Charlotte Brewers Embrace Witbier

They’re (ahem) not universally beloved. But in the depths of summer, a surging number of beer drinkers opt to wheat for it

Summer’s coming. You can feel it outside the walls of Triple C Brewing in South End on this mid-May afternoon: upper 80s, humidity rising. Time for a cold one. Inside, Garry McShane, recently installed as Triple C’s head brewer, orders two pints and walks them back to the table. I’ve asked for just a sample.

“You don’t have to finish it,” he says. “You need the full effect.”

Ordinarily, I’d laugh: Oh, I do think I’ll finish a cold beer on a hot day, thank you. But I’m feeling some apprehension. McShane proffers a wheat beer, Uncle John’s White Ale. (The Triple C folks are Deadheads.) Specifically, it’s a witbier, a Belgian-style hazy wheat ale with (usually) strong citrus and spice flavors. I have never developed a taste for witbiers or hefeweizens, their equally wheat-rich German counterparts.

The wheat beers most familiar to American drinkers are witbiers: Blue Moon from Colorado and Allagash White from Maine, and maybe Shock Top, formerly from Anheuser-Busch. They’re especially popular in summer. I’ve tried Blue Moon, and something about it just doesn’t go down right—and I am not picky. It’s not that the beer is bad in any objective sense. It just gives my palate “the ick,” as the kids say. That’s why I’m leery of Uncle John’s, one of Triple C’s core offerings.

McShane and I clink glasses. “Prost.” 

Hey—not bad! McShane uses orange zest, which elicits a citrusy nose and taste on the front end. The back end, usually where I sour on wheats, is pleasantly light on the ingredient I’ve determined is the source of my distaste: coriander. It’s an understandable reaction, says Chris Harker, Triple C’s president and co-owner, who admits wheat beers aren’t his favorite, either. “You either like coriander,” he says with a chuckle, “or you don’t.”

Triple C’s walk into the wheat field reflects a larger trend in Charlotte brewing. Harker and a pair of partners opened in 2012 and adopted an m.o. common to breweries in the first wave of #CLTBeer: They zeroed in on their niche—in this case, West Coast IPAs—and ran with it.

But the beer scene and drinkers’ palates have expanded, and Harker realized that Triple C’s IPAs, though excellent, couldn’t sustain the operation without support from other styles. He noted the popularity of White Zombie, a witbier from Catawba Brewing, and decided to launch Triple C’s answer to it in January 2023. Good move—Catawba closed its Charlotte location that August.

“We didn’t really intend it to be a year-round beer, but it’s turned into one,” Harker says. “You go into a lot of breweries these days, and it’s a very limited lineup. So we’re trying to cater more to everybody and not just have nothing but IPAs, although they still sell very well. It’s nice to have a beer we know we can always recommend when people are burned out on the styles they see everywhere.”

And more wheats are coming. McShane and his wife, Elizabeth, traveled to southern Germany last year, and he came back determined to brew a hefeweizen (translation: “yeast wheat”)—a German weissbier that commonly wields banana and clove flavors and a full, bready mouthfeel. “It’s divine beer,” he says. McShane, until recently the head brewer at Cabarrus Brewing in Concord, created an unexpected hit there with his version, Sommerweiss.

McShane expects to have launched Triple C’s first hefeweizen by the time you read this. As of May, the Triple C team was still workshopping names under a couple of strict conditions: It has to be one word and contain “weiss.” “I’d love,” he says, “for people to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, Triple C makes killer traditional European-style beers as well.’”