Brewery brings craft beer to area

Greg Camps hobby of making beer at home has transformed into a weekend business thats been gaining attention around the area since he and a friend opened a tasting room at a local winery almost a month ago.

Deslogetown Brewerys Ale House makes its home at St. Francois Winery, off Highway 32, a couple of miles outside Bismarck. Camp, whose main job is Desloge city administrator, said his new venture was all made possible by winery owner Ed Daugherty.

Hes been in business there since 2005, Camp said. Ed has a full-blown nursery and the vineyard producing several different varieties of wine. Its all locally grown, produced and sold there at St. Francois Winery. When it comes to fermenting things, Eds the man.

Camp said his interest in brewing beer came from an unexpected source.

This is all my wife Kristies fault, he said with a laugh. We have an affection for all different types of beer and its been one of those things that weve been able to explore together by trying the 100 different styles and different flavor profiles that are available out there.

Back in Christmas 2008, she bought me a homebrew kit. We just started messing around with it. You get into it and your first recipe, the first batch that you make is something that is bought and pre-packaged. Its an awful lot of fun. You get into the science of brewing. You get into the different ways that you can make beer.

Thats when Camp said Daugherty entered the picture.

We got to talking to Ed about it and he had been dabbling in homebrewing, too, he said. So, a few years ago we just started making beer together. We would get together on a Saturday or Sunday and decided a week or so in advance we were going to make this style or that style of beer. A lot of those would be recipes that I had started working on when I first started brewing in early, early January of 2009."

Camp said that in the natural process of having fun brewing together and sharing their beers with friends, things began to get a little more serious.

Back last spring, Kristie and I were starting to say, Lets do this for real. Lets find a place. Lets get our licensing and our permits squared away. Its just going to be a hobby on the weekend.

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Brewery brings craft beer to area