https://www.foxcarolina.com/video/2022/10/28/west-greenville-growing-bar-scene/

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https://www.foxcarolina.com/video/2022/10/21/local-spots-that-offer-great-beer-experience/

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https://www.foxcarolina.com/video/2022/10/21/spooky-cocktail-jason-revenge/

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https://www.foxcarolina.com/video/2022/10/14/local-dog-friendly-bars/

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https://www.foxcarolina.com/video/2022/10/07/great-places-have-drink-outdoors/

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(If I figure out how to embed directly, I will!)

https://www.foxcarolina.com/video/2022/09/23/nightlife-recommendations-romantic-cocktail-date/

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For Tom Davis, the co-founder of Thomas Creek Brewery, his passion for craft beer started long before he ever brewed a drop of the stuff.

“It all began at a place called International Café way back when I was working at Ruby Tuesday’s in 1982,” he said. “On top of that, my dad was a beer can collector, so he would bring cans from all over the country. At that time there were no such things as craft beer, but there was still beer being put in cans from smaller breweries – bigger than what we would consider a craft brewery today –  we’re talking beers like Hamm’s and Falstaff.”

He tells me this as we’re sitting at the bar of the Thomas Creek Brewery tap room, outside of downtown Greenville, South Carolina on a Thursday afternoon. It’s early and there are only two other patrons, sitting against the far wall sipping beers and chatting. He was pulled from the kitchen when I got there and he was still wearing black sanitary gloves. His voice is low and measured and I can only hope my recorder picks it up over the sound of the men talking and the music playing.

“At Ruby Tuesday’s we would go downstairs to the café and we’d have beers from all over the world. Again, they weren’t craft beers per se, but you might be able to find Newcastle. At that point I don’t think Sierra Nevada had even started.”

(It had, brewing the first batch in November 1980, but would not have come close to making its way to South Carolina until some years later.)

Soon, Davis says, he learned from someone that you could actually make beers like the ones they were drinking at the café and the beer that did it, that set Davis on a path that he is still on some twenty years later, was Hofbrau Oktoberfest.

“I started looking more into homebrewing. I bought every book I could get my hands on. I got Malt and Brewing Science, the Siebel Institute of Technology’s brewing textbook, as a birthday present,” he said. “I read it cover to cover six times. After close to a year/ year and a half of reading, I built my system to the specs basically like we brew today. We do all-grain, liquid malt, filtered, and force-carbonated. I never used a kit, I put my first recipe together myself.”

Then, when then the brewpub laws changed in 1994, the owner of the restaurant Davis was working at asked him if he wanted to be involved putting a brewpub in the restaurant. Davis was interested, and he credits that question with what really set him down his path. The expense of putting a brewpub in, though, was more than the owner wanted and so Davis and his dad got together to fund the brewery portion of the brewpub.

“Thomas Creek started as a leasing company. We leased the equipment to the restaurant. At the same time, I was working and brewing there.”

Three and a half years later, the Davises decided they wanted to get out of the restaurant business and further the brewery project, converting what they were doing into a full-time brewery. They bought a defunct brewery out of western North Carolina, Woodhouse Brewing, and put the equipment in storage for a year while they got the facility Thomas Creek currently sits in ready.

“My dad’s next-door neighbor is a contractor and land-owner so he decided he would build this building for us to spec, and in doing so he built two more beside us and was leasing those out short term,” Davis says. “We gradually took those over and had two more buildings built.”

By the time Thomas Creek opened, the state’s first brewery (that is still running), Palmetto Brewing in Charleston, had been open for a few years. New South Brewing, in Myrtle Beach, also opened up around the same time. The only other brewery in the Greenville area, Reedy River Brewing, had opened and closed by the time Thomas Creek came around.

The decision of what to brew when they opened, Davis says, was easy. Being a bartender, he knew the trends of the predominantly Bud Lite/Miller Lite/ Coors Lite crowd. The first two beers their made were amber ales, one of which they still brew to this day (and it is still one of the top sellers). They also brewed a beer based on Pete’s Wicked they called Malty Grain which sold well originally but was discontinued after a while because “the name wasn’t catchy enough, I guess.”

(For Thomas Creek’s thirteenth anniversary, they brought Malty Grain back as a special release, but it has not been back since.)

Since those first batches, Thomas Creek has grown and grown, becoming one of the largest in the state (Palmetto is the largest), producing around 9750 barrels in 2017. (This number does not include the beers that Thomas Creek contracts for other breweries, such as Inlet Brewery, which accounts for around 40% of the brewery’s production.) As of this writing, Thomas Creek’s capacity is 23,000 barrels per year, and they were currently eyeing a possible sale to get the capital needed to do what they want to with the equipment they have. Currently, Thomas Creek brews nine beers, including collaborations with a local tap room, Community Tap, named Trifecta IPA, and a Pilsner licensed by local radio hosts The Rise Guys named P1 Pilsner (“The best beer on the planet”). You can get their beers across the state and in North Carolina or, if you’re flying out of Greenville-Spartanburg airport, you can stop in their Terminal A taproom for a pint or three before a flight.

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In the third installment of Books Over Drinks, M. Judson had bestselling author Mary Kay Andrews in town to promote her new book, The Homewreckers (St. Martin’s Press, 2022). From the author’s site:

Hattie Cavanaugh went to work helping clean up restored homes for Cavanaugh & Son Restorations at eighteen; married the boss’s son at twenty; and was only twenty-five when her husband, Hank, was killed in a motorcycle accident.

Broken hearted, but determined to continue the business of their dreams, she takes the life insurance money, buys a small house in a gentrifying neighborhood, flips it, then puts the money into her next project. But that house is a disaster and a money-loser, which rocks her confidence for years to come. Then, Hattie gets a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: star in a beach house renovation reality show called “The Homewreckers,” cast against a male lead who may be a love interest, or may be the ultimate antagonist. It’s a question of who will flip, and who will flop, and will Hattie ever get her happily-ever-after.

