“Is that a brewery?”
“When do they open?”

“Will they serve food?” “When do they open?”

If you have asked any of these questions, or been asked them and found yourself unable to provide an adequate answer, this story is for you.

On Tuesday afternoon, your special correspondent went down to the construction site on the edge of town to get the scoop on Ocracoke’s latest addition to the food+drink industry.

Everyone on site was scurrying around, building, brewing, inspecting, or cleaning, in order to get the brewery open as soon as possible. As brewmaster and owner Garick Kalna said, “Looking around you can see how close we are, but also how far away.”

The brews are already available in restaurants all over the island, with different styles at the different locales, “We want to have the beers fit the venue,” says Garick, and of course all the different options will be available at the brewery. “This place is going to be my playground.”

To go along with this spirit of experimentation Garick brought in Joseph Ramunni to run the kitchen – “Jacqui and I didn’t want to run a restaurant,” he said.

UPDATE 10/26/17: This article references the Cedar Bistro plan for food service at 1718 Brewery. Since it was written, the decision was made for Joseph and Cedar Bistro to part ways, amicably, with 1718 Brewery. 

Joseph, on the other hand, is stoked to have his own testing ground for new recipes. “Cedar Bistro will be serving a fresh spin on traditional recipes, with a focus on local ingredients, and have a rotating seasonal menu,” he said.

The day I went over, they had just received two 75lb smokers — “We’re gonna have house-made sausage as well as some world-class smoked fish dip,” Joseph told me.

Joseph's wife, Lauren Strohl, will be baking her Graceful Bakery bread and other treats in the kitchen as well. Joseph has also hired Eric Sanderson, who has been in the restaurant industry for 20 years and held several positions as executive chef at country clubs, to be Cedar Bistro's head chef. While developing the menu with Joseph, Eric has also been helping out on the construction side.

“I’ve enjoyed the summer vacation, but I’m excited to get to work,” he said.

“The concept behind the menu is to have food flights to match the beer flights,” Joseph said, “we’ll have a bunch of smaller plates that encourage sharing around.”

“You know a lot of breweries have food-trucks pull up outside,” said Garick, “this is like the food-truck crashed into the building.”

Customers will be able to order on their phones through an app, or at the bars, and then take their munchies and brews anywhere in the building, or out on the beautiful upstairs balcony to eat, drink, and be merry.

Garick started home-brewing when he was at college in Fort Collins, Colorado, the same town that New Belgium Brewing started, “Jeff [Lebesch] was brewing in his basement at that time, too,” Garick recalled.

He loved making beer so much that twenty-five years ago he moved to Ocracoke to start his own brewery. “That’s the whole reason I moved to Ocracoke, I opened the Coffee Shop as a 3-year stepping stone...then life happened.” (Garick and Jacqui opened Ocracoke Coffee Co. in 1996, got married, had two kids, and eventually sold the coffee shop to its current owners in 2012.) Garick is excited to be brewing again, and he says that Ocracoke water is “a joy to work with,” due to it’s reverse-osmosis method of purification. “It’s a blank slate, I don’t have to break the water down, I actually get to build the water quality to suit different beers,” he said.

If that statement makes no sense to you, you’re not alone, there’s a lot of chemistry involved, but essentially with Ocracoke water it’s easier to manipulate the PH to create a more or less acidic “mouth-feel” which correspond to different brews. If you still have questions about this, ask Garick about it once 1718 Brewery opens; he’s a font, or rather a tap, of information on the subject. He’s not alone either, he has a whole family (both biological and otherwise) of brewers, including, his wife Jacqui, sons Dalton and Mac, and friends Aaron, Brooke, and Mike.

Garick is also hyper-aware of how potentially wasteful a brewery can be, “A sloppy brewery uses 8 to 10 barrels of water for every barrel of beer produced; the tighter operations use 3 to 4 – obviously we’re trying to get it down to that lower end.” In addition to that, the used malt is going to be sold as chicken and horse feed, and also makes very good compost.

In keeping with their Reduce Reuse Recycle spirit, the bars and floors are all recycled wood from a barn in Ohio, over 100 years old, which lend a warmth and a solidity to the big open space. The walls are still the original wood from the Cafe Atlantic, which had to be pulled off to replace siding, and then reattached. Even the metal grille on the upstairs walkway is recycled from the cases that the brewing vats came in.

When asked the question that’s been on everyone’s lips, Garick says, “If I could, I would open tomorrow, but I’ve said so many open-dates, and I’ve been so wrong, we’re opening soon, very soon, everyone’s been doing great work here...You asked me what it takes to open a brewery—everything you’ve got.”