212 South Green Street
Morganton, NC 28655
828-430-6883
E-mail: wscottpyatt@gmail.com
Website: http://catawbavalleybrewingcompany.com
Hours: Wednesday–Friday, 5 P.M.–11 P.M.
Owner and brewmaster: Scott Pyatt
Opened: 1999
Regular beer lineup: Farmer Ted’s Farmhouse Cream Ale, Brown Bear Ale, Firewater Indian Pale Ale, Honest Injun Stout, Indian Head Red Ale, White Zombie Ale
Seasonals: King Don’s Pumpkin Ale, King Coconut Porter, Hyper Monkey Java Stout
Scott Pyatt didn’t plan to open a brewing company. He used to homebrew with his brother, Billy, back in the 1990s. “It was something that we did on the weekends, just to hang out,” he says. “Then people start telling you that your beer is great, and you just get this idea in your head. Honestly, he really wanted to do it more than I did. I wanted to get into manufacturing, but not into malt beverages.” But he helped his brother get a brewery off the ground before Billy took a corporate move out of state. Scott stayed home, finished the facility, and started operation in nearby Glen Alpine.
The brewhouse at Catawba Valley Brewing Company
Catawba Valley Brewing Company began as a one-man operation in the basement of an antique mall. After a year or two, Pyatt could afford to ditch his ‘69 GMC pickup truck and buy a van as he started driving and selling a lot more. He looks back at those beginnings with a grin. “If I would have known then what I know now, I never would have tried to do what I did with what I had,” he says. “We started off with pure junk. It was just stuff we cobbled together. We were both fairly accomplished engineers, so we purpose-built stuff, and we’d take stuff that we liked and convert it into something that we could use. A lot of people probably couldn’t make good beer with what we had, and I’m glad we don’t have to make good beer on it anymore, because it was a whole lot of work.”
Fortunately for Pyatt, the late 1990s were rough for the craft beer industry, so he was able to pick up good used equipment from breweries in other parts of the country that were closing. As he did, Catawba Valley was able to grow. Almost a decade later, that growth took him out of the basement brewery and down the road to Morganton. The brewery moved into a much larger space with its own interesting history. In the 1950s, the warehouse space had served as a showroom for Heritage-Henredon Furniture Industries’ collection of Frank Lloyd Wright–designed furniture, known as “the Taliesin Ensemble.” In the 1970s and 1980s, it was a “Wild West nightclub” called Slick Willy’s.
In 2007, when Catawba Valley Brewing Company moved in, Pyatt managed to incorporate the best aspects of the building’s long history into its new life as a brewery. The facility is not just a brewery but also a large tasting room and bar. Tables and chairs take up most of the available space in the warehouse. A long bar reaches from the brewing area in the back of the space toward a row of garage doors that stand open on warm evenings. The brewery space is compact and efficient. Tall fermentation tanks are lined up against the back wall of the brewery, with natural light from the old wire-framed windows spilling over them.
Fermenters at Catawba Valley Brewing Company
Catawba Valley Brewing Company has become a community hangout and a place to hear good live music. Pyatt has put effort into building a full stage opposite the bar. “If I get interested in something, I like to support it, so we have a great music program,” he says. “We have better equipment here than most bands do. We try to make it a pleasure to put on a show here.”
The brewery offers an open mic night every week and has welcomed regional and national acts. It also plays host to a large number of community events such as birthday parties and weddings. “I guess we’ve done everything here except for a wake,” says Pyatt. One of his favorite annual events is the brewery’s Super Bowl party. Since Catawba Valley doesn’t serve food, guests can bring their own. As people arrive to watch the Super Bowl on the projector screen, “it just turns into this huge potluck supper where people are sharing what they made with everybody and having a great time.”
But of all the things Pyatt is interested in and supports, what is most important to him is his team. “One of the things that happens that really shows me that I’m doing something right is when you look at your employees, and you’ve got employees who are getting married, they’re raising families, they’re buying cars, they’re buying houses, and you’re expanding your brewery family. Having employees that can count on you and work not just for you but with you. You know you’re really making it then.”
For now, the future doesn’t hold many big changes for Pyatt—just steady growth. For a while, he looked at getting into canning and even went so far as to purchase canning equipment, but “I just don’t have the fermentation space to support it,” he says. His plans include expanding distribution into the Charlotte area and further improving the brewery’s performance space.