Almost every one of America’s roughly 8,000 breweries makes an IPA. The challenge to create IPAs that stand out from thousands of competitors is a daunting one for any brewery. It’s an even taller order for new breweries that don’t have the hops contracts, relationships with suppliers, or the industry cachet to source the most in-demand varietals.
Wilmington, North Carolina’s New Anthem Beer Project had a vision for its IPAs, though, and wasn’t about to let its early struggles to source Citra or Nelson Sauvin derail its plans. After just three and a half years, New Anthem’s outside-the-box approach to hops sets its IPAs well apart from the pack and proves an old adage true: Necessity is the mother of invention.
Cofounded by Bill Hunter and Brewer Aaron Skiles in 2016, the brewery was already used to working around roadblocks. Its brewpub’s building, formerly home to the last operating commercial livery stables in Wilmington, was built just after the turn of the century—and apparently its plumbing was, too. Four-inch cast-iron pipes had been dry for so long they disintegrated, leaving only holes in the brick walls and piles of iron flakes. Just a few years later, Hurricane Florence nearly sunk the brewery, and not with water or winds. Contractors were so tied up repairing or rebuilding damaged homes after the storm that construction on New Anthem’s 17,000-square-foot production brewery and taproom was delayed again and again, pushing back production and threatening to wreck business plans. But Skiles and Hunter recognized that getting neighbors out of tarp-covered homes was more important than their brewery, and they tightened belts enough to ride out the delay. That production facility finally opened in August 2019, adding about 5,000 barrels of annual capacity.