Tracing History from Charlotte’s First Brewer to Olde Mecklenburg Brewery

To paraphrase humorist and legendary lager imbiber Mark Twain, rumors of the Charlotte craft beer scene’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

This is not to say that the industry hasn’t been weathering the winds of change. In recent years, Charlotte’s craft beer boom, which saw nearly 20 independent breweries open in the decade between 2009-19, has leveled off and even faltered.

In our April 2024 Beer Issue, Queen City Nerve reported on the ways the scene had contracted slightly, citing multiple brewery closings such as Weathered Souls Brewing Company, D9 Brewing Company, Blue Blaze Brewing, Midnight Mulligan Brewing, The Beverly Cidery and Dreamchaser’s Brewery.

Although the Brewers Association, a nationwide nonprofit representing independent craft brewers, put Charlotte’s Artisanal Brewing Ventures at the 21st position among top brewing businesses, the association did not list any Charlotte companies among its top 50 brewers of 2024.

“[It’s] the market maturing rather than saturation or … any sort of bubble burst,” says local beer writer Daniel Hartis.

In an email to Queen City Nerve, Jim Birch, chief operating officer at Olde Mecklenburg Brewery (OMB), Charlotte’s oldest running brewery, writes that the city’s craft beer market is in the midst of a retrenchment.

“We think craft beer will both continue to grow and grow in market share,” Birch says. “There remains an interest in local production, and we think people want fresh, all-natural products that are produced locally.”

Even as local breweries brace for the impact that steel and aluminum tariffs could have on their business, they are also appealing to customers’ changing tastes, particularly younger adults between 18-34 years old who are consuming beverages with lower alcohol content.

This is good news for OMB, which specializes in lagers, says Birch, noting that the city’s craft beer scene has turned to brewing traditional lower-alcohol styles like lager. Younger drinkers have also turned to nonalcoholic beverages in social situations. Several Queen City brewers have responded by launching a range of THC- and hemp-infused seltzers.

Brewers agree that there is an industry-wide shakeup, but Charlotte has seen its local and regional brewing fortunes ebb and flow before.

From fruits to lager

Beer brewing in the Piedmont, and in the Carolinas at large, dates from long before the arrival of Europeans. Beer made without wheat or barley, or ones that contain fruit flavoring agents, may seem like a recent innovation, stemming from craft beers’ glory days of the 2000s, but they are much older.

English explorer and naturalist John Lawson’s A New Voyage to Carolina, published in 1709, reported that Native Americans made beer from corn and cedar berries. Lawson also noted that Indigenous people sometimes made beer with molasses.

In NCPedia’s entry on beer and breweries, writer Karl Campbell notes that housewives in private homes carried out most of the brewing in the colonial Carolinas. Barley was a scarce commodity in the South, so settlers followed the Native Americans’ example and fermented molasses, apples and other fruit to make beer.

Taverns had begun to serve local beer with a few rare grain-based imports from England. When the Revolutionary War broke out, taverns continued to thrive in Charlotte, then known as Charlottetowne. Many drinking establishments sprang up along the Native American trade routes that became Trade and Tryon streets.

“Captain James Jack is without a doubt Charlotte’s most famous tavern keeper,” writes Hartis in his book Charlotte Beer: A History of Brewing in the Queen City, published in 2013. “The British burned Captain Jack’s home, which also housed the tavern, in 1780 when Cornwallis marched through Charlotte.”

Captain Jack’s equestrian statue graces the Little Sugar Creek greenway today, and Olde Mecklenburg Brewery brews a pilsner named for him. Captain Jack delivered The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence (The Mecklenburg Resolves) to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The legendary — and disputed — “Meck Dec” purportedly predates the US Declaration of Independence by over a year.

In any case, rare grain-based brews grew even more scarce after fighting broke out between revolutionaries and loyalists. North Carolina farmers converted corn and whatever grain they had into whiskey rather than beer. Whiskey was easier to store and transport than beer.

During the Civil War, North Carolina’s Confederate government disapproved of brewing, insisting that grain be used for food. It was into this beer-starved environment that Martin Munzler, Charlotte’s OG brewmeister, moved his family in 1859.

In July 1860, Munzler bought a parcel of land on the southwest corner of East Trade Street and what was then called Boundary Road, which marked the eastern edge of Charlotte at the time and is today called McDowell Street. Munzler’s former property is currently occupied by the offices of the Mecklenburg County District Attorney.

