CALFKILLER BEER
The Sergio brothers inject a lot of creativity into what they make and seem to be less concerned with how well their brews adhere to “style.” A few examples:
J. Henry Original Mild
An English dark mild ale with notes of chocolate, coffee, caramel and tobacco. Nicely balanced and not as sweet as your average brown.
Grassroots Ale
An American pale with a little Belgian twist from the house yeast. Mildly fruity and a little grassy, with low hop bitterness. Balanced and refreshing.
Fire Roasted Coffee Stout
This stout features a firm jolt of coffee aroma and flavor without bitterness. The house-roasted java plays very well with the roasted malts.
Strawberry Harvest Trail Ale
A pale wheat with oats. This is a late spring version of the brothers’ granola-inspired Trail Ale, which is normally made with apples. A dash of vanilla and local strawberries are minor notes in this beer, which leans dry instead of sweet.
IF YOU GO
Calfkiller Brewing Co. 1839 Blue Springs Road, Sparta, Tenn. 931-739-2337, calfkillerbeer.com.
Sparta is about 90 miles north of Chattanooga, off scenic Highway 111.
Wine, Shine and Stein
This monthly tour offered by DelMonaco Winery in Baxter, Tenn., takes guests to Calfkiller Brewing and Short Mountain Distillery of Woodbury, Tenn. The daylong excursion is $35 per person and advance reservations are required. July’s tour is sold out; the next one is Aug. 15. 931-858-1177.
DelMonaco Winery & Vineyards. 600 Lance Drive, Baxter, Tenn. delmonacowinery.com.
Two Chattanooga retailers carry Calfkiller beer:
Heaven & Ale. 304 Cherokee Blvd., Chattanooga. 423-602-8286, heaven-and-ale.com.
Sigler's Craft Beer & Cigars. 1309 Panorama Drive #117, Chattanooga. 423-485-3271, siglerscraftbeerandcigars.com.
ADVENTURE IN WHITE COUNTY
Part of the Upper Cumberland region, White County’s biggest attractions are its natural ones.
Burgess Falls State Park. Four waterfalls, one of which plunges more than 130 feet into a gorge, are the highlight of this day-use park. Activities include hiking and fishing. 4000 Burgess Falls Drive, Sparta,Tenn. 931-432-5312, tnstateparks.com/parks/about/burgess-falls.
Rock Island State Park. This 883-acre park is a favorite of freestyle kayakers; national and international paddling events have been held on the Caney Fork River here. Park amenities include cabins and a campground with Wi-Fi accessibility. 82 Beach Road, Rock Island, Tenn. 1-800-713-6065, tnstateparks.com/parks/about/rock-island.
Virgin Falls. This 1,157-acre wilderness area is home to multiple waterfalls, caves and sinkholes. Activities include hiking and backcountry camping. Scott's Gulf Road, Sparta, Tenn. www.state.tn.us/environment/natural-areas/natural-areas/virgin.
My GPS failed me at least twice.
Once I got back on track, I found myself downtown in the quaint county seat of Sparta, Tenn.
I wasn’t there long. One turn and I was quickly working my way down a road along the narrow, snaking Calfkiller River — as still as muddy-green glass and nestled between banks full of trees.
Another turn and the scenery was all rolling hills and farms. Just ahead on the left, a red building.
The brewery.
Conventional wisdom holds that breweries must be in the thick of the action, in a city, or at least a suburb, where they can build on a ready-made customer base.
But this is farmland, about a 90-minute drive from each of the region’s three cities: Nashville, Knoxville and Chattanooga. Almost precisely in the middle of nowhere.
And there’s more. Back in 2006, when brothers Don and Dave Sergio started Calfkiller Brewing Co., Sparta — in fact, all of White County — was dry.
It would take another four years and some legal wrangling before Calfkiller was able to sell its brews.
The Sergios know they have a great story. And the eastern half of Tennessee is discovering that they also make great beer.
State law prevents them from selling beer that is higher than 6.3 percent alcohol by volume, so the Sergio brothers strive to make brews that are complex, with layers of flavors, yet easy enough on the palate for a craft-beer newbie to enjoy. They describe it as “unparalleled drinkability paradoxically balanced by uncompromised complexity.”
