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WHITSETT — It’s Wednesday, and it’s bottling day at Red Oak Brewery.

Employees circle a huge $700,000 machine shipped straight from Italy. It looks like something dreamed up by Dr. Seuss, with a long mechanical belt that rinses, fills and caps 150 bottles of beer a minute as it snakes around the room.

Stand near the door, just beyond the sign, “An Honest Brew Makes Its Own Friends,’’ and you hear the constant clink-clink-clink of bottles and a huge whoosh from the machine.

It’s the sound of the Red Oak revolution, created by the tall, balding guy walking around the brewery in jeans and hiking boots.

That’s Bill Sherrill, the business-minded maverick behind Red Oak.

In North Carolina, beer guys see Sherrill as one of the craft-brew originals. He opened a brew pub near Guilford College 18 years ago and started brewing the Bavarian lagers he first found in Europe.

Two summers ago, after the brew pub closed, Sherrill opened a $5 million brewery off I-85 and thought about creating Red Oak Village on 12 acres — complete with shops, a restaurant, a hotel and even an art museum.

Right now, Red Oak Village is just an architect’s drawing on the brewery wall. Sherrill likes to dream big. He’s got his 40 head of cattle, and he’s got his brewery where, from the highway, you can see gleaming tanks behind a wall of windows 35 feet high.

His 18 employees are busy. After years of talk and speculation, Red Oak started bottling its Red Oak Bavarian lager six days before Halloween. Today, the brewery bottles 600 to 1,200 12-packs a week.

No six-packs. No cases. Just 12-packs. Of one beer.

So far, the brewery sells the 12-packs at its headquarters as well as one spot in Burlington and three spots in Greensboro. Three trucks and eight vans cart the beer where it needs to go.

Why did it take so long? And why so few spots? Sherrill has an answer.

“I don’t move fast because I’m old and not very bright,’’ the 65-year-old says, laughing. “But I didn’t want to misstep. It’s easy to mess up.’’

For decades, Sherrill has done everything his own way. In 1979, he opened the restaurant Franklin’s Off Friendly off a dirt road near Guilford College.

Today, in a spot where fields stretch for miles, he’s got his own brewery where he follows the philosophy of one of his favorites: college basketball coach John Wooden.

You’ll find a framed article by Wooden inside the bottling room. A key phrase? “Develop yourself. Don’t worry about opponents.’’

Sherrill relies on brewmaster Chris Buckley. He’s been at Red Oak for six years . Buckley grew up in Germany, the only child of an Austrian mother and American father , and he saw firsthand how beer had become a way of life.

At 25, after a three-year program, Buckley became a certified brewer and maltster . Now, after 15 years of experience , he steers the quality of one of North Carolina’s oldest breweries.

Red Oak employs Star Trek technology and follows strict German standards , created when Leonardo da Vinci was alive, to brew three types of lagers: Hummingbird , Battlefield Bock and the popular Red Oak.

Ask brewmaster Buckley about it, and he sounds like a scientist. He’ll take you through a complicated process, where you’ll catch the grainy smell of malted barley and see the gleam of tanks, kettles, pipes and 22-ton silos everywhere you look.

It takes eight hours of brewing and four to eight weeks of fermentation to create three lagers you can find at beer taps across central North Carolina. But you’ll only find one in a bottle. That’s Red Oak, its most popular brand.

That’s the whole idea of doing what you think works, of channeling Coach Wooden, of following your own drumbeat.

That’s the Sherrill way.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com