Nearly two decades ago, as he took up a job as an agricultural consultant in Manteo, NC, Uli Bennewitz was persuaded by his brother back in Bavaria that a restaurant that brewed its own beer—a brewpub—would be a sure winner in his new home in America. The brewing equipment was en route to North Carolina before this newcomer discovered two unfortunate legal obstacles: brewpubs were illegal in North Carolina, and Manteo itself was located in a dry county.
Bennewitz managed to get brewpubs legalized in North Carolina (without the aid of a lobbyist, he’s proud to tell you), navigated the local dry laws, and in 1986 opened the Weeping Radish, named for the large Bavarian radishes that accompany a good beer back in Munich.
Now, the new Weeping Radish Farm Brewery in Currituck integrates all of Bennewitz’ diverse passions about food, health and community in one enterprise.
Uli Bennewitz: In 1986, I started the brewery. Like so many times in my life, I did not do my homework, so I bought the brewery without knowing what the legalities were.
Specifically, that what you were about to do was not legal.
This is correct. I found myself in a dry county with an illegal project.
Your brother in Bavaria thought this was a great idea.
Yes, he had a friend with a small brewery in Bavaria, and it wasn’t profitable. In Bavaria it’s very tough to do small brewpubs because the average quality of the beer is so high. Every little town has a brewery anyway, so the charm of a brewpub is much less obvious than it is in this country. In 1986, when we had so few breweries in this country, it made far more sense to open something here.
And you set out to at that point to create a proper Bavarian beer garden here.
Again, I didn’t do my homework. All I would have had to do is look in the phonebook under German or Bavarian restaurants. I would have realized that nobody had such a thing and there might have been a good reason—which was that probably nobody wanted one. But it took me a while to figure that out.
A couple of years ago, you speculated that one problem beer has in North Carolina—that wine has overcome—is that it hasn’t stressed its connection to agriculture.
True. If you look at wine in North Carolina, a brewer is absolutely envious. The Department of Agriculture supplies wineries with funds, billboards, brochures; they even have a right for every winery to have an interstate signpost, with their own logo. Can you imagine a brewery with a signpost on the interstate? Wow.
The reason I passed this brewpub law so easily—well, fairly easily—was because the Biltmore got the wine law passed in ‘84. Before that, the winery was not allowed to sell wine on premises. The Biltmore had lots of money and political connections, so they passed the wine law [allowing producers to sell wine]. My strategy with the ABC [Alcohol Beverage Control] was, whatever’s good for wine is good for beer. Without Biltmore, there wouldn’t have been a brewpub law in ‘86, that’s for sure.
In fact, wine and beer, we are both craft industries, we are very similar, we both go back thousands of years.
Your latest project brings all of this full circle.
It really does. Being in the farming business, which I still am, and the beer business, I saw more and more parallels The reason why microbrewed beer is so much better than conventional beer—it’s an issue of the food chain.
The best beer you ever see is perhaps at Oktoberfest in Munich. They make it, they age it for six months, they haul it across town and serve it in the beer tents they same day they tap it from the brewery. You’d have to be brain dead not to serve decent beer, if you do it like that.
This is the issue of the food chain. If you can control the distribution, and the temperature and the pressure from the brewery to the tent all in the same day, you get quality.
Small-scale farming is the same way. The farmers’ markets are superior in their products. Why? Because the farmer digs the vegetables the night before and hauls it to the farmers’ market.
There is a direct parallel. Both are perishable commodities that decrease in quality over time. And both—if they are consumed in moderation—are health beneficial.
