Mother superior: a homegrown beer business buoys Kinston's burgeoning foodie reputation.

• Author: Williams, Allison

Trent Mooring and Stephen Hill, surely the most compatible in-laws east of Interstate 95, were sharing a Red-Eye, a combination of craft beer and homemade tomato juice, when they hatched the idea of a brewery in their hometown.

Kinston as a food-and-drink destination seems as natural now as ... tomato juice and beer? But it might have been laughable then, in 2008. True, Vivian Howard had already opened the brewery's more famous neighbor, Chef & the Farmer, about a block away, but A Chefs Life, the PBS television show that put the nationally celebrated restaurant on the map, was five years into the future. Tobacco was once king here; now, Southern food reigns.

Mother Earth these days is a taproom, trading post, beer garden and working brewery--much of it powered by solar energy--encompassing most of a city block in downtown Kinston. Its size would be a stretch even in larger cities, but such a venture in a town shy of 22,000 people in far-flung eastern North Carolina could be considered downright adventurous.

Staying true to your roots, it turns out, pays off.

Mother Earth Brewing expects to double revenue next year with the expansion of a sister business, a distillery called Mother Earth Spirits, and the opening of the Mother Earth Motor Lodge. The distillery is on track to sell 1,346 cases this year, while the brewery is expected to produce 7,000 barrels, the magic number that put the brewery into profitability last year. It's far smaller than the 50,000-barrel capacity of the state's biggest craft brewer and Business North Carolina's 2014 Small Business of the Year, Highland Brewing in Asheville, but Mooring and Hill have never been concerned about how fast or how high they can fly. Making the best beer and improving their comer of Kinston are what motivates them. "We're just having a bunch of fun," Hill says.

After a month piloting a delivery van--and one trip to Raleigh with kegs in the trunk of Hill's 1970s Lincoln limo--he and Mooring hired a distributor. "It's two different animals," Mooring says. "We're either a brewery or a distributor."

Mother Earth beer can be found in only two states: Georgia and North Carolina, where the brand is in the top three of Charlotte-based Tryon Distributing's most popular beers. Mother Earth has captured a World Beer Cup medal, 17 medals at the U.S. Open Beer Championship and two awards at the Great American Beer Festival. Daniel Hartis, a Charlotte writer for All About Beer magazine, says Mother...