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With the pull of a tap handle Wednesday night, Savannah entered the ranks of brewery towns.
Southbound Brewing Co. debuted its first batch of beer, a Belgian wheat-style brew, during a gathering at World of Beer. The beer will be available to the general public starting today at World of Beer. Other local taverns, including The Distillery, Wild Wing Café, B&D Burgers and the Warehouse, will debut the beer over the next week.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Wiggins said. “It’s good to finally have product for people to taste rather than have to just describe it to them.”
The Scattered Sun Belgian Wit proved popular Wednesday. The initial half-barrel, which holds between 130 and 140 pints, was consumed in a little more than an hour — a World of Beer Savannah record. The fastest previous keg consumed lasted three hours.
The second of Southbound’s three initial beers, an India pale ale known as Hoplin’ IPA, is still in the brewing process but will be available next week. The third beer, the Iron Lion Pale Ale, is made with water from the IPA and will be available later in the month.
Southbound’s product is sold only on draft right now. The company has plans for bottling and canning the beer but not for at least another 10 months.
The beer is in demand. A representative for Southbound’s distributor, United, said many downtown Savannah clients have pre-ordered or requested the beer.
“The local bars are enthusiastic about having locally brewed beers, especially the downtown bars that see a lot of tourists,” United’s Scott Garner said. “And being a local brew, it will be a focus for us.”
United distributes several craft beers, including those made by Atlanta’s Sweetwater, Sierra Nevada and Rogue. The company recently hired a “craft-brew specialist” even, Garner said.
Southbound isn’t the first locally made craft beer, but it is the first to be brewed in Savannah outside a microbrewery setting, such as that at Moon River Brewing Co. on Bay Street. Another local craft-brew company, Coastal Empire Brewing, contracts out its production to a brewery in Alabama.
Southbound is two years and more than $2 million in the making. Mathews and Wiggins raised more than $700,000 in start-up costs from family and friends and purchased a 13,000-square-foot warehouse on East Lathrop last summer. They installed custom-made brewing equipment over the winter and secured a brewing license from Savannah City Council in April.
Mathews and Breard began brewing days later. A representative from the brewing equipment manufacturer flew to Savannah to help with the first batch, and it was packaged earlier this week. The initial run of Scattered Sun Belgian Wit was 60 barrels.
Southbound’s westside facility has the capacity to produce 3,000 kegs a year and they plan to brew five 1,000-gallon batches at a time. They will brew the white beer, a pale ale and an IPA year round and rotate two seasonal beers. A Belgian Tripel, brewed with triple the amount of malt, will be Southbound’s first seasonal beer.
Mathews and Wiggins have been friends since childhood. They first worked together as teenagers, serving as lifeguards at Statesboro’s Forest Heights Country Club, and were co-workers again as Georgia Tech students at Atlanta’s Sweetwater Brewing Co.
Their experiences at the popular craft brewery led to their wanting to start their own operation. Mathews went to brewing school following graduation from Georgia Tech then earned a master’s of business administration from Georgia Southern in 2011.
Mathews is Southbound’s brewmaster, Wiggins the company’s marketing director and Breard is a brewer. Breard and Mathews were classmates in brewing school.
ON THE WEB
Staff blogger and beer drinker Daddy Warbucks reviews Southbound Brewing’s Scattered Sun Belgian Wit at savannahnow.com/share/staff_blogs