NoDa Brewing Company in Charlotte turns 15 in October.ย
My mom and stepdad started it as what was supposed to be a retirement project, rolling their 401k savings into a small neighborhood brewery back when craft beer barely existed in Charlotte.
I’ve been part of this family business unofficially since day one, and I joined full-time five years ago after a post-Covid career shift. What started as friends and family chasing a passion for homebrewing has grown into a regional brewery serving five states. But the core tenets of the brewery never changed: build community, treat people well and never compromise on quality.
South Carolina is one of the states where we do business and it matters to us. Last year, we brought our standard for quality to a new category when we launched Happy Bird, our hemp-derived THC and CBD seltzer in March 2025.
I’ll be honest, I had my reservations when we first started exploring the category. Like a lot of people, I carried some outdated assumptions about who actually drinks these products. What changed my mind was hearing about a teammate’s wife, who had mostly stopped drinking alcohol and found in these beverages a way to still unwind at the end of a day.
Once I looked past my own assumptions, I saw the real consumer clearly: people looking for an alternative to a glass of wine or a couple of beers, not people looking to get as high as possible. Today, Happy Bird makes up roughly 11% of our revenue and is sold across North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, with more states in conversation if the regulatory picture clears up.
I know what it means to watch a business nearly come apart and rebuild anyway. Covid hit us right after we’d invested heavily in self-distribution and relocated a team to open a new warehouse near Raleigh. Our taproom, a major piece of our business at the time, went to zero overnight.
We did everything we could to avoid furloughing people, leaned on the community and got through it. That experience is part of why I take it seriously when I say a South Carolina ban on hemp beverages isn’t some abstract policy debate. It’s the kind of shock that puts people out of work and closes doors that don’t reopen.
This isn’t only a North Carolina brewery’s problem. It’s a South Carolina problem too. Retailers, restaurants and distributors across the state have built real business around this category, and a ban doesn’t just stop out-of-state brands like ours from selling here. It pulls the shelf space, the tax revenue and the jobs behind it out of South Carolina all at once.
“Over 3,000 jobs would be negatively impacted in South Carolina alone, and the state would lose over $1.5 billion in economic activity,” I tell lawmakers when they ask why this matters beyond a single brewery in Charlotte.
Here’s what I’d say directly to any South Carolina lawmaker considering a ban: killing this category doesn’t solve a problem. It creates one. The demand for these products isn’t going away. Banning them doesn’t make people stop wanting an alternative to alcohol. It just pushes that demand into an unregulated, unsafe market with none of the lab testing and labeling standards that responsible brands already hold themselves to. This is genuinely one of the few issues right now that doesn’t split neatly along party lines. People across the political spectrum just want a safe, legal way to relax and unwind, and the industry itself, not just government regulation, has largely policed that responsibly so far. What we are asking for is simple: government regulation and taxation that is on par with regulations in the alcohol industry.
If you care about this beverage category, whether you drink these products or just believe in fair treatment for a legitimate, tax-paying industry, the most useful thing you can do is make your voice heard. The Hemp Beverage Alliance makes this simple: visit its website, enter your information in their action center and send a letter to your representatives that is already written for you. Edit it if you want or just hit submit.
Support the brands you trust while you’re at it. South Carolina jobs and South Carolina tax dollars are on the line, and that’s a problem we can only fix together.
Jacob Virgil is president of NoDa Brewing Company in Charlotte.
Help keep the City Paper free.
No paywalls.
No subscription cost.
Free delivery at 800 locations.
Help support independent journalism by donating today.
