Comprehensive Charlotte Breweries Spreadsheet

Spreadsheet available here

I have compiled all the key information about each of the 32 Charlotte breweries into a single consolidated spreadsheet that anyone can view. This will be updated as new breweries open, existing breweries close, or other relevant event changes occur to existing breweries. Comment below or shoot me a note if something in the spreadsheet is incorrect, and I will update it. The fields in the spreadsheet are as follows:

Name – Self-explanatory, the name of the brewery

HQ vs Satellite – Denotes if the brewery is a satellite brewery with the original flagship outside of Charlotte or whether it is local. As noted in the introduction, I have only included the larger flagship brewery in cases where a brewery has two charlotte locations (i.e. Protagonist, Legion).

Non Beer Options – Every group has at least one non-beer drinker. Most breweries will serve at least some form of cider, seltzer, or wine. This column, along with the notes column, describes what alcoholic non-beer options the brewery has, if any. This can be either on tap or canned, and might not be something the breweries themselves produce. This column is from memory, so feel free to comment or reach out to me if a brewery has changed their non-beer options or if you have an answer for one of the breweries that is currently blank!

Food Option – This is essentially whether they have a restaurant in-house, have food trucks, just have snacks, or have no food at all (i.e. BYOF). Note that many breweries that have food trucks only have them during peak hours/days. For the latest information on what food truck the brewery has and the schedule, please see the breweries website (also included in this spreadsheet).

Food trucks at Sycamore Brewing

Food/ Non-Beer Notes – As mentioned above, this characterizes the non-beer alcohol options and food options where applicable.

Google Rating – Google rating as of 8/1/2021. Caveats apply, as anyone with a google can write a review of any business. Additionally, newer places of business tend to have higher average review. However, this, along with the Yelp ratings, serves as a rough proxy for how “good” the average customer thinks the brewery is overall.

Yelp Rating – Yelp rating as of 8/1/20201. As with google ratings, there is flaws to using Yelp ratings. Yelp has been known to propagate fake reviews and take down certain reviews at the discretion of the business. Nonetheless, Yelp ratings can combine with Google ratings to serve as a rough proxy for how “good” the brewery is.

Untappd Rating – Untapped beer rating as of 8/1/20201. This is strictly a measure of how “good” their average beer is according to the community. I plan to update all three of these ratings semi-annually, so note that some small changes will occur over time.

Normalized Rating – I took each of the three sets of ratings and assigned them percentiles within Charlotte Breweries. For example: Google ratings ranged from 4.2 (D9 Uptown) to 4.9 (Lower Left and Petty Thieves). D9 would be at 0%, Lower Left and Petty Thieves would be at 100%, and every other brewery would be somewhere in between. This accounts for Google, Yelp, and Untappd all having different ranges of ratings: on untapped 4/5 is outstanding, and 3.5/5 is awful, while the range of scores on yelp is much more drastic. I then took all three percentiles and averaged them for an overall score from 0-100%, where 100% would mean the brewery was the top rated by each set of rankings. This methodology inherently gives twice as much weight for overall customer ratings (Google + Yelp) as it does for strictly beer ratings (Untappd). I think this is fair, since untapped only considers half of the brewery experience, and doesn’t require users to have physically been to the brewery to try their beer.

All-in-all, I believe this is the most scientific and objective way of seeing how the public rates each brewery and how they stack up collectively. Without spoiling the power rankings too much, I was surprised at how many of my least favorite breweries were also the lowest rated by this methodology. While there are a fair number of significant outliers in my opinion, this rating is a great tool of figuring out which breweries to avoid and which ones are worth checking out if you don’t want to trust my power rankings.

Area – I have broken up the Charlotte map into mini regions/neighborhoods in order to classify where the brewery is located and help with potential brewery-hopping efforts. The full map is outlined below:

Address – The physical address of the brewery.

Website – The Breweries website. Many will tell you what they have on tap, what food trucks are there this week, when they have trivia or run club, etc.

Beer – My rating of the beer on a scale of 0 to 5. A detailed explanation of the beer ranking is available in my introduction post. This will remain hidden until the power rankings have been completed.

Atmosphere – My rating of the overall atmosphere of the brewery on a scale of 0 to 5. A detailed explanation of the atmosphere rankings is available in my introduction post. This will remain hidden until the power rankings have been completed.

Overall – My overall rating on a scale of 0 to 5, averaging my beer and atmosphere ratings. This will remain hidden until the power rankings have been completed.