Pivots include offering expanded food and cocktail options, as well as increasing wholesale production
On a recent afternoon at Coast Brewing Company near the old Navy Yard, the bar patrons weren’t just drinking beer. Behind the counter, Aiden Merritt was stirring up cocktails—s’more old-fashioneds and clarified milk punches—in between pouring pints of the lagers and ales his father has brewed for nearly two decades.
For Jaime Tenny, Coast’s cofounder, the moment carried a certain symmetry. When she and her husband, David Merritt, opened the brewery in 2007, their son was six years old. Today, he runs the well-received cocktail program in the taproom, which they expanded in 2022. “It’s been awesome to see him take to it just like his dad did with beer 20 years ago,” Tenny says. “That’s a proud mom moment.”
The cocktails also say a lot about how much the craft beer world has changed since then. “If you’re just a brewery today—no wine, no liquor, no food—I think it’s almost impossible to make it,” Tenny says.
Charleston’s brewery scene looks very different than it did two decades ago. Many taprooms now offer cocktail menus, and some employ executive chefs. The industry that once seemed to add a new brewery every few months is now navigating a more complicated phase—one defined less by expansion than by adaptation. In fact, local breweries may well be at another inflection point, and whether the future will prove frothy or flat remains to be seen.
Charleston’s modern brewing scene dates back to 1993 and the founding of Palmetto Brewing Company, the first South Carolina brewery since Prohibition. For two decades, the industry was constrained by state laws that treated breweries more like factories than social places where people might enjoy drinking a beer. South Carolina’s three-tier distribution system rigidly separated alcohol producers from alcohol consumers. Brewers had to sell their beer to wholesale distributors, who then sold it to retailers like grocery stores and restaurants. Making beer and selling it directly to on-site customers simply wasn’t in the model.
That began to change in 2010, when a new law allowed breweries to serve four-ounce samples to visitors as part of a guided tour. But it took two additional pieces of legislation—the so-called “Pint Law” in 2013 and the “Stone Bill” in 2014—to finally unlock the industry. The first allowed breweries to sell up to three pints of beer per customer each day. The second removed the tour requirement to allow direct alcohol sales to guests, with the caveat of requiring an on-site commercial kitchen and serving food.
No longer were Charleston breweries just facilities where beer was made. They could become neighborhood gathering spots where family and friends (and dogs) could hang out and enjoy themselves. The brewery boom was on. “When I was writing the business plan for Commonhouse,” recalls Pearce Fleming, proprietor of North Charleston’s Commonhouse Aleworks, “there were four breweries in Charleston. When we broke ground in 2017, there were eight. When we opened our doors [in 2018], we were the 16th.”
And new entrants kept coming. At the peak, around 2020, there were roughly 35 breweries in operation in the greater Charleston area. However, COVID-19 threw a wrench in the works, as it did for the rest of the food-and-beverage world. Breweries faced additional challenges, including supply chain disruptions that sent aluminum can prices soaring. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 triggered a global surge in the price of grain, the largest input cost for breweries.
The Paycheck Protection Program and other Federal relief helped breweries weather the worst of the pandemic, but for many, post-COVID inflation and decreased taproom traffic proved unsustainable. In the past three years, at least 11 area breweries have closed their taprooms. Most are no longer making beer at all, though a few, including Fatty’s Beer Works and Cooper River Brewing, have engaged contract brewers to keep their brands in the market.
The most notable closure came last summer, when Palmetto Brewing, Charleston’s pioneering brewery, abruptly shuttered. In 2017, the business had been purchased by North Carolina-based Catawba Valley Brewing Co., which, four years later, was bought by a private equity-backed company out of Alabama. In June 2025, the firm fell behind on debt payments and ended up closing the Huger Street brewery and selling off its equipment.
Today, the Charleston brewing scene is somewhat smaller in scale and much more focused, and the nature of breweries is evolving. One lesson brewers took away from the pandemic turmoil is the importance of growing distribution—that is, selling canned beer via wholesalers to grocery stores and other retailers and kegs of beers to restaurants and bars.
