The Twelve-Ounce Pour of It ~ Dry County, Wet Town:
Our Founder purchased a 121-year-old soda bottling site. He bought the 32,000 square-foot, 2-acre spread, reinvented it into a Craft Brewery for You. Welcome to NODU, North Duke Street.
An historic evolution of tasteful indulgence? In the Dry County of Caldwell County, North Carolina, in the Wet Town of Granite Falls (population 4,722), a behindhand mill town stretched along the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains where residents voted in a liquor store in 1963 but didn’t vote in on-premise/off-premise beer and wine sales until 2005 (42 years later), an aging funk keyboardist & well-traveled foodie – the grandson of a coal miner of 41 years – decided to drag the Town to an idea: Soda pop. Begets Craft Beer.
Ordinances and a New Permitted Use for the Real Estate, one Building Inspector and a Fire Marshall, and some Dusty Sledgehammer Work later:
Granite Falls Brewing Company (“GFB”) opened locally to the public on September 6, 2013. GFB operates from the former home of Granite Bottling Works (1903-1978) and Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company of Hickory (1978-2012). To put the dates in perspective: soda production and bottling began on our site the same year the Wright Brothers took flight, Ford Motor Company was founded, Harley-Davidson was founded, Pepsi Cola was trademarked, the first Tour de France bicycle race was held, and the first World Series took place. The year 1903 was also the year Michael Joseph Owens invented the first machine to automate the production of glass bottles – “Lightning In A Bottle Owens Bottle Machine Company” – which sheds light on the 1903 birth of Bolick’s Bottling Plant, later to become Granite Bottling Works, and now home to Granite Falls Brewing Company.
Michael J. Owens, “Lightning In A Bottle Owens Bottle Machine Company” (1903)
When you enter GFB’s lobby, you’re stepping inside the original brick Granite Bottling Works plant. Prepare to be greeted by the original Cheerwine, Sun Drop, NuGrape, Grapette, Sun Crest, Sunny Isles, Diet-Way, Double Cola, My Cola, Flavors of the Highest Quality, and other surviving bottles in our lobby display case.
Journey on into our 220-seat tasting room, gastropub, and live music venue and you are exploring the 1962 bottling warehouse—constructed the same year Wal-Mart Stores was founded. Four TVs lend GFB a sports bar feel but remember you’re standing on a site that was operational seventeen years before the NFL was born. Get the picture? Our covered, Pet-friendly (dogs, cats, falcons, reptiles, rocks), heated and cooled patio lies just beyond the faraway door.
Tradition. But Evolved. GFB is proud to continue 121 years of Beverage Production and Packaging onsite at 47 Duke Street in Granite Falls. With special permission granted by Duke University Libraries (David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library), the Estate of H. Lee Waters, and Mr. Waters’s daughter specifically, we’re honored to bring you this segment from H. Lee Waters Film Collection “Movies of Local People”, Lenoir (N.C.), 1937 (Reel 1), showing GFB’s existing front building and site – and our predecessor, Granite Bottling Works in 1937. Enjoy stepping back 87 years in time:
Century-Old Roots. An unmistakable New Liquid. We didn’t invent soda pop—we simply built our craft brewery atop its foundation. Tradition. But Evolved.
Join us at our pet-friendly patio!
