Metal Shed Brewing: A Home Brewer in a Beer Boomtown

Last year, while working on our annual brewery directory, I came across a Google Maps listing for a Charlotte brewery I’d never heard of, Metal Shed Brewing. It had a 4.4-star rating, with comments like, “Customer service is amazing here. 10/10” and “The brewmaster is a hottie.” The singular one-star review read, “Drove here, it’s just some guy’s house.”

“That one’s my favorite,” Mark Flynn, the 61-year-old pest control company regulator behind the listing, tells me later with a soft chuckle. (The other reviews are from his wife and sons’ friends.) 

Flynn belongs to a part of Charlotte’s craft beer scene that’s never advanced beyond 10-gallon setups stashed in basements, closets, or garages. It’s not because the brewers aren’t talented enough, or because the local market is full, or because they want to drink a style of beer they can’t find at one of Charlotte’s 100-plus breweries. Homebrewing is the foundation of the craft beer movement, with up to 90% of commercial craft brewers starting at home. But a lot of folks want to keep their hobby as just that. A bio at the top of the Metal Shed Brewing Instagram account informs readers that it’s a private home brewery prohibited from selling its beer.

I visit Flynn at his brick ranch in east Charlotte on an October afternoon. He appears quickly at the glass storm door. His gray hair is tied back in a low ponytail. His eyes are framed by passé rectangular glasses, and he’s wearing a red T-shirt with the Metal Shed Brewing logo, which he designed, ironed on the back. (“Is my logo crooked?” he asks me later. It is.)

“Well,” he says in his warm, soft-spoken drawl once I’m inside, “this is it. You just tell me what you want me to do.”

In a corner of the front room is a homemade bar, slightly unstable and just wide enough for two stools. Next to the life-size cardboard cutout of Spock is a mini-fridge with two taps on top—a homemade kegerator. An Amazon Fire tablet mounted above it displays a Taplist.io menu of the two beers inside: a mango pale ale and a California common lager.

For more than a decade, Mark Flynn has tinkered with beer recipes in his backyard shed.

I explain to Flynn that I’m here to learn about why he homebrews—and why he’s spent so much time on Metal Shed’s online presence if it’s not a business. He shakes his head at a lot of my questions but politely humors me. Brewing beer, Flynn explains, is just one of many hobbies he enjoys when he’s not working his longtime job for the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. I can pick out the others just by looking around. A 3D printer is next to a desk with multiple computers. There’s a mini-greenhouse of bonsai trees in the backyard, diagrams of Volkswagen Beetles on the walls (and a couple of the real things parked outside), and refinished furniture throughout the brimming but tidy house.

He brewed his first beer in 2012, when his oldest of two sons, Sam, in college at the time, wanted to try it. “We got some of the Mr. Beer-type malt kits and started with that. Then we confiscated this,” he says, gesturing to a 5-gallon glass jug beside the kegerator. Flynn says his dad brewed (“not good”) beer in it in the ’70s using a Prohibition-era recipe from Flynn’s grandfather. Sam got bored with homebrewing after a handful of batches, but Flynn was hooked. 

“So what is it that you like about brewing?” I ask. 

His reply is quick this time. “Oh, too much. The chemistry and creativity. You can make it as hard or as simple as you want. It’s hard to mess up, because you’re going to get something. It may not be something you want to share with anyone, but you will get something.” 

Soon, his setup outgrew the kitchen and his wife’s patience, so he moved it to a 7-by-8-foot metal storage shed in the backyard. He warms up as we talk. He leads me to the shed and laughs at himself as he points out all the things—like lights and fans and filtration systems—he’s rigged and retrofitted. There’s a shiny 10-gallon homebrew tank on the floor that gets the job done faster, though Flynn has a soft spot for the original system, in the corner, that he engineered from a stock pot and an orange plastic cooler. On a homemade wooden shelf sits a white binder, and he opens it to show me recipes he’s used—including his grandfather’s—and old iterations of his Metal Shed logo. Behind the shed are two rows of hops he planted several years ago to use in his beers.

Flynn with his homemade kegerator.

Flynn says he brews “one or two” 5-gallon batches a month, but he shares them only with friends and family—though strangers occasionally find out about him and ask to visit. (Legally, he says, he has to decline.) The online presence, he explains, is merely because he also enjoys building websites and keeping a digital log of his brewing progress. 

“I just like makin’ stuff,” he says with conviction. It’s his most assured explanation of the day. “And makin’ do with whatever I already have or can find—like the cooler! My friend gave it to me, and apparently, it came from a church.” He tilts it back to show me where “Providence Road Church” is scrawled on the bottom in black Sharpie. “I wonder how they’d feel about that.”

“Well, Jesus drank wine,” I reply. 

“Yeah!” he says. “Though I have not made wine yet.”

Tess Allen is the associate editor.