Author: Sam

Thomas Creek Brewery: The First Greenville Brewery

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.