Powering Ranking Overview

Sugar Creek Brewery

I'm just some guy that's been to every single brewery in Charlotte at least once (more about me here). My goal with this blog is to provide a craft beer drinker’s perspective on Charlotte breweries with a few hot takes along the way. With 32 breweries in a single city, there are bound to be some duds and some studs. I hope that this set of rankings can help guide your Charlotte Brewery experience.

What is a power ranking? 

A power ranking a meme-ified concept where you take a bunch of things in a category and rank them from best to worst. Part of the fun is knee-jerk reactions and hot takes that are more emotional than objective. I am trying to straddle the line of my subjective opinions based on personal experiences, and objective ranking criteria with a bit of science behind it. While there are many "Charlotte's top x breweries" articles and blogs out there, they read as lists of places that the author likes. None of them serve as true comprehensive rankings, and none of them have the level of detailed required to do each brewery justice.

I will publish posts one-by-one starting with what I think is the worst brewery in Charlotte and end with what I think is the best. Posts will consist of key information about the brewery (i.e. where is it, do they have food, etc.), as well as my rating of the brewery based on my ranking criteria described below. This information is also stored in the public facing Google doc.

A quick note on "worst" and "best" as I am phrasing it: in addition to this being based on my own opinions, this is also relative to the breweries that exist in Charlotte. Charlotte has such a strong beer scene that many towns would be lucky to have just one "below average" brewery from this list. You will find that almost every brewery in Charlotte has some fans that consider it the best in the city. In actuality, there are only a handful of breweries that I truly dislike. The aura of negativity that will emerge throughout the first few posts will quickly be replaced by more ambivalent and even positive tones as we get into the mid twenties and below.

Free Range Brewing

What are the ranking criteria?

In my opinion, there are two aspects to why you would go to a brewery and they are of equal importance: the beer and the atmosphere.

Beer: In the simplest terms, my rating here is how good I think the beer is at the brewery. 0 means I’d rather drink Natty Light, 5 means they collectively have the best beer I’ve every had. However, there are several things at play. First, I think of the overall portfolio of the beer. If they have great IPAs and nothing else, their rating has to come out somewhere in the middle. If their IPAs are shitty but they have some good stouts, their rating also has to come out somewhere in the middle. I also factor in quantity of choices: its hard for a brewery that literally has 4 beers on tap to be considered as highly as a brewery that has 20 beers on tap unless all 4 of those beers are better than all 20 at the other brewery. Lastly, I give some credence to having good flagship beers versus just having a bunch of experimental brews. What’s the point of brewing a really good and unique beer if you’re never going to replicate the recipe? I will call out these nuances as I go through the rankings but know that the beer ranking is as comprehensive as I can possibly make it. I’ve tried to get a flight at just about every brewery I’ve been to, and in many cases have been multiple times.

Atmosphere: This one is a bit more subjective. Ultimately, think of this rating as my desire to want to spend time at this place, regardless of the beer. 0 means I’d rather be anywhere else, 5 means it is my favorite place to be in the city. A lot of the rating here comes down to the overall design, theme, and location of the brewery. How lively is the place? How friendly are the employees and the customers? Are there any fun games and things to interact with? Do they have live music? The list goes on. The atmosphere rating serves to asses how “cool” the place is.

In order to place each brewery in this ranking, I have taken the average of their beer rating and their atmosphere rating, to give an overall score from 0 to 5. In an ideal world, beer and atmosphere are independent from one another. In actuality, I’m sure there is some bias that creeps in. I’m more likely to think favorably upon the beer if I liked the atmosphere and had a good time there. In any case, the resulting scores have determined where each brewery stacks up in the Charlotte Brewery Power Rankings.

OMB

What breweries are included?

For the purposes of these power rankings, I am including only breweries within the City of Charlotte (i.e. they must have a Charlotte address). Pineville, Mathews, Huntersville, and the other suburbs that exist outside of Charlotte do not count. Further limiting the scope, I am only counting a brewery once if they operate multiple locations in Charlotte (such as Legion, Protagonist, and NoDa). For the ratings of atmosphere, I will be evaluating the atmosphere of what each brewery considers their flagship or main location. Clarification will be included in each post where applicable. Lastly, I have decided to include breweries that exist in Charlotte but are headquartered elsewhere (such as Fonta Flora, Catawba, and D9). Under those Criteria, we get to our number of 32 breweries in Charlotte as of 8/1/2021. As breweries continue to pop-up, I will consider making supplemental posts where I say where I think the new brewery would slot into the original power ranking. The 32 breweries subject to these power rankings are listed below in alphabetical order.

1. Armored Cow Brewing Company
2. Birdsong Brewing Company
3. Blue Blaze Brewing
4. Brewers at 4001 Yancey
5. Catawba Brewing Company Charlotte
6. D9 Brewing Uptown Charlotte
7. Devils Logic Brewing
8. Divine Barrel Brewing
9. Edge City Brewery
10. Fonta Flora Brewery - Optimist Hall
11. Free Range Brewing
12. Heist Brewery
13. Legion Brewing
14. Lenny Boy Brewing Company
15. Lower Left Brewing Company
16. NoDa Brewing Company
17. Olde Mecklenburg Brewery
18. Petty Thieves Brewing Company
19. Pilot Brewing
20. Protagonist Southend
21. Resident Culture Brewing Company
22. Salty Parrot Brewing Company
23. Salud Cervezaria
24. Sugar Creek Brewing Company
25. Sycamore Brewing
26. The Suffolk Punch
27. Town Brewing
28. Triple C Brewing Company
29. Trolley Barn Fermetory
30. Unknown Brewing Company (Closed as of August 2021)
31. Vaulted Oak Brewing
32. Wooden Robot Brewery