Weeping Radish Farm Brewery founder Uli Bennewitz will hand over the reins of the 35-year-old craft brewery to a new owner at the end of this month and retire from the beer industry to focus on farming.
The Grandy, North Carolina-based brewery – which includes a farm, butchery and pub – specializes in farm-to-glass and farm-to-table offerings, which Bennewitz told Brewbound he expects to continue under the brewery’s new owner, Sumit Gupta – CEO and co-founder of SAGA Realty and Construction, a real estate development firm based in Kill Devil Hills in the state’s Outer Banks region.
“We’ve created a canvas on which to paint,” Bennewitz said. “The new owner can use that canvas and can paint on it in any direction he wants to. He can expand the brewery, can expand the farm-to-table concept. There’s so many different things you can do with it. And it takes somebody younger to really take that concept and run with it.”
Weeping Radish will close for renovations after January 4, with plans to reopen in March, according to the brewery’s website. All 20 employees are expected to retain their jobs, and Bennewitz will stay on in a consulting role to advise Gupta.
A German immigrant who moved to the U.S. in the 1980s to pursue a career in farming, Bennewitz blazed a trail for North Carolina brewers when he led the charge to modernize state alcohol manufacturing laws as he prepared to open Weeping Radish. At the time, Bennewitz was living and working in Manteo when his older brother, who lived in Germany, suggested buying brewing equipment from a friend there looking to sell.
“My brother said ‘Look, why don’t you buy that and open up in Manteo and you can just sell beer and sandwiches and make a fortune?’” Bennewitz said. “Because he was my big brother, I believed him.”
After he purchased the brewery, someone recommended that Bennewitz check in with ABC – an acronym that stumped him.
“I didn’t know what ABC was – I thought it was a school activity or learning center or something like that,” he said with a laugh. “Turns out to be Alcoholic Beverage Control. I mean, this is the only civilized country in the world that has such a thing.”
Bennewitz traveled to the state capital to meet with the ABC and shared his plans to open a Bavarian-inspired brewery in Manteo, which he was perplexed to learn was illegal. However, the bureaucrats’ next suggestion flummoxed him even more.
“The chairman of the commission said ‘Why don’t you go ahead and change the law? We’ll help you,’” Bennewitz recalled to Brewbound. “I was completely baffled. I’d been in the country for less than five years. I was on a visitor’s visa. I didn’t have a green card at the time.
“Sure enough, they helped me,” he continued. “A local senator sponsored the bill and we walked into the house and the senate, and it passed in less than six months. The most amazing thing about that bill is it’s probably the only law that was ever passed in this country’s history without a single attorney hour being billed by anybody.”
Today, North Carolina boasts a robust craft beer industry, which includes both prominent local brands and production facilities owned by some of the largest craft brewers in the country. Last year, the state had 359 craft breweries, ranking it ninth in the nation for number of breweries. Combined, they produced 912,589 barrels of beer in 2020, according to the Brewers Association (BA). In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic hampered tourism, the state’s beer industry generated $2.8 billion in economic impact.
In addition to pioneering a legislative environment in the 1980s that eventually allowed such a vibrant beer scene to thrive, Bennewitz and Weeping Radish introduced the notion of farm-to-table butchery to the area in 2007.
“Everybody said in the beginning ‘You’re going to do what now?’” he said. “Even today, if you Google ‘brewery butchery’ there’s only one name that comes up in the whole Google world and that’s us.”
He sees Weeping Radish, which opened in its current location in 2005, as “part of a much bigger movement.” Weeping Radish aims to serve food that has not traveled more than 200 miles to the brewery, according to its website.
“It’s not just about beer,” Bennewitz said. “It’s really about creating a focal point back to local, because what we’ve done is we have taken our economy and gone global with it. And then global crashed for the first time in 2007, and now it’s weakening again because of all the supply chain issues.”
The local food and beverage movement – including brewers, distillers, winemakers, coffee shops and farmers markets – has the potential to ignite a spark in a new generation of craftspeople, he said.
“You see the enthusiasm when you go to a microbrewing conference or when you go to a meat conference or when you go to a culinary school,” Bennewitz said. “The enthusiasm of the young generation to be part of that and get involved in this craft world outstrips any enthusiasm you can find in a college world.”
He recalled training young brewers at Weeping Radish who “were basically college dropouts.”
“They started in the brewery and they took off like a rocket and suddenly they had a smile on their face and a determination about where they wanted to be,” Bennewitz said. “That is what it’s all about, in my opinion.
“If we can just change the focus of our education system and get away from this goal of shoving as many kids through college as we can and turning around and saying OK, there are kids that need to go to college, there are kids that need to go to university, but there is a huge swath of young people who, if they get involved in the craft business in the broadest sense, they will flourish,” he continued.
None of Bennewitz’s children were interested in running Weeping Radish after he stepped down, a decision he had been mulling for a year. He said the complications the pandemic wrought on the beer industry made the choice easier for him.
Other first wave craft brewers found themselves in similar successor-less situations and have opted to sell or retire, including Bell’s Brewery founder Larry Bell and Stoudts Brewing founder Carol Stoudt. Last month, Bell announced he agreed to sell the brewery to Kirin-owned Lion Little World Beverages, the parent company of New Belgium Brewing. Stoudt ceased operations about a month before the pandemic upended the beer industry.
“My thing was to find somebody who can take this to the next level, somebody who will continue to employ the staff that we have,” Bennewitz said. “That was my goal for this year, and we’ve accomplished it.”