It’s Lime Time For Charlotte Brewers

Kit Burkholder reaches into one of the refrigerators that line one wall in Kit’s Trackside Crafts, his bottle shop and taproom in Pineville. He pulls out a white 12-ounce can. The label displays a drawing of a man who paddleboards against a “sun” in the form of a lime slice. This is by far Burkholder’s best-selling beer and a favorite among his customers, many of them Charlotte brewers. “Oh, yeah,” says Andrew Viapiano, co-owner and head brewer at nearby Middle James Brewing. “I drink that all the time.”

And it’s (gasp!) not a Charlotte beer. It’s the Lime Pilsner from Uinta Brewing in Salt Lake City, about 2,000 miles west. The brewery confirms that Kit’s is its top retail partner east of the Mississippi for that particular beer. (“Kit has been a strong supporter of Uinta over the years,” says Brand and Creative Manager Leonard Gath, “and we are grateful for his continued enthusiasm for one of our favorite beers.”)

How’d that happen? We’ll explain shortly, but the answer is more complicated than the result: In the past five years or so—due in part to the popularity of that western lime pilsner—Charlotte brewers have cranked out enough lime-infused lagers to practically bridge the distance between here and Utah.

You can sample 20 or more of them at what’s become a local celebration of citrus beer: the Lime Lager Thunderdome, a two-day event that Kit’s Trackside Crafts has hosted on or near Memorial Day weekend since 2022. Hundreds come by to blind-taste-test lime beers and rank their favorites. Last year, about 750 voted.

It’s informal. You can come on in and sample as much as you want—but submit only one ballot. This year’s event is scheduled for Saturday, May 31, and Sunday, June 1. (Burkholder and his friends got the name from the 2005 comedy Waiting …, in which a character remarks, “Welcome to Thunderdome, bitch,” itself a reference to a 1985 Mad Max movie. “We’re just goofy sometimes,” Burkholder says.)

Carolina Sky-Lime from Middle James Brewing, the work of co-owner and Head Brewer Andrew Viapiano, has won the Lime Lager Thunderdome champion’s belt twice.

Here’s how that Utah pilsner lit the fuse for the Charlotte lime beer boom. Burkholder, a 46-year-old Charlotte native, worked for a time as an architectural consultant in the Washington, D.C., area. There, he encountered an annual (now defunct) food and beer event called SAVOR. Burkholder moved back to Charlotte in 2014 to work in the beer industry and founded the first of Harris Teeter’s in-store bars, a whole other story.

In 2016, a few months before he opened Kit’s, Burkholder and his friend Federico “Feddy” De La Torre IV—now the head brewer at Town Brewing in Wesley Heights—traveled north to attend SAVOR. Burkholder was looking for beers to stock, and he and De La Torre began talking to the Uinta Brewing folks, who encouraged them to try their Lime Pilsner. “Me and Feddy took a sip of it,” Burkholder says, “and we looked at each other like, ‘Oh, shit.’” He ordered five cases and a couple of sixtel kegs.

Back in Pineville, he says, “We just kept on putting it on tap, and we kept on selling it. People started buying it by the case, and now we do over 5,000 cans of it a year—our little tiny shop.” Local brewers, just starting to crank up their own operations, bought and quaffed Uinta Lime Pilsners with enthusiasm. One after another, they began to develop their own lime lagers.

Viapiano was one of the first. He introduced Carolina Sky-Lime not long after Middle James opened in August 2019. “My friend’s dad used to only drink Bud Light Lime. We’d steal it from him all the time,” he says. “When I started brewing, I was like, ‘I want to make my own, hopefully better version.’ We started out with just a traditional American lager, and all we do at the end is put an egregious amount of lime puree in.” That’s one way to make a memorable lime-infused beer. Puree lends the brew a fruity sweetness, while lime zest, which contains aromatic oils, makes for a tarter beer with a stronger “nose.”

Carolina Sky-Lime (promotional tagline: “Carolina on my lime”) won Thunderdome in 2022 and again in 2024. The 2023 winner was the De La Torre-brewed Mariachi Static Mexican lager from Town. The champions get to taste tart victory, of course, and earn a green leather championship belt with the Kit’s Trackside Crafts logo imprinted on a comically massive buckle.

Burkholder eagerly awaits this year’s competition and cautions contestants against hubris. Making good lime beers isn’t just a matter of squeezing lime juice into your beer. “I’ve had brewers sit in front of me who said, ‘Who submitted this? This is terrible,’” he says. “And it was theirs.”