Project Overview

Carolina Brewery has partnered with Suora over the years to showcase the many incredible aspects of its brewery and restaurant business and share the story of how it came to be one of the most popular places to go to in the Triangle area.

Carolina Brewery is more than just a brewery: instead, it’s a lifestyle, and unlike many others, the hands behind its hops belong to women.

Client

One summer, a college sophomore from North Carolina’s Outer Banks, traveled through Europe and fell deeply in love. With beer. Carolina Brewery’s Chapel Hill location, founded in 1995, is the oldest operating craft brewery in the Triangle. 

This was before ‘craft beer’ was a thing. For Robert Poitras, though, the traditional, artisanal brewing techniques became an obsession. In 1995, with the ink barely dry on his UNC-Chapel Hill business degree, Robert set out to build his own brewery.

Since those humble beginnings, the Triangle’s oldest continuously-operating brewery has evolved and thrived. Robert teamed up with fellow Tarheel Allen Corey, CEO of SquareOne Holding Company, and the former CEO of Gordon Biersch and Craftworks. Together, they have built a truly world-class brewery. Carolina Brewery’s pursuit of flavor over hype has won hearts on both sides of the Atlantic—consistently earning top honors at the Great American Beer Festival, the World Beer Championships, and other premier competitions. 

They proudly carry on our tradition of excellence with SquareOne’s Brewmaster, Becky Hammond, a rising craft beer star and Clemson graduate.  Combining time-honored methods with new approaches, Carolina Brewery serves up iconic varieties like our Sky Blue Kölsch, Copperline Amber Ale, American IPA, Costero Mexican Lager, and a growing family of specialty seasonal releases. 

Today, Carolina Brewery is where friends gather around Southern cooking and crisp, delicious beers that celebrate the Carolina Life, 16 ounces at a time. They’re a true-blue companion to football tailgaters, paddle boarders, surfers, anglers, kayakers, mountain bikers, and anyone who loves the Carolinas as they do.

Audience

The beautiful thing about beer, is that it leaves no one behind, and on the contrary, brings people together. The Carolina Brewery restaurant and brewery serve people of backgrounds and demographics throughout the Triangle and the greater North Carolina area.

Approach

From the brewing vats at Carolina Brewery to a quiet beach in the Outer Banks, this project took us across North Carolina and into the lives of the people behind the beer. 

Our team headed out to the Outer Banks to film a series of video spots that would display Poitras’ love for the beach and how that lifestyle reflected in his brewery’s product. Essential for the video was a considerable number of extras—it took a tricky bit of coordination to find enough people who would hang out on a beach for a few hours, drink some beer, and enjoy the moment (as if anyone would say no to that). Fortunately, both Tristan and Robert have a lot of friends in the Outer Banks from their time at Real Watersports. 

Within no time, we made it work, and we hit the beach with a group of people, some Carolina Brewery products & gear, and plenty of beer. Of particular fun was diving into the ocean with our camera gear in our new water housing to get shots of beer on surfboards. We enjoyed the conditions that made filming not just efficient but pleasurable. As a team, we spent the weekend in the Outer Banks filming, learning to surf, and enjoying the product of Carolina Brewery. 

Poitras is not just a beach enthusiast. He’s a family man, a growing brand owner, and a local invested in his community. We styled the video “Maker’s Mark” as a mini-documentary, offering a slice of life shot into his life beyond the brewery and as a resident of Chapel Hill. 

Internally, part of what sets Carolina Brewery apart from others is its brewmaster: Becky Hammond, a woman who has long valued the intersection of art and science and views her craft as just that. Whether handling the mechanics behind the production or testing the beer’s quality, Hammond puts care into the popular and award-winning varieties that make the brewery: Sky Blue, Copperline, and Carolina Honey, to name a few. 

This project was an opportunity to continue improving our methods of planning out shots to the second. It also offered us the chance to work with new technology—namely, the water housing gear and 4K production quality for the Poitras’ home life video. As our partnership with the Looma Project develops, we’re excited to continue creating stories and appreciating each moment—whether there’s a CB Sky Blue in our hands or not.