Autumn is a popular time for beer lovers, with events like October Fest, right?

Well, craft brew enthusiast Jason Frye was a little thirsty, so he went on a craft draft crawl in Winston-Salem.

Here's what he found.

- Welcome to Winston-Salem.

I'm here to explore the city's Craft Draft Crawl.

[upbeat music] All of these breweries are in such a close proximity.

Within a mile-and-a-half radius of downtown, we have nine breweries.

You can stop by Hoots, a funky owl-themed bar in the West End.

If you're a football fan or a soccer supporter, you can swing by Small Batch.

They're a Liverpool FC official fan club site.

I'm gonna stop by four breweries today that are housed in historic buildings across downtown.

[traffic whirring] Foothills, on the West End of downtown, in a former car dealership showroom, keeps 10 taps flowing and serves up tasty bites in their brew pub.

These guys were the first microbrewery to come to Winston-Salem, and they really set the stage for the beer scene.

Core beers like their Hopium IPA and People's Porter have been on draft since day one.

But Sexual Chocolate, their imperial stout, has had beer fans lined up around the block for release day for years.

We are lucky because the new release of Sexual Chocolate is on draft.

- It was one of the first, like, home brews I ever made back when I was getting into the beer business, and then once we opened Foothills and the alcohol laws has changed in North Carolina to allow higher alcohol beers, we just, we wanted to make it.

This is the Bourbon aged version, aged in Woodford Reserve barrels for about eight months.

- Cheers.

- Cheers to you.

[upbeat music] - Oh, that's a beautiful beer.

No wonder people line up around the block for it.

[footsteps thudding] [uplifting music] You'll pass through murals, galleries, and art collectives here in the downtown Arts District.

We're on our way to Fiddling Fish.

This brewery is dog friendly.

Their beers are inspired by the Grateful Dead and by other musical acts.

They have a really vibrant scene and one of the best indoor-outdoor spaces in all of downtown.

We're talking with Stuart Barnhart, one of the co-owners, along with his cousin Dave.

Stuart, my understanding, this used to be a tobacco auction house, is that correct?

- Yes, I believe it was built around 1939.

Winston-Salem is obviously well known for its tobacco history.

- It is a tobacco town.

- We're just a few blocks away from R.J. Reynolds headquarters behind us.

They built the town.

All the farmers would come in and bring their tobacco here at auction.

- You've got this great colorful flight.

What do we have here?

- Yeah, so these are some of our flagships we have year-round.

We've got, starting out with the lightest, you got our Buena Vista Blonde, and then we've got our bestseller, That Fish Cray, and then we've got our Ardmore Amber, which is just a great, well-rounded American amber.

And then we've got our Raspberry Currants Wild Sour.

- What's wild about it and what makes this beer distinct from the other three?

- Yeah, so these are all made with the typical brewer's yeast.

This yeast actually comes from paper hornets nests and bees nests.

They've kind of found this wild yeast that produces lactic acid during fermentation.

- [Jason] Okay.

- And so that's actually what's giving it the sourness.

- Let's jump in and let's see what this is like.

Near perfect beer.

That's fantastic.

I love that.

[upbeat music] Hey!

You only need to walk two minutes to cross the street and belly up to the bar at Wise Man Brewing.

- Over the years that we've been open, we have brewed over 250 styles of beer.

- That's incredible by itself.

- What we have here today is our Outraged Daughters red Irish ale.

This is a two-time gold middle winner at the Great American Beer Festival.

So I just think it has a beautiful, like, slightly nutty finish.

It's very crushable, as my son would say.

- Let's see.

Ooh.

[upbeat music] Oh, that's crushable, indeed.

All the breweries we visited today on the Craft Draft Crawl are housed in historic buildings, and yours is no exception.

- It was a warehouse, a historic warehouse from the 1920s, and the Angelo Brothers ran it.

And this was essentially the Costco before there was Costco.

- [Jason] Yeah.

- This is where all the wholesale was done for a lot of the restaurants and bars in Winston-Salem.

I mean, you're looking at the original brick, you're looking at the floor.

- I love that.

I love that connection to Winston-Salem, to Winston-Salem's history.

It's the bones of this building are the very bones of the city itself.

- [Mike] We did do one kind of new-fangled thing, which, on top of this roof, it's covered with solar panels.

All of our energy for production is solar generated.

- [Jason] And that's really future-forward, and I think that that was a really wise move by you guys.

- [Mike] Well, thank you.

I like the way you worked that in.

[upbeat music] - Winston-Salem is called the City of Arts and Innovation, and Incendiary shows off both with their beer selection.

Their robust list of IPAs compliments a roster of porters, stouts and seasonal brews.

We're here with Chris Straus from Incendiary, who's poured us a couple of great drinks.

Chris, what do you have for us today?

- So we have one of our flagship IPAs, the Shift series.

It's the same mash bill, and it's a shifting hop profile, which is where the name comes from.

So you'll see all these different colors designated with it, and that just kind of identifies the different hop profiles.

Today we have the shift blue, which is mostly Mosaic hops.

[upbeat music] - Oh, that is a great beer.

That tropical note is really dead on.

Oh, it's full of these great tropical flavors.

There's a little guava, a little papaya on there.

That's really nice.

- And it takes a subtle hand to elicit a lot of those flavors, especially when you're using the same mash bill.

That shows a lot of talent and restraint coming outta your brew house, great job.

- Yeah, and these are 8.1%, and they do not drink like a heavy IPA.

So, like, they can be a little dangerous if you have too many of them because they are so drinkable, even for how high ABV they are.

This is the Dulce Muerte.

It is an imperial stout.

It's 11.3%.

It is our Mexican chocolate cake stout.

[upbeat music] - Oh, you're right, that smokiness comes right through.

Ooh, what's a beautiful beer.

We are in the old Bailey Power Plant, and where we're actually sitting outside, this was the former coal pit, and all of that goes on to inform the Incendiary name.

- Originally, these trestles that are right behind us, they kept them kind of for the historical aspect.

So the trains would actually come in on these trestles, drop the coal in this pit right where we're sitting.

It'd get conveyed into boiler room, and that's where they burned the coal to produce all of the power that supplied the buildings for R.J. Reynolds around it.

And it is called Bailey Power Plant because it was originally owned by the Bailey Brothers Tobacco Company.

And then R.J. Reynolds purchased it.

My grandfather used to work in this building.

His dad was a railroad engineer.

- [Jason] Maybe your great-granddad would've dropped some coal off here.

- Probably.

We got our name just paying homage to the history of the building because this was a really important company in the development of Winston-Salem.

- [Jason] Cheers to you guys.

Can't wait to dive back into another sip of this beer.

- Yeah, go for it.

No one's holding me back.

- No.

You can really get a feel for downtown Winston-Salem on the Craft Draft Crawl.

From the historical buildings to the funky art everywhere, it's a cool place to come discover for yourself.

[upbeat music] - To find out more about the Winston-Salem Craft Draft Crawl, go to visit Winston-Salem.com.