Kinston, NC- Mother Earth Brewing Company and The Chef and the Farmer

April 27, 2013

Wednesday night the rain started again. Thursday morning was overcast and we decided to move up the Neuse River 40+ miles to a new campground. Greg found a listing for the Neuseway Nature Park, a county park in middle-of-nowhere Kinston, North Carolina. It's $12 a night for full hook-ups and free wifi. Wow! Cheap, what's the catch? There is only one bathroom (one toilet for each gender) for the whole campground and nature center/park/picnic grounds, and the shower is in it. So we are going to try out the RV shower again, instead of locking everyone in the whole park out of the only bathroom for our showers! Otherwise, we have a nice site across from the river and in the trees. Every hour from across the river the church bells chime and several times a day they also chime hymns. 

When we arrived, we discovered that we had to go into the Nature Center to register. Crazy little rural zoo of sorts. There were cages with snakes everywhere. Some indigenous, some not. They keep the local taxidermist busy. There are stuffed critters everywhere. Same as the snakes. Some local, some not. Then there are live critters as well. Oliver the tropical bird has the only open fronted exhibit, so I'm guessing his wings are clipped. According to his sign, he craves attention, (duh...the bird is bored!), and likes you to sing “Happy Birthday” to him. I declined, but did talk to him a bit. There was a tankful of crabs, and several exhibits of furry things. The Prairie Dog broke my heart. He was all alone and came over and scratched the plexiglass with, I swear a look of utter desperation and loneliness on his face. He had no colony, just a lone animal. At that point I told Greg we had to leave the building. I couldn't stand to be there. I won't go on about small zoos and animal rights issues. Suffice it to say, I was concerned.

Friday morning, with sunshine again (these coastal clouds that drift in and spit rain are driving me crazy!), Greg walked the highway bridge over the Neuse River to Kinston. He came back with an appointment- a 3 pm tour of the Mother Earth Brewery across the river from us. Greg had sampled their Sisters of the Moon IPA at a restaurant in Ocracoke. They just started three years ago and only distribute in North Carolina, Georgia, and DC. We forgot that the brewery was in Kinston, because we hadn't expected to find ourselves here!

So about 2:30 we wandered over to Kinston with a plan to tour the brewery, go to their Taproom that opened at 4 pm, and then find a place for dinner. All within reasonable walking distance of the campground. We toured the brewery with a young hipster couple from Raleigh. The young man was a bartender and serves the beer where he works. Mother Earth Brewery is the only LEED gold certified brewery in the country. They bought up a block of old buildings in the dying downtown of Kinston and re-habbed them using green techniques. Everything they could they reused; floorboards, etc. Then they installed solar panels, side and rooftop gardens for vegetables and hops, and a huge rainwater collection tank. They salvaged an old local playground slide and installed it to slide down from the corporate offices upstairs. A bunch of the employees skateboard and bike to work.

Tank Room

Fermentation Tanks

Finishing Tanks

Bottling Machine

Employee Skateboard Parking

Recycled Playground Slide and Fire Escape

Distilling Equipment

Barrels for Aging Special Fruit Beers

Distilling Experiments in Glass Jugs

The owner is originally from Kinston and currently runs a 8,000 employee company. The brewery is his passion. He has also started nearby, a music venue/jazz club, and a restaurant is getting ready to open, that will use the food grown in the brewery gardens. In addition to the beer, and the specialty beers they brew, that have a higher alcohol content and are seasonally produced with fruit and hops, they are experimenting in order to start a distillery on the premises. It will produce gin, rum, grappa, and whatever else they get interested in. In the building is The Taproom which serves their products. It has a trendy, big city vibe, and an adjoining beer garden for warmer weather.

They have a mission to do brew as sustainably as possible. When they can, for the type of beer being brewed, they use hops from the US, but certain types of beer, because of their definition have to use imported hops. In order to compete in contests, they need to use the proper ingredients for that category of beer. Their spent hops go to local farmers for their cattle. Most of their beer is bottled, but they are transitioning to cans. In a can the beer is not exposed to light, so it stays fresh longer. Also, cans can be recycled everywhere, but bottles are not. Previously, they had to wait for a beer to become more popular in order to justify the cost of having a lot of cans printed with the label. Now they have a machine that will put a sleeve on the can, so that they can switch out types easily. They have just found a sleeve that is biodegradable, so they will be starting to use cans more.

Long story short, the tour was interesting, but we finished up before the Taproom opened, so we walked around the deserted downtown. Not much else around, typical of a small town that has lost most of it's downtown retail. We had already discovered that there was only one restaurant close by, so we walked over to see if we could make reservations. We looked up The Chef and The Farmer on line and decided it looked interesting, but a little pricey, but we knew we wanted dinner right after sampling beers and not after a walk back to the rig, so we got a reservation.

We went back to the Taproom as a few locals wandered in. We got a chance to sample and then try several of their beers. We tried the Dark Cloud Munich-Style Dunkel Lager, that had just won a bronze medal at a big competition, 2012 and 2013 Tripel Overhead Barrel-aged Belgian Tripel, Second Wind Pale Ale, and Nitro Batch No. 533 German Pale Ale. Whew! Time for dinner!

Tap Room

Beer Garden

LEED Gold Award

The Chef and The Farmer turned out to be one of the best meals we have ever had! It beat out Volt back home in Frederick. (Volt is owned by the Voltaggio brother who lost first place to his other brother on Top Chef.) The chef/owner is a two time finalist in the James Beard competitions, and chose to open up a restaurant in Kinston??? She sources local food and provides a very upscale dining experience. Of course, we came wandering in dressed in jeans, walking shoes and Greg had on his maroon t-shirt with a chemical representaion of capsicum (hot peppers) on it! The guy who gave us the tour of the brewery assured us we were dressed fine for Eastern Carolina!

After an hour and a half at the Taproom, we decided to pass on drinks before dinner, (seriously...we didn't have a designated walker). Greg visited the restroom first and informed me that they had washcloths to dry your hands with and he had just washed his face. What??? He said no one else was in there and the sunscreen was grimey, so, I can't take him anywhere. We got a good laugh out of it. Traveling is really loosening Greg up...good! Back to the meal- we started with a fresh asparagus salad. Perfect choice since the asparagus have just come up here. Then Greg had the New York strip steak and I had the Pork Surprise. The chef sources a local pig and makes bacon, sausages and roasts out of it. The dish had all of them in it with an amazing sauce tasting of coriander, and very small dumplings and thin strips of greens. We couldn't resist the in house made deserts. Greg had a sort of pecan pie/cake with chocolate and bourbon ice cream with a citrus sauce, and I had a lemon coconut meringue cake with fresh picked first of the season strawberries. Back to my diet today, but the splurge was SO worth it. We waddled back to the rig for the night.

Nicer than Campground Bathroom!

Outdoor Herb Garden

Today, the sun is still shining. We are keeping our fingers crossed! Greg walked back to town to the hardware store. He needed a hardware fix. Gotta' keep him happy. On the way he found a farmer's market, so we now have fresh picked spinach, turnip greens, small red onions, and...asparagus!!! It really is only good if it has just been picked, and this is, so I am very excited to cook it for dinner. It won't be prepared like last night's, but after that meal, simple is better!

We have two more nights here, and then I think we'll start to head north. (Yay!!!!!)