Filled with Mary Kay Andrews’s trademark wit, warmth, junking trips, and house porn, The Homewreckers is a summer beach delight.

With that in mind, I wanted something that would match the beach read-i-ness of the book (and all of Andrews’s books, from what I’ve gathered over time). Thus the Savannah Sunrise. It’s simple and light, and can be made lighter by cutting with club soda (or turned into a blended frozen drink on especially hot days).

Note: I’d also garnish with a mint leaf for color, but we were batching 80 cocktails and speed/efficiency was the name of the game.

Savannah Sunrise

• 2 oz Humboldt Distillery vodka
• 3 oz lemonade
• 1 oz peach puree
• .25 oz grenadine

Method: Add all ingredients to shaker with ice except grenadine. Shake well and pour into a Collins glass with ice. Drizzle grenadine on top. Garnish with a mint leaf.

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One of the things I realized, quickly after starting working with the fine, fine folks at M. Judson for Books Over Drinks was that I enjoyed the challenge of working with books by authors that I didn’t know. It’d be one thing to create a cocktail for a book by an author I’ve read everything from (in case you want a drink, TC Boyle, you just say the word), but getting to experience new books by different voices is surprisingly fun. For this round, I was tasked with coming up with a drink for Kimberly Brock’s The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare. From the author’s website:

The fate of the world is often driven by the curiosity of a girl.

What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke remains a mystery, but the women who descended from Eleanor Dare have long known the truth lies in what she left behind: a message carved onto a large stone and the contents of her treasured Commonplace Book. Brought from England on Eleanor’s fateful voyage to the New World, her book was passed down through the fifteen generations of daughters who followed as they came of age. Thirteen-year-old Alice had been next in line to receive it, but her mother’s tragic death fractured the unbroken legacy and the Dare Stone and the shadowy history recorded in the book faded into memory. Or so Alice hoped.

In the waning days of World War Two, Alice is a young widow and a mother herself when she is unexpectedly presented with her birthright: the deed to Evertell, her abandoned family home and the history she thought forgotten. Determined to sell the property and step into a future free of the past, Alice returns to Savannah with her own thirteen-year-old daughter, Penn, in tow. But when Penn’s curiosity over the lineage she never knew begins to unveil secrets from beneath every stone and bone and shell of the old house and Eleanor’s book is finally found, Alice is forced to reckon with the sacrifices made for love and the realities of their true inheritance as daughters of Eleanor Dare.

In this sweeping tale from award-winning author Kimberly Brock, the answers to a real-life mystery may be found in the pages of a story that was always waiting to be written.

The inspiration for this drink came from the beautiful cover, specifically the peacock feathers. To capture their essence, I used butterfly pea flower tea, which changes color when it interacts with acid. (You can read the science behind it at Bon Appétit.) From there, I added some rum and a few other ingredients, and voila!

The Peacock’s Feather

• 1.5 oz Flor de Caña 4 Extra Seco rum
• 3 oz butterfly pea flower tea
• 75 oz simple syrup
• .5 oz lemon juice
• .5 oz lime juice

Method: Add rum, tea, and simple syrup to a shaker with ice and shake well. Strain into a glass with ice. Top with lemon and lime juice and stir to see the color change.

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A few weeks ago, I was attending an event at my local indie bookstore, M. Judson Booksellers, to celebrate the launch of my friend Taylor Brown’s incredible new book Wingwalkers — y’all need to read it, by the way — when I had an idea. The event, Books Over Drinks, gives you a chance to meet the author, hear them read, get a copy of a book and a cocktail (or beer/wine if you prefer). That night, because of the book, we were having Paper Planes. It was a perfect pairing. After the event, I went up to the owner of the shop and offered up a proposition — I’d be happy to come up with the custom cocktails and serve them if she gives me a copy of the book to work with and allows me to be at the event. She agreed. Easiest win-win ever, in my opinion. Thankfully, M. Judson had a couple in the immediate future, so I got to work.

The first event I participated in was with Katherine Reay and her new book The London House (Harper Muse 2021). From the author’s site:

An uncovered family secret sets one woman on the journey of a lifetime through the history of Britain’s WWII spy network and glamorous 1930s Paris in an effort to understand her past, save her family, and claim her future.

One call could bring ruin to her family name.

Caroline Payne thinks it is just another day at work when she receives a call from Mat Hammond, a doctoral candidate, who has uncovered a dark and scandalous family secret: her British great-aunt defected to the Nazis to marry her German lover.

The letters tell a different story.

In search of answers, Caroline flies to London to search her grandmother’s diaries and her aunt’s letters. In them she discovers the “Waite girls” and a time of peace and luxury in the interwar years that is beyond anything she ever imagined. But the buoyant tone quickly changes as the sisters grow older, fall in love with the same man, and one leaves home to join the glamorous art scene of 1930s Paris—all amid the rumblings of war.

But history won’t let its secrets go so easily.

The more Caroline learns, the more questions she has. Together Caroline and Mat work to dig out answers, uncovering stories of spies and love, of family rifts, and of one fateful evening in 1941. Will the truth they uncover heal the decades-old family wounds, or will they tear the family even further apart?

From this, I knew I had to use gin, and I wanted to use other ingredients that evoked London. So, tea (naturally).

Note: This one is great hot, too.

Not So Foggy London Town

• 2 oz Bombay Sapphire gin
• 3 oz Cold English breakfast tea
• .5 oz lemon juice
• 2-3 dashes orange bitters

Method: Add all ingredients to a shaker with ice and shake well. Strain into a glass with ice and garnish with a lemon wedge.

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