Beer

BEER SHOVEL READY

The coming of Asheville’s celebrated Burial Beer Co. adds a fresh layer to Plaza Midwood

BY GREG LACOUR

THE CHARACTER of Charlotte’s arts-andentertainment neighborhoods and the cra brewery rosters they support is, unlike much of the beer, growing clearer. South End/LoSo has everyone beat in sheer volume. NoDa harbors a pleasant mix of pioneers (NoDa Brewing, Birdsong) and newer arrivals.

Plaza Midwood can’t match either in quantity. But the announcement in March that Burial Beer Co. of Asheville—one of the fastestexpanding cra brewers in the state and most celebrated in the country—planned to open a taproom and bottle shop on Thomas Avenue, in the commercial heart of the neighborhood, seemed to add a layer of de nition to Plaza Midwood. You might not be able to hop all day from brewery to brewery there. But the Burial site is within trotting distance of a pair of popular and critically praised establishments, Legion Brewing on Commonwealth Avenue and Resident Culture Brewing Co. on Central Avenue. Why would you want to?

“I think—and I’m probably biased—that even though we have only three breweries, they’re three of the best,” says Wes Turner, a Plaza Midwood Neighborhood Association board member and past president. “Adding Burial to that list will just make Plaza Midwood one of the brewery destinations in Charlotte.” (He includes the nanobrewery Pilot Brewing, which opened in 2018, in his count.) Turner adds that he’s visited Burial only once but enjoyed what he drank: “I enjoy a good IPA.”

Burial has plenty of those, along with a growing number of imperial stouts, farmhouse ales, and table sours to match the rustic lagers that co-founder and COO Doug Reiser says was the brewery’s cornerstone style when it opened in 2013. Since then, Burial has expanded from South Slope, a brewery hub in a former industrial area just south of downtown Asheville: The Reisers and partner Tim Gormley opened a 20-barrel production brewery, restaurant, and winery in Asheville’s Biltmore Village in 2016 and a taproom and bottle shop in Raleigh in 2019.

Reiser says he and his team had eyed Charlotte for years. The opportunity to help preserve part of a 62-year-old shopping center in a thriving neighborhood helped sell them on the site, last occupied by a pair of now-relocated boutiques, Boris+Natasha and the Stash Pad. “We were very intentional about going to the people,” he says. “It’s important for us to not

(Top) Burial Beer co-founders Doug and Jess Reiser and Tim Gormley wanted their planned Charlotte location to occupy a neighborhood with both homes and businesses—and they found it in the old Boris+Natasha and Stash Pad spaces in Plaza Midwood. (Above, left to right) Deathstalker, an IPA; The River to Hell Runs Red, a barrel-aged dark sour ale; and Mythologies of Realism, a double IPA. just be in a residential or commercial district but in a combination of the two.” Those are ideal locations for cra brewers everywhere. In North Carolina, state law allows breweries to operate as many as three retail outlets in addition to their primary production sites, and some have capitalized on the provision to stake out territory far from their home bases, says Rich Greene, the executive director of the N.C. Cra Brewers Guild. For example, Burial’s fellow Asheville brewer Hi-Wire Brewing and Catawba Brewing Co., a Morganton-based company that operates a taproom just outside Plaza Midwood, recently opened locations in Wilmington. It’s a slight contradiction—a statewide mini-empire of hyperlocal neighborhood pubs—but it’s central to the evolving cra beer culture, which emphasizes sense of place and camaraderie with the neighborhoods they choose to occupy. “What was really, really important to us,” Reiser says, “was to get a space that was historic, that was in a neighborhood, and that had that funky Asheville feel that’s so important to our brand.” South Slope and Plaza Midwood are unique neighborhoods whose residents might not relish the comparison. But it’s hard to deny that the brand ts. GREG LACOUR is senior editor of this magazine.