“We used to sell basically 75 percent on premise, just out of the taprooms,” says Adam Goodwin, owner of Charles Towne Fermentory. He opened the brewery in a small storefront in the Avondale neighborhood in 2016 and, five years later, added a second taproom on Ashley River Road with a large outdoor beer garden. In 2024, needing more room for production, the Fermentory built a larger production facility with a taproom of its own on James Island.
“There is a healthy balance between wholesale and on-premise sales,” Goodwin continues, “so that’s been the real driver for getting this space [on James Island.] It’s not like all of a sudden we’re going to be making 10 times as much beer, but if we can maybe double what we’re doing wholesale, that’s finding that balance.”
Even for breweries with significant wholesale distribution, the taproom remains essential. Timmons Pettrigrew, co-owner and operations director at Edmund’s Oast Brewing Co., says that more than 80 percent of its total beer by volume is sold through distributors. “But the dollars don’t shake out equally,” he notes, since they make a much higher margin on the beer sold on-site.
“For us, [the taproom] is part of our DNA,” confirms Cameron Read, Edmund’s co-owner and brewing director. “A place where people can hang out, and we can show them what we’re about. Our bartenders can talk about the beers, and they can see us and our vibe. If we were just a building with a bunch of tanks, I feel like that loses a little bit of our soul.”
In recent years, food has proven to be an increasingly important element in local taprooms. In the first iteration of many breweries, meals and snacks were provided by food trucks or pop-up vendors with irregular schedules. Now, many local breweries are partnering with established restaurants to offer consistent in-house menus.
Former pop-up Bok Choy Boy took up permanent residency at Charles Towne Fermentory’s Avondale tasting room in 2023, and the following year Commonhouse partnered with Anthony DiBernardo of Swig & Swine to sell barbecue sandwiches and brisket burgers inside the brewery. Michael Toscano of downtown Italian restaurant Le Farfalle operates Da Toscano Fugazzi inside Revelry Brewing Co., and in January, Anh Toan Ho of Mount Pleasant’s Mì Xào began serving Vietnamese favorites like pho, bánh mì, and dumplings five days a week at Munkle Brewing Co.
“When we opened [Commonhouse], it was legally important to offer some sort of food,” says Fleming. Doing so removed the brewery tour requirements and sampling limits, but having an on-site kitchen turned out to be a boon for business. “Now, I would tell you, more than ever, it’s critical to have.”
Edmund’s Oast has taken things a step further. Last summer, the owners brought on Alex Yellen, formerly chef at Minero and Collectivo, to be the brewery’s executive chef—a notable move for a taproom.
Yellen’s menu includes amped-up versions of pub grub staples—burgers, wings, buffalo chicken sandwiches—along with more wide-ranging fare like chicken shawarma bowls and Thai lettuce wraps. “We were so lucky to get to work with chef Alex,” says Scott Shor, Edmund’s cofounder and co-owner. “His creativity and the ownership of the menu is evidence that we take the food super seriously.”
Ironically, serving drinks other than beer has also proven critical to long-term success. Coast is hardly the only local brewery with a cocktail menu. Holy City Brewing in North Charleston offers a slate of painkillers and palomas alongside hard seltzers and kombucha. Frothy Beard’s drinks menu includes a “reserve cabinet” of small-batch and single-barrel bourbons. So far, no local brewery has a sommelier on staff, but most offer a short list of wines by the glass and bottle.
“I think Charleston is very much a wine and cocktail town,” says Fleming. He notes that the hard-core craft beer crowd “is probably aging,” and that younger consumers aren’t as committed to a single type of beverage when they go out with friends. Last year, Fleming says, Commonhouse launched Cavu, a hemp-derived beverage brand, to provide “an N/A offering to what I now call the ‘omnibus drinker,’” who might want a craft beer one day but something fizzy or nonalcoholic the next.
Looking ahead, the multimillion dollar question still remains. Is the downturn that breweries have experienced over the past few years a necessary correction after the frothy boom or are we witnessing a longer-term secular decline for craft beer?
