9 North Carolina Craft Breweries Worth Planning Your Weekend Around
North Carolina brewers spent decades locked under a 6% alcohol cap, a Prohibition-era law that made entire beer styles illegal to sell in the state.
A grassroots campaign called Pop the Cap got that law rewritten in 2005.
Now breweries can be more creative than ever.
These are the North Carolina craft breweries worth planning your weekend around.
1. Highland Brewing Company
Highland Brewing Company brewed Asheville’s first legal craft beer since Prohibition back in 1994, mixed up in the basement of a downtown pub.
Not bad for a basement.
Founder Oscar Wong earned the nickname the Godfather of Asheville Craft Beer for what came after.
Highland’s hilltop campus now anchors a city famous nationwide for its beer scene.
The tasting room runs outdoor concerts through the warmer months, giving visitors an actual date to build a weekend around.
Skip the concert calendar.
It’s still worth two days.
Asheville’s brewery map takes longer than an afternoon to work through, and Highland is where it starts.
2. Weeping Radish Farm Brewery
Weeping Radish Farm Brewery became North Carolina’s first legal microbrewery in 1986, after founder Uli Bennewitz talked state lawmakers into changing a law that had never let anyone do it before him.
He didn’t stop at the brewery.
The brewery moved from Manteo to a 14-acre farm in Grandy in the mid-2000s, adding a full butcher shop and a restaurant that runs on what the farm raises.
Many of its beers still follow Germany’s centuries-old Reinheitsgebot purity law, limiting the ingredient list to hops, malt, yeast, and water.
That’s a short list for a long weekend.
Weeping Radish Farm Brewery also runs tours of its own smokehouse and butcher shop, plus festivals throughout the year that turn the farm into a full day on its own.
Lunch alone doesn’t cover it.
3. Outer Banks Brewing Station
Outer Banks Brewing Station became the country’s first wind-powered brewery when owners Aubrey Davis and Eric Reece raised an 80-foot turbine over their brewpub on Earth Day 2008.
Wind does the work.
Kill Devil Hills makes sense for it, since the same steady coastal wind drew Orville and Wilbur Wright to test their gliders there more than a century earlier.
Outer Banks Brewing Station runs live music in its own backyard beer garden every evening from Memorial Day weekend through the fall, pulling in national touring acts alongside local bands.
That’s most of a summer’s worth of nights, not just one.
A Sunday brunch and a full coastal dinner menu keep the kitchen as busy as the taps, so a trip here doesn’t have to end when the music does.
4. Burial Beer Co.
Burial Beer Co., a craft brewery in Asheville’s South Slope, started in 2013 out of a renovated transmission shop.
It’s built for a crawl.
Founders Doug and Jess Reiser, along with Tim Gormley, launched Burial Beer Co. on a one-barrel system and grew it to ten barrels within about a year.
That kind of growth is why South Slope now has more taprooms within walking distance than any visitor can hit in one evening.
Plan two days for the district, and Burial Beer Co. is the anchor worth building the itinerary around.
5. Mother Earth Brewing
Mother Earth Brewing sits in downtown Kinston.
It comes with its own place to sleep it off.
Owner Stephen Hill bought Kinston’s old Midtown Motor Lodge, built in 1963, and reopened it in 2012 as the 45-room Mother Earth Motor Lodge right down the street from the brewery.
Room key included.
A pool, mini golf, and an art gallery come with the stay, along with a continental breakfast the next morning.
That’s a whole weekend built around one address.
Psst! How much do you know about North Carolina’s brewing history? Take our quiz and see how many you can get right.
Quiz
Tar Heel Beer IQ
Answer these questions on North Carolina’s beer and brewing history. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
Which North Carolina city topped or tied for the national “Beer City USA” poll every year from 2009 through 2012?
6. Pisgah Brewing Company
Pisgah Brewing Company began pouring in Black Mountain in 2005, the same year North Carolina finally raised its old cap on how strong a beer could legally be.
Good timing.
The brewery grew into one of the region's best-known names for strong, adventurous ales, and it built something few breweries ever bother with: An eight-acre outdoor stage.
Pisgah Brewing hosts close to two dozen concerts on that stage each summer and fall, with local and national touring bands filling an outdoor meadow that turns a beer run into a plan-ahead trip.
Check the concert calendar before the cooler, not after.
Why North Carolina Breweries Boomed After 2005
North Carolina's craft breweries owe a lot to a law few visitors have ever heard of.
Until 2005, state law capped beer at 6% alcohol by volume, a Prohibition-era limit that made it illegal to brew or sell styles like Belgian ales, hoppy IPAs, and dark doppelbocks.
A grassroots push called Pop the Cap convinced the legislature to raise that limit to 15%, and Gov. Mike Easley signed it into law in August 2005.
North Carolina had about two dozen breweries the year the law passed, and within seven years that number had grown past 60.
7. Olde Mecklenburg Brewery
Olde Mecklenburg Brewery poured its first pint in Charlotte in 2009, after founder John Marrino noticed the state's largest city didn't have a brewery of its own.
That's since changed.
The brewery's Munich-style biergarten seats over 1,000 people under century-old oak and pecan trees.
Olde Mecklenburg Brewery times its biggest weekend of the year around Mecktoberfest, its Oktoberfest-style lager that took silver at the Great American Beer Festival, with festivities built for a whole afternoon outdoors, not a quick pint.
The kitchen matches the beer, with pork schnitzel, German-style potato salad, a rotating list of bratwurst, and a pretzel big enough to share.
Show up hungry.
8. Appalachian Mountain Brewery
Appalachian Mountain Brewery became Boone's first brewery in 2013, started by cousins Nathan Kelischek and Chris Zieber on a plot of land bordered by two creeks.
Building there took nerve.
Boone Creek runs one edge of the property, and Hodges Creek runs the other, with a 120-foot outdoor bar and covered porch that stays open through winter, heated against the mountain cold.
That's a lot of scenery for one pint.
Appalachian Mountain Brewery works better as a base camp than a drive-by, especially once the Blue Ridge Parkway's fall colors pull leaf-peepers into town for the weekend.
9. Nantahala Brewing Company
Nantahala Brewing Company got its start in Bryson City in 2009, right across from the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad depot.
That spot didn't last.
Nantahala Brewing Company closed the Depot Street taproom in 2023 and now pours out of The Outpost, its taproom in nearby Sylva.
The beer lineup still carries the old hometown's name, with Bryson City Brown Ale remaining one of its most popular cans.
The Outpost was built family- and pet-friendly, with live music as a regular fixture rather than an occasional booking.
That's the kind of setup that keeps a family around for a whole afternoon, not just a flight of samples.
Sylva sits a short drive from Bryson City, close enough that regulars just consider it Nantahala Brewing Company's new address.
The Bryson City name on the can is the only part of the original spot that never moved.
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