Atlanta-headquartered Monday Night Brewing will set up shop in North Carolina next year, when it opens a new taproom and expands distribution in Charlotte, the company announced today.
“Not only is Charlotte our fifth taproom, but North Carolina is also the fourth state we’ll be expanding our distribution to,” co-founder and CEO Jeff Heck said in a press release. “We are thrilled to join the beer scene and community in North Carolina, which we have long admired.”
The new taproom will be located in an 8,500 sq. ft. building on a 1.13 acre plot of land in Charlotte’s South End. Commercial real estate brokerage firm Providence Group Capital (PGC) purchased the property, formerly an automotive shop, in February 2021. PGC’s original plan was to convert the building and land into a food hall, but after meeting Heck and his co-founders Joel Iverson and Jonathan Baker, the firm decided to shift gears.
“We spent a lot of time with the Monday Night team in both Charlotte and Atlanta, and it was immediately evident that they would be the perfect match for South End’s laid-back and fun-loving culture,” PGC partner Eric Nichols said in the release. “They have cultivated a distinct community at each of their locations by embracing the vibrancy of the neighborhood, while also offering some of the most innovative and exceptional beers.”
The Charlotte taproom will feature “a diverse, internationally-award winning tap list, sweeping outdoor spaces, hand-crafted neapolitan-style pizzas, and a curated wine and cocktail program,” according to the release.
The company has not selected a distributor for the Charlotte market yet, but plans to begin distribution in the city to coincide with the taproom’s opening in early 2023. Monday Night “eventually plan[s] to roll statewide, but want[s] to start with just Charlotte so we can really go deep in that market before expanding,” Heck told Brewbound.
North Carolina will be Monday Night’s fourth market and the first it has added since 2018, when it began shipping to Tennessee, according to the brewery’s website. It also ships within its home state of Georgia and to Alabama, which it added in 2014.
Monday Night operates taprooms in Atlanta; Birmingham, Alabama; and Nashville, Tennessee. In Atlanta, the brewery operates two locations: its original brewery and taproom in the city’s West Midtown neighborhood, and its Garage location in the West End neighborhood, where Monday Night brews sour beers and houses its barrel-aging program.
Last year, Monday Night’s production output increased +3%, to 23,000 barrels of beer, a record for the 11-year-old brewery, according to the May/June edition of the New Brewer, published by the Brewers Association (BA). BA data does not include production volume of non-beer products, so Monday Night’s Narwater craft hard seltzer line is excluded from its output.
The Charlotte-area craft beer industry has expanded in recent years and the city brewers guild, the Charlotte Independent Brewers Alliance (CIBA), counts nearly 50 breweries and cideries in its membership. Last year, CIBA further professionalized when it named Nils Weldy its first-ever executive director.