Todd Steven Boera is at the helm of his 3.5-barrel brewhouse mashing in the 2016 batch of Fonta Flora Brewery’s Urban Monk Imperial Stout. He’s working with his new assistant brewer, Adam Glover, the first employee he has hired since opening in 2013. “Up until two weeks ago, I was doing all the brewing, kegging, cleaning, barrel aging, fruiting...everything,” says Boera. “A lot of people assume we have a much larger system with the variety of beers that we’re making.”
Imperial stout is not a beer style commonly associated with Fonta Flora (Morganton, North Carolina) nor is the flagship West Coast–style Hop Beard IPA, despite their popularity. “Though we try to keep all kinds of beer styles flowing, we actually have a strong saison focus here,” Boera says, “mainly because the whole point of that style was a farmer’s kitchen-sink beer. Whatever Belgian farmhouse brewers had on their farms were the ingredients used to brew the style.”
Boera’s concept is greatly influenced by his travels in Europe after college, right around the time that homebrewing took over his life. “I was already really interested in saisons, spontaneously fermented beers, and sours in general,” he remembers. “I immersed myself in a lot of Belgian and French beer culture while I was out there, and almost immediately after coming back from traveling, I landed my first professional brewing job.”