Writing for the Charlotte Museum of History, President of the Mecklenburg Genealogical Society Jeffrey Houser surmises that the Bavarian-born Munzler learned how to brew lager in his native land.

“Lager,” which comes from the German word “Lagern,” meaning to store, is a beer fermented and stored at cool temperatures, typically between 40-55 degrees Fahrenheit. This cold fermenting, possibly discovered in a system of caverns by Bavarian monks in the 15th century, produces a clean, crisp, and lighter-bodied beer with a lower alcohol content than ales.

Sugar Creek cut through Munzler’s property and he used the fresh water source to brew lager soon after he bought the parcel. Munzler’s business is probably the first beer brewery in Charlotte, and possibly the first in North Carolina.

Throughout the 1860s, Munzler placed notices in local newspapers advertising his business and offering to buy hops and barley to make his beer. The ads stopped running in 1870. Houser writes that subsequent newspaper articles stated Munzler had closed his brewery but there is no record of when the business was shuttered.

In July 1878, Munzler’s youngest son, Frederick, opened a beer garden, a forerunner of Charlotte’s taprooms, on the corner of East Trade Street and Boundary Road. Here, much like today’s breweries, families gathered outdoors and drank beer — or at least the men did.

Unlike his father, Frederick did not brew on the premises. He acted as a sales agent for the Berger & Engel Brewery Company. The Philadelphia-based business brewed a lager similar to Marvin Munzler’s.

In 1886, Frederick quit the beer business, joining the newly formed Charlotte Police force in 1890.Martin and other Munzler family members are today buried in plot 55 in Section T of Elmwood Cemetery.

From Prohibition to a pioneer tribute

“In 1880, Charlotte was home to 17 saloons,” Hartis says. Customers were free to consume bottled beer from their hometown as well as products from Atlanta and Philadelphia.

In 1905, however, 15 years before the 18th Amendment banned alcoholic beverages nationwide, Charlotteans, influenced and lobbied by the powerful Anti-Saloon League, approved an anti-saloon ordinance. As a result, the city went dry until 1945 despite the fact that national prohibition ended with the passage of the 21st Amendment in 1933.

Commercial brewing slowly returned to North Carolina after World War II. In 1948, The Atlantic Brewing Company (ABC) in Charlotte was the only brewery in the state producing beer for sale and distribution. By the 1950s, the company’s 120,000-barrel-capacity brewery at 300 S. Graham St., near where Truist Field stands today, boasted a canning line that could turn out three cans a second. ABC, which opened in the Queen City in 1936, closed in 1956.

There wouldn’t be a true homebrew renaissance in the Queen City until Olde Mecklenburg Brewery owner and founder and owner John Marrino stopped in the Queen City while traveling cross-country in the aughts. He was surprised to discover that Charlotte was the largest US city without a brewery.

In 2009, Marrino rectified that oversight by opening OMB, marking the first time since 1870 that the city could boast an independent local brewery.

“In 2009, there were no other distributing breweries in Charlotte,” Birch says. “South End Brewery had already closed and the Rock Bottom Brewpub in Uptown was on-premise only.”

OMB also debuted its flagship brew, called Copper, in 2009.

“Copper is a hybrid style that uses an ale yeast but ferments at a cooler temperature,” Birch says.

While the popular Copper ferments like a lager, it’s actually an altbier, a German ale that originated in Düsseldorf in 1838. Altbier probably would have been familiar to Munzler, who was born 1828, and didn’t immigrate from Bavaria to the United States until November 1852.

OMB opened its current facility on Yancey Road in 2012. It was a milestone in the saga of Queen City beer, but a product announcement made by OMB seven years earlier marks an even more resonant anniversary. In November 2018, OMB released Munzler’s Vienna Lager, an amber-tinged brew boasting a toasty flavor courtesy of darker malts typical in Munzler’s era.

And so, 159 years after Munzler opened his facility on Boundary Road, Charlotte’s current longest running brewery had brought the city’s beer making history full circle.

Read more: Where Does Charlotte’s Craft Beer Scene Go From Here? (2024)

“Mr. Martin Munzler was the first (recorded) brewer in Charlotte — so we wanted to shine a light on our local history,” Birch said.

In 2025, OMB cemented its place in the city’s independent brewing scene by celebrating its 16th year in operation — five more than the city’s OG brewmaster Munzler could claim.

Now surrounded by an ever-growing roster of competitors, Olde Mecklenburg might be the oldest kid on the block, but in the beer game, aging isn’t always a bad thing.