Duck Sauce, Duke’s Mayo, & Durham – Catching Up With DSSOLVR

Even Vince Tursi and Mike Semenec, co-founders of one of North Carolina’s most highly stylized and sought-after breweries, DSSOLVR, probably didn’t imagine mayonnaise and Chinese take-out as inspirational fodder for beer. Between the occasional $.50 shots of Bushmills and never-ending sales of macro half barrels at the Downtown Boston “Packy” store that employed them over a decade ago, this darling duo experienced a budding friendship based in part on a shared love for well-made beer.

Fresh off convincing a naive local landlord that he (and eleven other friends, no big deal) would make better tenants than the local ne’er-do-well fraternity occupying a nearby apartment complex, Tursi soon started making beer at his new digs under the guise that it could be produced “cheaper and better” than what was available on shelves. Like many of us who partook in homebrewing, his inaugural yield left plenty to be desired, particularly when weighed against the Weihenstephans and other American craft beers he had been imbibing.

“Literally, every possible off-flavor and flaw you could imagine,” Tursi says, describing his first batch. “But it was a ‘black box’ situation for me. If there’s a solution, you can work your way through the process to achieve what you want, and fermentation is very much like that. It’s kind of open-ended and combines a lot of process and ingredient-oriented instruction with creativity, and that portion of it really appealed to me.”

Semenec, busy finishing his design degree while juggling the demands of the aforementioned retail job, joined in on the homebrewing fun by purchasing the ever-popular Mr. Beer Kit. For those not familiar, this adjunct-driven, one-stop-fermentation shop was ubiquitous amongst homebrewers at the time. Touted as an all-in-one brewery for the house, it provided minimal hassle and a less-than-desirable chance at producing beer appropriate to style.

“It tasted like plastic,” Semenec recounts. “The plastic fermentation tank always found a way to leech into the flavor of the beer.” However, during this exploratory endeavor, one of Semenec’s professors timely posited that the most successful applications of design often manifest when the designer combines learned knowledge with an area of passion.

Buoyed by an appreciation for the craft and between hocking mixed 6’ers and cheap kegs to college kids, DSSOLVR started to take shape. Five years on, they’ve found themselves running a brewery where success is informed as much by honoring tradition and technique as it is by eschewing convention altogether.

Brewed Until Surreal

Graphics courtesy of DSSOLVR

“I don’t know how many times I said no to a crab rangoon beer,” Tursi says in a phrase that perfectly describes DSSOLVR’s creative approach and production output. DSSOLVR has succeeded because, unlike many producers, it is not trying to nail down or cash in on some new trend.

But when they do dial-up something wild, a la a beer modeled after an ever-popular Chinese-American appetizer, you can count on it being tasty. And that’s due in large part to the fact that these kinds of endeavors speak to the very nature of what makes DSSOLVR one of the finer outfits out East. Measured doses of creativity combine with insatiable curiosity without flying completely off the rails. And the result of that effort is usually more wild creativity in motion.

When Tursi peels apart the layers of this smoothie-style fruited cheesecake sour, he says, “Crab rangoon isn’t about the crab. It’s really just breaded and fried cream cheese…[Crab rangoon] is about creating a delivery vessel for duck sauce. And what is duck sauce? It’s just pineapple, orange, cardamom.” Which is why DSSOLVR conditions its Crab Rangoon on peach, apricot, pineapple, orange, tangerine, cheesecake, and marshmallow for a tangy, sweet and sour foreplay.

Sound crazy?

At the risk of infuriating rangoon purists, it’s tough to argue Tursi’s logic on the topic. He took a wild idea from Semenec and realized it in liquid form by. Crab Rangoon highlights what makes this team so unique and successful: brewing beer that no matter how polarizing it may sound, turns out incredibly quaffable and well-executed. When DSSOLVR decides to play in the portion of the industry sandbox driven by trends, they continue to set themselves apart.

Humbly articulated as blind luck, Tursi and Semenec have cultivated a talented production team around them, led by Zack Mason, that can harness the best of these wild conversations into fully realized beverages with labels and branding that stand on their own. DSSOLVR’s “Brewed Til Surreal” approach makes these over-the-top ideas and conversations consistently bear fruit worth picking,

Brewed Until Real

Photography courtesy of DSSOLVR

The above is all well and good for those looking for more polarizing adult bevies. But for those aforementioned rangoon-type purists, they’d be happy to know that it isn’t all Chinese take-out and peanut butter and jelly cheesecake sours at their North Carolina dojo. DSSOLVR produces incredible liquid across a myriad of beverages (such as wine) and beer styles, with some of their best-selling beers within their two brick-and-mortar stores coming from their Lager program.

“[Cold Caprese] Pizza is our best-selling beer in the taproom,” according to Semenec. What started as a collaboration with another idiosyncratic brewery now carries the torch inside their Asheville taproom as a fan-favorite. Maybe it’s because many beer-savvy consumers frequent Asheville annually or because pizza, in its many iterations, remains undefeated that this is a reality for them. But a killer Italian-style pilsner that drinks true to form speaks as much to the overarching quality of DSSOLVR’s beer-making prowess as it does any other notion oft associated with this crew.

In between a never-ending carousel of wild ideas (hello Duke’s Mayo/Good Hot Fish collab) is a team that’s every bit as excited about subtlety and nuance as they are eager to push boundaries. Another series of pilsners they produce (the “…Of Doom” Series) is a current personal favorite of Tursi and Semenec because it combines the historic European style with an American classic, the West-Coast hop regiment.

“They’re clean and easy to drink. It’s a really nice beer to have whether you’re trying to just have a beer or want a hop-forward fix,” says Semenec. And this cleaner, dare I say traditional slant on a style, is also starting to gain steam in-house.

Dreamlike in Durham

Photography courtesy of DSSOLVR

Last year, DSSOLVR opened a new taproom in downtown Durham, NC. The brewery aimed to blend what makes its Asheville space so visually appealing and hospitable with the idea that the only path to success is to patiently ingratiate itself into the Raleigh/Durham area.

With the latter sounding like quite the heavy lift, Tursi and Semenec both explain that through thoughtful event curation and by literally just getting to know your neighbors, their idea of success seems to be in lockstep with what the Durham market currently wants.

Hosting events alongside the “Dog Moms of Durham,” throwing weekly art workshops, and working alongside a few local restaurants have all proved worthwhile after seeing the reception from locals. The latter, a collab with a new burger restaurant named PattyBoy, saw the two teams butter each other’s proverbial bun by coming up with an Orange Soda-Inspired sour that mimicked the fountain drink (straight down to the sugar content) but was deftly balanced by a nervy, acidic base.

Because it wouldn’t be DSSOLVR if they didn’t lean into the fun.

Tursi and Semenec have proven time and time again to possess the highly-coveted-yet-often-realized balance to make something so seemingly ridiculous yet incredibly enjoyable. As much as it may dismay those who wrote off these styles or ideas long ago, this malleability has become exceedingly important in the modern American craft landscape.

Our advice to those still standing firmly in that camp? Keep your weight distributed evenly when assessing their output. For my money, their ability to pivot from surreal back to traditional is truly what makes them so unique, not to mention amongst the most talented players in this game.