Nationwide, Gen Z isn’t drinking as much beer as previous generations. The Brewers Association trade group estimates that craft beer sales declined by four percent in 2024 and another five percent last year. At the same time, other alcohol categories like hard seltzer and ready-to-drink canned cocktails are on the rise, as are hemp-derived THC beverages, which became legal in South Carolina in 2018. “It’s kind of a nuanced market,” says Edmund’s Oast’s Read. “There’s a lot of younger people that are finding other ways to enjoy beer or reducing the number of occasions that they drink craft beer. I think there’s an evolution that’s happening.”
Goodwin of Charles Towne Fermentory agrees. “Your core consumer of alcohol is drinking a little bit less,” he says, “so they’re being a little bit choosier on where they’re spending their money.” Charleston, he predicts, “will eventually find that equilibrium of the number of breweries that we can support in a city.”
There was a period just after the pandemic when it looked like the new mantra for craft beer was “go big or go home.” Local breweries were expanding their production lines. Private equity was snatching up and consolidating smaller breweries into regional conglomerates. These days, though, most Charleston breweries are more focused on staying the course and maximizing the home market in the Lowcountry.
None of the owners interviewed had radical plans for new locations or rapid growth, much less mergers and acquisitions. Goodwin says Charles Towne Fermentory will continue expanding its wholesale distribution in the years ahead, but “the main thing is doing whatever we can—little things or big things—to improve the on-premise experience for our local customers.”
Edmund’s Oast has added a few field sales reps as it tries to land more accounts in Georgia and North Carolina, but Read says the main strategy is to “continue to make as much craft beer as we possibly can and try to continue making it better.”
“Trends come and go,” says Tenny of Coast, “but consistently making really good beer, that’s why we’ve stayed around so long. Just staying the course and committing to what you started for has proved to be the smarter choice overall.
“I’m glad we built this [new] taproom,” she adds. “I feel complete in seeing all that through. Are there tweaks—things we could do a little better—all the time? Yes. But what we’ll do next, I don’t know.”
The craft beer market may be smaller and more competitive than it once was, but the brewers who remain seem less focused on chasing the next big thing than on refining what they already do best. Charleston’s craft beer future may not be quite as frothy as it once seemed—but for the brewers who remain, it may prove more sustainable.
New England has its hazy IPAs, and the West Coast its hoppy pilsners and pale ales. We asked local brewers whether they considered there to be a distinctively Charleston style of beer. The uniform answer was “not really.” At this stage, most local breweries have settled in on a handful of core beers that are always on tap, but they continually experiment with a wide range of styles in everything else they make, which is where their distinct personalities emerge.
“We have six core brands,” says Cameron Read of Edmund’s Oast. “But we love exploring historic beer styles and doing an English pale ale or a pils. It’s as by the book as we can possibly make it when we go for a style [like a pilsner]. We try to make it to specs as humanly possible. It’s all Hallertau Mittelfrüh hops, German pilsner malt, Weihenstephaner lager yeast.”
Snafu Brewing Co. in North Charleston has gone in a different direction, becoming known for its neon-hued sours. These tart, fruity brews span the rainbow, from the bright red Nordic Trout (think red fish candy) to the vivid green Keeping It Teal to the purple grape-conditioned Snafusion.
“You’ll see a lot of German stuff from us,” says Jaime Tenny of Coast Brewing, “because that’s where you can shine on the really good drinking beer.” Don’t expect to see any hazy IPAs or hard seltzers on their taps. “David will only make beer that he wants to drink,” she notes.
A mile up the road in Park Circle, Commonhouse Aleworks is very much into hop-forward beers like the juicy Park Circle Pale Ale and Looking East, a West Coast IPA. “We definitely don’t lean too heavily into wild ales,” Pearce Fleming says, “and we don’t lean too heavily into the sours.” He does, however, point to one characteristic that he thinks differentiates Charleston’s breweries from those in other parts of the country. “Most of our breweries tend to be outdoor-centric,” he says, “having space for people to sit outside and enjoy a craft beer. I think we have a preponderance of that here because obviously our weather supports that and, on the whole, the breweries here are family friendly.”
Sounds like a pretty good style to us.