“We work well through adversity,” Dave Sergio said. “Having those limitations is kind of fun for us. It’s like, ‘How much flavor can we put into a beer that’s 5.6 percent alcohol?’ It’s one of the things we like to goof around with.”
The brothers use the same mildly fruity Belgian yeast strain for their entire lineup of draft-only brews, which range from pales and wheats to browns and ambers to porters and stouts.
They produce about 1,500 barrels of their high-demand beer a year on a seven-barrel system, which is small by microbrewery standards. They are working on adding another fermenter and brite tank, which will increase capacity by about 30 percent, partly because it will enable them to brew five days a week without breaks.
In its former life, the red building that serves as tasting room and brewhouse was a much smaller horse barn. The resourceful Sergios, who are also carpenters, enlarged, renovated and refurbished the structure almost entirely out of recycled building materials.
Likewise, their brewing system was assembled from second-hand dairy and brewing equipment. Dave Sergio said it closely resembles their original home-brew set-up, but on a larger scale.
Calfkiller lab technician Alex von Seitz said the unique qualities of the hand-built system affect the beer itself.
“Beer changes flavors by the vessels it’s in,” he said, comparing the Sergios’ system with ready-made ones that other breweries use. “They change the geometry of their beer by doing all that on their own.”
Von Seitz, who works in an oncology unit in a hospital full-time and helps the Sergios test for quality control, said Don Sergio’s attention to detail is remarkable.
“There’s nights I’ll come by late to get a sample and he’ll be sitting there listening to the bubbles from a fermenter to make sure the fermentation is just the way it should be. And he knows the sound, because he’s that intimate with the beer.”
Sparta and White County aren’t dry anymore. Of its 100 or so accounts, Calfkiller beer can be found locally at three restaurants and one gas station that fills growlers.
Marvin Bullock, president of the Sparta-White County Chamber of Commerce, said he and other locals make dining choices based on whether a restaurant serves Calfkiller.
Bullock estimated the brewery attracts more tourists to the county than any other business, and its value goes beyond that.
“In addition to attracting tourists, the Sergios are quite generous to community events and supporting the county and city in other ways — I don’t know of a way to assign a value to that benevolence other than to say it’s priceless,” he said.
The tasting room at Calfkiller is open to visitors from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays, but tours aren’t offered then because the brewery is in production mode. Free tours are available on Saturdays, but space is limited. Visitors must sign up on the brewery’s website to reserve a spot.
“It’s like you’re coming into somebody’s house to talk about beer,” Dave Sergio said. “It just happens that our house has a brewery in it.”
Calfkiller cannot sell beer on-site. The brewery offers free samples in the tasting room weekdays and during Saturday tours. Donations are welcome, and plenty of merchandise, from T-shirts to leather growler holders, is available for purchase.
The brewery is able to self-distribute in Tennessee through its other company, Grassroots Distributing. This has been a large factor in the Sergios’ success, since it allows them to reinvest most of the money generated by sales and enables them to deliver fresh beer straight to retailers.
So, the brewery in the middle of nowhere is really in the middle of everywhere. Calfkiller’s location is perfectly positioned for distributing to the three big cities in the region and smaller municipalities like Murfreesboro and Crossville.
“My wife and I distribute Chattanooga,” Dave Sergio said. “We’ll brew early one day and then Don will stay and do stuff around here and keg and wash kegs and things like that. And my wife and I will load up and go to Chattanooga and divvy up all the beer around and go and have dinner and come home.”
Chattanooga is the closest city to Atlanta where Calfkiller is distributed. It’s sold by two retailers there — Heaven & Ale and Sigler’s Craft Beer and Cigars.
The Sergios are looking beyond their next small expansion. They own an old water-treatment plant near downtown Sparta that they plan to turn into a brewpub in five years or so. It will be a family-friendly spot to grab a bite and a pint and take a growler filled to go.
It’s right on the river and Dave Sergio said they will be able to rent canoes to folks who want to paddle down the Calfkiller and back.
“Then Don and I can write a book on how beer saved Sparta,” he said, laughing.
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