Chapel Hill location:
460 West Franklin Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27516
919-942-1800
Hours: Monday–Thursday, 11 A.M.–midnight; Friday–Saturday, 11:30 A.M.–1 A.M.; Sunday, 11 A.M.–11 P.M.
Pittsboro location:
120 Lowes Drive #100
Pittsboro, NC 27312
919-545-2330
Hours: Sunday–Thursday, 11 A.M.–11 P.M.; Friday–Saturday, 11 A.M.–midnight
Website: http://www.carolinabrewery.com
Tours: In Pittsboro, first Saturday of each month
Owner: Robert Poitras
Head brewer: Jon Connolly
Opened: 1995
Regular beer lineup: Copperline Amber Ale, Downtown Trolley/Bynum Brown, Flagship IPA, Oatmeal Porter, Sky Blue Golden Ale
Seasonals/Special Brews: Alter Ego Altbier, Anniversary Ale, Bullpen Pale Ale, Franklin St. Lager, Jumpin’ Java Bean Coffee Stout, Maibock, Oktoberfest, Old Familiar Barley Wine, Old North State Stout, Phil N. Topemov’s Imperial Stout, Santa’s Secret, Super Saaz Imperial Pilsner, To Hell n’ Bock, West End/Circle City Wheat
Award: 2006 GABF Gold Medal for “Flagship IPA”
Carolina Brewery in Chapel Hill
Head west down Franklin Street from the flagship campus of the University of North Carolina in historic Chapel Hill and you’ll find the Carolina Brewery, the town’s first brewpub, now a major area attraction for beer and food lovers alike.
From the outside, it might be any other restaurant on the west end of Franklin Street. The building features simple brickwork, like many other local businesses. Large maple and pin oak trees grow along the road and push up the brick sidewalk around the tables in the brewery’s outdoor dining area. Inside, the proud copper kettle gleams as visitors walk in the door. On most days, the rich, sweet smell of a mash in progress wafts through the restaurant. A long granite bar winds its way around the brewpub just feet from the brewing equipment, so visitors can often listen to the bubbling of active fermentation while watching their favorite sports team on the flat-panel televisions above the bar. The upstairs portion of the brewpub is a mixture of comfortable booths, tables, and a private room where patrons gather for seasonal beer releases and other special events.
Carolina Brewery in Pittsboro
Owner Robert Poitras was in school at UNC–Chapel Hill when he became entranced by beer. During a semester abroad near Interlaken, Switzerland, he found himself getting to know the area’s food and culture. “I was impressed with the sense of pride people had for their local beer,” he notes. Afterward, he had a chance to tour other parts of Europe and noticed the same kind of pride elsewhere. Meanwhile, he was experiencing flavor profiles he hadn’t been familiar with in America.
When he returned to the United States, he didn’t really think of craft beer as a career path—until the next summer, which he spent in San Diego. He noticed the same thing happening there he had witnessed in Europe: local goods, a great sense of pride in the local beers. And they were beers he really enjoyed.
Poitras looks back on a dinner conversation that summer with his original business partner, Chris Rice (who has since moved on), as a catalyst. “You know, a brewpub would work really well back in Chapel Hill,” one of them said. When they returned to school in the fall, Poitras started doing research. “I didn’t want to be a banker, stuck up on the 57th floor, working nine to six, and stuck in traffic, and wearing a tie,” he realized. He and Rice started trying to make a Chapel Hill brewpub a reality.
The next summer, as they moved toward opening, they toured over 100 brewpubs around the country to get ideas and refine their vision. “We took the best parts of each brewery and put them together,” Poitras says.
His first brewmaster turned out to be a master stroke. Originally a mechanical and electrical designer, Jon Connolly had always enjoyed good beer. He knew he wanted to be involved in the beer business in some way since his first sip of a hoppy IPA in California in the 1980s. In the 1990s, his wife got a teaching job in Virginia that allowed Connolly some time to figure out what he wanted to do.
“I did a little bit of homebrewing because I had this understanding that you could make this great beer at home, but of course I was doing everything with syrups,” he says. “Whoever thought that tasted anything like Anchor Steam didn’t know anything about beer. Of course, at that time, we didn’t really have the Internet, so I went to the library to find out if there was any sort of education for brewing.”
In January 1994, he attended the Siebel Institute in Chicago, enrolling in its concise course in brewing technology. Soon afterward, he was able to join Legend Brewing Company in Richmond, Virginia. “At that time, they were just thrilled to get someone who knew something about beer, and they trained me and I started working,” Connolly says. “But as life would have it, two weeks after I started working there, their head brewer gave his two weeks’ notice, so within a month I was head brewer, and I learned really fast everything I needed to learn to make a small brewery hum.”
A year later, Poitras contacted him to gauge his interest in moving to Chapel Hill and helping start the Carolina Brewery. Connolly had relatives in the area and had been to Chapel Hill on a visit. “I really fell in love with the town,” he says. “My kids were still very young then, and I really wanted to raise them in a small town. It was a perfect fit.”
Connolly has been there ever since, helping launch the Carolina Brewery and even custom-designing its draft lines and some of its equipment. The brewery was a success from the beginning, winning medals in regional and national competitions and growing in leaps and bounds. It even started to sell beer to other bars and restaurants in the area.
“It started off slowly at first,” Connolly says. “A bar in town would just say, ‘Please, can I just put your beer on tap?’ And it just grew and grew, and after a while we were having a hard time keeping up with both the brewpub and the wholesale accounts.”
To meet that demand, Poitras and Connolly opened a second Carolina Brewery location in Pittsboro in 2007. Pittsboro, they thought, was an underserved location. Just off Highway 64, it is equidistant from Chapel Hill, Cary, and Apex—fast-growing parts of North Carolina’s Research Triangle.
The Pittsboro location has turned out to be another great success. It brews beer for numerous wholesale accounts around central North Carolina, including a special beer, Bullpen Pale Ale, for a local AAA baseball team, the Durham Bulls.
The Pittsboro brewery looks like an expanded version of the Chapel Hill location, with the same long granite bar. But Pittsboro also has a large dining room and a gorgeous outdoor patio. The brewing equipment is behind a glass wall to keep the noise from the bar, but patrons can still watch the brewing process or join in a monthly tour to see the operation from the inside. Pittsboro also has a side retail space called The Hop Shop, which sells Carolina Brewery merchandise, growlers, and coffee and breakfast items before the restaurant opens. The Pittsboro brewery features live music throughout the year and even hosts its own farmers’ market during the summer.
Hops are added into the boil at Carolina Brewery.
Both locations offer a “Brew Crew” membership that allows patrons to accrue points as they drink and dine. Prizes range from T-shirts to kegs of beer to beer dinners with friends.
The Chapel Hill pub, which now brews beer only for its location, as well as many of the small-batch seasonals, continues to be a hub of activity for Carolina sports fans and beer fans. It remains a vibrant part of the West Franklin Street restaurant scene.
