6810 Caratoke Highway
Grandy, NC 27947
252-491-5205
Website: http://weepingradish.com
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 11 A.M.–4 P.M.; Sunday, noon–4 P.M.
Tours: Wednesday at 11 A.M., or self-guided during business hours
Owner and brewmaster: Uli Bennewitz
Opened: 1986
Regular beer lineup: Corolla Gold, Fest, Black Radish, OBX Kölsch, IPA 25, Radier
Seasonal: Winter Doppelbock
Award: 1990 GABF Silver Medal for “Hopfen Helles”
“I’ve been here since 1980. I’m a German immigrant,” says Uli Bennewitz, founder of Weeping Radish. “I came here to farm, and I still farm. Farming is my life.” When Uli moved to North Carolina and Hyde County, he worked as a farm manager, becoming the only resident on a 30,000-acre farm. “We had 60 miles of roads that I was in charge of patrolling,” he remembers. “It was what you expect pioneering to be.”
Goats greet visitors at Weeping Radish Farm Brewery in Grandy.
The trouble was that he never really thought farm management would be sufficient for paying the bills and raising a family. In 1985, Uli’s brother—who lived in Munich—called him with an idea. He had a friend with a brewery that was up for sale and asked if Uli was interested in buying it.
“I was not very enthralled with American beers at the time,” says Uli. “Your choices were either Bud or Coors, which was no choice at all.” He immediately agreed to his brother’s plan, subject to Uli’s finding the capital to enable him to buy the brewery.
He remembers talking to the owner of The Christmas Shop in Manteo, a popular tourist destination. The owner told Uli that the question he was most often asked in his shop was, “Is there someplace to eat?” So the two got together, pooled their resources, and decided to open a sandwich stand and brewery.
A view of the brewery from above at Weeping Radish
At that point, after he had already committed to the brewery, Uli faced his first real stumbling block. “I didn’t know what the ABC was. I thought it was some sort of learning center. Coming from Germany, I never thought that in the land of the free there would ever be such a thing as an alcohol control board,” he says, referring to the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control commission. He met with the ABC and told it of his plan to open a brewery/restaurant. The board broke the news to him that it was illegal. However, the ABC thought it was a great idea and proposed to help him get the law changed.
Soon afterward, Uli began meeting regularly with the chief legal counsel of the ABC drafting the new law, which flew through the legislature in the hands of then–freshman senator Marc Basnight, becoming law just six months after Uli first approached the ABC with his question. Weeping Radish opened on July 4, 1986.
Interestingly, Uli doesn’t take full credit for the law change. “It was really Biltmore that did the share of the work,” he says. In 1980, Biltmore Estate Winery in Asheville wanted the ability to serve its own wine on the premises, which was illegal at the time. Using its considerable resources, Biltmore had pursued a change in the law for wine. “When I came along, we just used the exact same argument, but we just changed the word wine to beer,” Uli says jovially. “I’ve always wondered if Biltmore knows that it is essentially responsible for the microbrewery boom in North Carolina.”
Weeping Radish, now legal, did not see instant success. “You do not open a brewpub in a dry town,” says Uli. At the time, liquor was outlawed in Manteo. Although beer and wine were technically legal, they were frowned upon. “It’s a dumb concept. They were not amused to have a brewery in town.” Furthermore, the idea behind Weeping Radish was not immediately popular with the local clientele. “Don’t open a Bavarian-themed restaurant in the South. There aren’t any Bavarian-themed restaurants in the South, and there’s a reason—nobody wants one. We did great in the summer when tourists from Midwestern states—Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa—were in town, but the rest of the year it was dead.”
Still, Uli continued to pursue his idea. In 1988, he opened a Weeping Radish in downtown Durham near the Brightleaf Square area. “It was gorgeous. It was a beautiful building with great architecture, and it was a beautiful brewery, but it was about 25 years ahead of schedule.” Uli notes that if he opened the Durham location today, it would likely be immensely popular. As it was, it lasted for about a year and a half and then shut down. The city was just not ready.
Back in Manteo, Weeping Radish ran into a new problem. In 2000, the brewhouse fell through the floor of the brewery. “We had an all-wooden structure,” says Uli, “a heavy, water-intensive operation on a wood floor.”
At that point, he decided to take the brewery to the next level. He had long been interested in the local food movement and was beginning to realize the connection between natural beer and natural food. “They’re both crafts,” he says. “Beer is a craft, meat is a craft, vegetables are a craft. They’re all the same.”
Stained glass above the counter at Weeping Radish
After taking a look at the market, he realized there were no craft butchers in the entirety of North Carolina. He then put out an ad in a German journal for a master butcher and began his plans for a full farmhouse brewery in Currituck County. “Literally, all I had was a field,” he says. He constructed a 20,000-square-foot building, which he calls “a celebration of craft brewing, butchering, and organic farming—all of these wrapped into one concept.”
The building is immense and impressive. Visitors enter an enormous room with a restaurant at the far end. A rough wooden outdoor façade stands over a short bar decorated with newspaper articles about the Outer Banks in the early 20th century. Although the brewing operation is out of sight from visiting patrons, they can take a tour that allows them to see the brewpub-sized brewhouse tucked into an enormous cavern of a brewery. “My real goal,” says Uli, “was to have a distillery as a companion to the brewery, but the bureaucrats won on that one.” Outside, visitors can see fields stretching in back of the brewery. Those are the fields Uli farms. He fertilizes them with waste from the brewery, including spilled beer. In fact, he calls the fields “the first true beer garden in America, without a table, without a chair, without a patron.”
A view of the bar inside Weeping Radish
In 2011, Weeping Radish’s Doppelbock was the first beer in the state to feature 100 percent North Carolina–grown and –malted ingredients, Uli is a supporter of Asheville’s Riverbend Malt House, a new craft maltster using all North Carolina–grown barley. “We want to end up growing our own barley and have Riverbend malt it for us,” Uli says, “so that we can have a complete closed loop, even more integrated into the farming operation.” He notes that he has many more ideas about how to combine beer and food. “There’s a lot going on in both worlds that we want to explore.”