209 Technology Park Lane
Fuquay-Varina, NC 27526
919-567-BEER (2337)
E-mail: info@AviatorBrew.com
Website: http://www.aviatorbrew.com
Hours: Monday–Friday, 3 P.M.–midnight; Saturday–Sunday, noon–midnight
Tours: Thursday–Friday, 5 P.M.–8 P.M.; Saturday, 3 P.M.–8 P.M.
Owner: Mark Doble
Opened: 2008
Regular beer lineup: Devils Tramping Ground Tripel, Hogwild India Pale, Hotrod Red, Steamhead, Madbeach American Wheat
Seasonals: Crazy Pils, Saison de Aviator, Old Bulldog Extra Special, McGritty’s Scotch Ale, Oktoberbeast, Bonehead India Brown, Horsepower Double IPA, Caveman Alt, Frostnipper, Blackmamba Oatmeal Stout
A short drive southwest of Raleigh, in the burgeoning suburb of Fuquay-Varina, in a small industrial subdivision called Technology Lane, is Aviator Brewing Company. It’s a fitting location, given founder Mark Doble’s previous career as a software engineer. Before software, though, there was beer.
Aviator Brewing Company, including the Aviator limo
Back in the 1980s, Mark and his older brother Jim opened The Brew Shack, a homebrew shop in Tampa, Florida. It did well, and the family wanted to expand to a brewpub.
“My mom is British, and her family had owned pubs all over England and Wales,” Mark Doble says, “so she was really focused on getting a pub opened. And my brother really wanted to do the brewing, so we opened a brewpub. I wanted to do a packaging brewery. I wasn’t really into the restaurant side of it.” The family went on to open Tampa Bay Brewing Company in the city’s historic Ybor City neighborhood.
Doble moonlighted at the brewery. But he had just graduated from college and wanted to focus on the career he had been preparing himself for, so he got a job at Hewlett-Packard. He ended up working there for over 15 years.
“But time went on, and I kinda got sick of working there,” he says. “I always wanted to come back and start a microbrewery.”
At that point, Doble was still in Florida. He did research on distribution laws that would support a packaging brewery in the Sunshine State but felt like they were unfavorable. He therefore decided on North Carolina and its favorable beer laws. “And besides,” he says, “with RTP here, if it ever didn’t work out, I could always fall back into an engineering job there.”
He moved to Fuquay-Varina and bought a hangar at the Triple W Airport. At that point, he was still doing software design. “I had a small airplane,” says Doble, an amateur pilot, “but the hangar was huge. I used to work out of there, just me, my computer, and my airplane.” Brewing was still on his mind, though, and he kept his ear to the ground for equipment.
Assorted decorations at Aviator Brewing Company
Eventually, he found a brewhouse in Belmont, California, that “needed some work,” so he decided to make a cross-country trip to pick up components of his brewhouse, fermenters, and even dairy tanks. It was a tightly orchestrated trip from one location to another. “I flew on a commercial airline, and an 18-wheeler kind of tracked me across the country. I would rent U-Hauls and drive equipment south to meet him, and then we would off-load stuff. It was crazy. There was literally an inch left in the truck when we packed everything in there.”
Finally, he got it all back to his hangar in Fuquay-Varina, and Aviator Brewing Company was born. He rebuilt the equipment he had collected from across the country and started making beer. But he still kept working on software. “I always thought it would be something that supplemented my income,” he says. “I’d brew in the hangar, and I’d work my job. I love beer, and I wanted to do something with it. But I didn’t think it would take off the way it did.”
Eventually, Doble had a small bar in the hangar that he operated a few nights a week and for tours. “People just kept coming,” he says. Some nights, he had 500 to 600 patrons hanging out. “They would drink all of the beer that I had!” he laughs. “I had a two-tap kegerator, and I was filling old soda kegs off of the bright tanks. I could never keep up.” So he decided to grow.
That growth had two phases. The first was a taproom supplied by the brewery in downtown Fuquay-Varina in the old Varina train depot. It’s a long, warm space with a 38-foot polished wooden bar, wide-plank floors, and tall ceilings. “It’s packed all the time,” says Doble. The second phase of growth was a larger brewing facility away from the original airplane hangar, in a space that could better handle a brewery. That space is on Technology Lane.
Now, Doble has room for more fermenters. But he isn’t done expanding. His plans include installing a new, larger brewhouse, so he can finally move away from the system he cobbled together out of parts. He has more staff—salespeople and delivery people. A new bottling line has just been set up, so Aviator’s beers will soon be available in more than just kegs and growlers. Doble has also opened a barbecue restaurant across the street from the taproom.
“We still can’t keep up,” he says with a smile. “I can’t see that we’re doing anything that other breweries aren’t doing, but I’m not going to complain.”