I had begun homebrewing in 2003 with my college roommates while an undergraduate at the University of Mary Washington. We had our garage split up, biodiesel processing on one side, beer brewing on the other side. We had the sense to rent a spot out of town where we had an acre to garden, make lots of noise at band practice and make compost to further improve our process and begin to dabble in growing our own feedstock. When I was offered the opportunity to teach the Science of Beer at Clemson, I was thrilled to be able to apply my expertise in biosystems engineering to my hobby of brewing. Soon we were publishing academic papers and presenting unique research on creating a regional identity for beer; sort of taking it back to its old world roots of brewing with what is regionally and seasonally available, and using the resources in the Clemson tool box to experiment with growing techniques, explore heirloom, landrace and southern hardy hybrids, and characterize regionally unique native yeast strains. All of which supported the Sustainable Biorefinery model. It was also pretty exciting stuff getting to work with some of the great food celebrities of the south like Dr. David Shields of University of South Carolina and the Carolina Golden Rice Foundation and Glenn Roberts, founder of Anson Mills.

The excitement continued to mount as a friend and former student, Even Skjervold, decided to partner with me to take one of the concepts from our lab into the commercial sector. We ended up winning the grand prize for the Clemson Enterprise Business Challenge competition, and won upwards of $25,000 to start our business, SouthYeast Labs, that would bioprospect and provide unique yeast strains for the brewing industry. I continued my work at Clemson, and as a hobby built the lab with Even. To open our production lab, we found we needed a brewers license. This was the pleasant pivot that gave birth to Carolina Bauernhaus Brewery.

I figured, if we need this license to produce yeast ( side note, the license is required because the co-product of growing yeast is producing alcohol ) we might as well use it to its full potential and make and sell beer as well, and perhaps grow this culture around the concept of The Sustainable Biorefinery. To found the brewery I partnered with the best brewer I knew: Keston. We first met at a homebrew competition, the Upstate Brewers Cup, held annually at Thomas Creek Brewery in Greenville. Keston and I enjoy brewing many styles of beer, but we have always been fond of the old world ales. Keston brought an ESB ( English Special Bitter) while I brought a Scottish Brown Ale. Keston soon became the president of our local homebrew club, where he educated all of us with his vast experience brewing many styles of beer and employing a variety of technique. Keston was always the first person I’d give a new strain of yeast to, and he’d brew a few beers with it that we would all taste and “characterize”. When I could get samples of the first grains produced and locally malted products, I’d get them to Keston. The beers we brewed paid homage to what we call European farmhouse brewing. Brewing beers from what is regionally and seasonally available, and in turn, creating unique beers with a special sense of time and place. Also, brewing with the seasons meant that we could use our vast knowledge of yeast to select strains to perform better with the the ambient temperature in each season. This is a unique attribute to our location in South Carolina where we have four seasons of farming and four seasons of fermenting. This further improved our energy balance as we do not have a liquid chiller or temperature controlled fermenters.

The most iconic of the farmhouse style beers is the Saison. The word means ” season ” in the French speaking region of Belgium called Wallonia. Our brewery opened its doors December, 2015. One of the first beers we brewed was a saison made from regionally grown barley, wheat and rye, fermented with 3 strains of native isolated yeast and a strain of locally sourced lactobacillus from SouthYeast Labs. The beer then aged in a local vineyard’s red wine barrels, and was refermented with copious amounts of tart, juicy prickly pears. This beer, Source Series Opuntia, went on to win a gold medal at the prestigious Great American Beer Festival a gold medal at the Best of Craft Beer Awards and many more accolades. It is brewed just once annually when the prickly pears, aka cactus figs, ripen. It was a huge affirmation to receive this acknowledgement so early in our brewing journey.

I eventually left Clemson in 2017 to run the brewery and farm ventures supporting it full time. In 2017 we added “Winery” to our name and began producing fruit wines and natural wines from local and foraged ingredients. In 2018 I partnered with Oconee Hop Farm founder, Rus Price, to replant his 2 acres of failing hops with the southern hardy varieties we’d been selecting for at Clemson. The hops are grown using regenerative techniques and drip irrigated with mountain spring water from one of two temperate rainforests in North America. The raised bed soil is amended annually with rich organic compost. These whole cone cascade and nugget hops are used to produce our flagship beer, Oconee Pale Ale, the first beer in recorded history to be brewed with entirely South Carolina grown ingredients, and my favorite beer to sip on.

In 2019 my wife Casey and I sold my farm property in Anderson, SC, in order to revive her family’s 4 generation farm in the fertile foothills of Walhalla, SC. We not only produce ingredients for our beers, ciders, meads and wines, but also for the menus at our brewery taprooms. My favorite menu item is the seasonal pickle board!

In 2020 we opened our second brewery and taproom location in the bustling arts district of Greenville, SC. The neighborhood is a diverse cultural hub, likened to Greenwich Village, so it has been dubbed The Village of West Greenville. Opening during the pandemic was tough, but we have survived and utilized the unforeseen circumstances to lean hard on our roots of sustainable agricultural systems and community, and we have gratefully been sustained. Prior to 2020 we distributed our products across 7 states. Today you can only get them in South Carolina at our two taproom locations and about 50 premium beverage accounts across the state.

