In late May, when Currahee Brewing Co. opened in the former Hop Alley Brewpub space on South Main Street in downtown Alpharetta, it was a full-circle moment for Brandon Hintz.
Hintz and his wife, Jodi, opened Hop Alley in June 2013. Situated in a long, narrow storefront with a brewhouse behind the bar, Hintz said at the time that the concept was simple: “Bring a great beer bar/brew pub to outside the perimeter.”
Some three years later, in July 2016, Hintz opened Currahee in Franklin, North Carolina, with a similar purpose in mind.
The brewery produces several year-round beers in cans and on draft, including the flagship German-style Wayah Lager, as well as seasonal and limited release offerings.
The German-inspired biergarten overlooks the Little Tennessee River, drawing visitors from western North Carolina and beyond.
Nowadays, Hintz, who started out brewing at Atlanta’s SweetWater, divides his time between Franklin and Alpharetta. When I caught up with him, recently, he was at Currahee in Alpharetta, brewing another batch of beer.
“When I left SweetWater, I wanted to do something a little different,” Hintz recalled. “But as you know, the laws in Georgia weren’t where we wanted them to be to open a brewery, so we decided to do the brewpub and sell our beer over the bar.
“It did really well for us and we were able to open up Currahee. We started construction in 2015 and we opened in 2016, and kind of ran it and Hop Alley for a while. But in 2017, when the law changed, we decided to bring Currahee down here to Alpharetta.”
Under the new law, Hintz was able to close the restaurant side of the business, freeing up more space for the brewing operation, and eliminating all the hassles that come with food service.
“It’s a tough business, and it wasn’t really what I wanted to do,” he said. “When we had the opportunity to go to a full brewery, I jumped on it. The fact that Currahee was doing pretty well, I thought that it would be a good business decision for us to rebrand and open down here with a major face lift.
“The idea with the construction was to make it not like Hop Alley anymore. We wanted to give people a new experience. And we felt that putting a little money into the place would be worth it. We ripped out the front facade and put in overhead doors and awnings, changed out most of the fixtures, and put in new bar tops.”
What’s more, all the changes in Alpharetta have created a symbiotic relationship with the Franklin brewery.
“We’re doing all the test batches in Alpharetta, and then we’re bringing the year-round beer from Franklin down here,” Hintz said. “And we also have seven or eight one-off batches that we’re running through our seven barrel system down here.”
As is often the case in different locations, the best-sellers in Franklin aren’t necessarily the best sellers in Alpharetta, especially when it come to beer styles.
“Up there, we do a German-style lager, called Wyah Lager, with German malt and German lager yeast that we change up a little bit with New Zealand hops. It is bar none our best-seller in the tasting room in Franklin. “But in the Asheville market, it’s our Garand IPA, which we call a mid-coast IPA, with a east coast malt backbone, and west coast hops. And then we have our Lucky Scars, which we came out with at the beginning of the year. It’s a wild IPA with brettanomyces and some funky hops that give it a really distinct flavor. That one is killing it for us up there, and we’re trying to get it in distribution down here.”
The good news is, you can find Lucky Scars on draft in Alpharetta, along with almost any other beer Currahee brews in either location — including Brush Creek, a plum Berliner Weisse, and Helldiver IPA, made with fruit peel.
“We’re trying to cater to the Atlanta palate, rather than the western North Carolina palate, which is completely different,” Hintz said. “Here it’s a little more funky, with sours and fruits, and a lot more danky IPAs. But we’ll be playing with some things with coffee and some Belgian beers, too.”
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