Birds Fly South

The pandemic confirmed what Lindsay and Shawn had long believed: The brewery should have a mission and core values, but it shouldn’t cling to beer styles or business practices just because those are the ways things have always been.

South Carolina’s Birds Fly South is introducing new, more approachable beers—while going from strength to strength on their highly regarded mixed-fermentation and farmhouse-inspired ales. As it turns out, IPA and saison have a lot to learn from each other.

BIRDS FLY SOUTH CELEBRATED its fifth anniversary this summer, which—according to cofounder Shawn Johnson— makes it “35 in beer years.” An avian analogy might be more apt than a canine one: After half a decade, Birds Fly South appears ready to spread its wings and take flight.

Shawn and the brewery’s other cofounder—his wife, Lindsay—have built a reputation for exquisite wood-aged farmhouse and mixed-fermentation beers. (Part of the brewery’s origin story is that Jolly Pumpkin’s Ron Jeffries appeared to Shawn in a dream.) However, over the past year, Birds Fly South started brewing IPAS and lagers, canning most of its beers instead of packaging them in its previously favored 750 ml green bottles.

Identity crisis? Not at all. The Johnsons think of their expanded focus as an evolution—a way to further the brewery’s mission of building community and drawing in new drinkers. This summer, the brewery’s two best sellers were an IPA and a Kölsch, and they were selling twice as much beer in cans out of their taproom as they had been in bottles.

“The green bottle is my heart,” Shawn says. “It’s what I think our wild beer should be in. But at the end of the day, our beer is really good, and if it means more people [who] may not ever touch our beer because it’s in a big bottle are now actually going to try Birds Fly South because it’s in a can, then that’s what we need to do.”

The broader offerings have been paying off. Evan Fatula, manager of the Greenville Beer Exchange bottle shop in Birds Fly South’s hometown, says that he expects the brewery to continue excelling on the funkier side. However, it’s now able to satisfy drinkers who are looking for something cleaner. “When they started five years ago, customers were like, ‘What’s the lightest beer you have from them?’” Fatula says. “It didn’t exist then, but they’ve managed to evolve with the times.”

That’s all according to plan, Lindsay says. The pandemic confirmed what she and Shawn had long believed: The brewery should have a mission and core values, but it shouldn’t cling to beer styles or business practices just because those are the ways things have always been. Flexibility would be the key to survival.

“It’s thinking of ourselves as able to shift, to keep up with the times,” she says. “We’re not here to just do one thing and become a dinosaur.”

Shawn agrees, but adds one important point: “Saison isn’t dead. It still lives!”

Slow Beer, Meet Clean Beer

The Johnsons haven’t erected any cognitive walls between their farmhouse beers, which they sometimes refer to as “slow beers,” and their clean beers. In fact, brewing the former has imparted lessons about brewing the latter, and vice versa.

Obsessed with yeast, Shawn is forever thinking about how to achieve perfect fermentation in all his beers. In that realm, slow beer taught him patience, which has turned out to be pretty useful when applied to clean beer, too.

“We allow our hazy IPAS to get a little more time under their belt before we