Carolina Bauernhaus Brewery and Winery is a family owned small business run by myself, David Thornton, Co-Founder and Chief Flora Farmer, along with Co-Founder and Head of Brewery Operations Keston Helfrich and our wives Casey Certain and Shane Sisi. Casey and Shane bring some amazing perspective and company culture to our team that help cultivate a safe and inclusive environment at all of our locations. In addition to our award winning ales and ciders, we have some fantastic events. Our 3,000 sq ft covered beer garden at our Greenville location has hosted numerous concerts, food and beverage festivals, fashion shows, farm markets, a petting zoo… you name it. We love opening this space up to our community.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

When we started Carolina Bauernhaus Brewery in 2015, we were only the 21st brewery in the state of South Carolina and one of only 5 breweries in a 60 mile radius. Beer was so exciting and new then. Beer was the main attraction to the brewery. Being one of the smallest breweries in the Southeast, but one of the most awarded, really made us stand out, and we doubled our revenue each year for the first three years. But saturation came quickly. In 2019 we reached a plateau. Craft beer culture was changing. There were now over 9000 breweries in America and breweries started adding in features like arcades, music venues and niche restaurants to make their taprooms really stand out from the rustic industrial breweries that speckled most of the landscape. 7 years later, there are over 100 breweries in this state. The craft beer marketing and strategy have changed so many times I can’t recount them all. As new trends and styles like milkshake IPAs, Beer Slushies and Pastry Stouts come and go, we hope that by standing by our mission and our regionally grown seasonal roots, it will further solidify our identity as the premier Farm to Fermenter operation in South Carolina. We take pride in our beers telling the story of South Carolina’s agricultural history. In a time where the brewery bubble has now breached 12,000 breweries in America, we believe our authenticity sets us apart. That said, we have had to adapt. We now feature small restaurants with pub fare at both locations, and have some exciting plans in the works to expand them both. We also partnered with a local brinery, making naturally fermented pickles, krauts, kimchi, kombucha and kvass to further tell South Carolina’s farm to fermentor story. 7 years in, it still feels like our story is unfolding, but we continue to solidify our identity by staying true to our mission and community.

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

I don’t think our fundraising experience is particularly exciting, but perhaps it is inspiring. My partner Keston and I leaned heavily on our engineering and mechanical experience to design and build our own brewery from scratch. We bought raw steel, lots of fittings, some various tank segments, and hired some local machinists to assemble our masterpiece. We built our brewery to be heated by direct fire, meaning we wouldn’t need a boiler. We ferment specific beers each season to utilize the ambient temperatures instead of temperature controlling our tanks, so we didn’t need a chiller or a glycol system. Because we were committed to old world and sustainable approaches, we were able to build a brewery unlike any other in the Southeast, and we were able to do it for hundreds of thousands of dollars less than some of the other start ups at the time. This meant that it didn’t take much to get us rolling. We each ponied up about $15,000, and we ran a successful Indiegogo campaign that brought in another $12,000 to help furnish a rustic tasting room in our brewery.

We were very careful in selecting our opening location back in 2015. We searched all over the Upstate, but what really brought us to Anderson was their smart city planning and economic development. The city had some great plans for parks, bike trails and pedestrian traffic. Over the years we’ve been able to leverage our assets for low and no interest loans from the city that have helped finance our growth. These funds allowed us to put in a small commercial kitchen, expand our seating and the status of a Winery to our brand. These low and no interest loans have totaled somewhere around $80,000. Additionally, the growth of our taproom at our first location in Anderson made us an ideal investment opportunity when we decided to open a second location in the vibrant Village of West Greenville. We were able to leverage some friends and family investment to get an opportunity zone investment grant, all together totaling $300,000 to build out the brewery, taproom, kitchen and event space. Our conservative approach to taking on debt is what has kept us afloat since Covid hit in 2020. Sales went down, and fortunately we were able to survive some dire months because of our favorable debt position. There were several months where Keston and I as owner and operators couldn’t pay ourselves. Fortunately, we were able to take advantage of some stimulus opportunities available to us because our restaurant service meant that we were an essential business. This meant that we could retain employees during those lean months. As it turned out, our huge covered beer garden in Greenville was a blessing during covid. It was easy to social distance outside in a family friendly environment and enjoy award winning beer and local seasonal food. We are so grateful for the pieces that have fallen into place — some planned, and some surprises — that have sustained us and grown our brand and reputation. During the tough times we remind ourselves of our two core values 1) Beer is the vessel from which we serve our community 2) Remember, we’re in the happiness business!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.carolinabauernhaus.com
• Instagram: @carolinabauernhausand: @carolinabauernhausgvl
• Facebook: @carolinabauernhaus: @carolinabauernhausgvl
• Twitter: @carolinabauernhausales

Image Credits
Sarah E Photography Casey Certain