Americana Beer Company is proud to introduce our latest brew, The Granddaddy Carolina Gold Rice Lager. We brewed this beer with Carolina Gold Rice from our friends on the coast at Tidewater Grain Company. Get it on tap Friday, February 9, starting at 2 pm. At 5.2% ABV and 10 IBU, it’s the perfect beer for the upcoming warmer spring days.

You may ask yourself, “It’s rice, so what?” Well, this heirloom rice is the oldest medium-grain rice grown in America, dating back to 1686. With its rich, nutty flavor and our favorite Pilsner malt from our friends at Carolina Malt House, this beer will become the ‘granddaddy’ of crushable beers this Spring and Summer seasons.

To give you a quick history lesson, Carolina Gold is the great granddaddy of most of the rice grown in America today. Its American roots trace back to the late 1680s in the port of Charleston, SC. The story goes that the captain of a merchant ship from Madagascar used his cargo of rice seed to pay for much-needed ship repairs.
The seed landed in the hands of an ambitious farmer named Dr. Henry Woodward. He planted the first rice crop in the Americas, and it flourished. Soon, rice was the cash crop. Production took over the South Carolina lowlands. Rice plantations began moving north into the coastal plain known as the Tidewater region. This stretch of coastal land went from Eastern North Carolina up into Virginia.

Rice farming in the Carolinas thrived for nearly 200 years due to the region’s fertile soil, river waters to flood the plain, and nearby coastal ports to facilitate easy distribution to England and Europe.

With the end of the Civil War, market pressures in the early 1900s, a series of destructive hurricanes, and the boom of commodity farming all combined to end rice farming in North Carolina effectively. That is until now! The Tidewater Grain Company is proud to announce that after a 120-year hiatus, Carolina Gold Rice production is back in Eastern North Carolina, and we’re honored to bring this authentic taste of the Carolinas to Monroe and Union County, NC.