A Guide to the Top Breweries to Visit in Winston-Salem, NC

Winston-Salem’s craft beer scene is one of the deepest in North Carolina, built on a mix of the city’s industrial heritage and a steady wave of new breweries. Many of the taprooms occupy repurposed buildings — former tobacco warehouses, a manila envelope factory, a 1920s garage, a decades-vacant wholesale building — which gives the scene a sense of place you don’t get everywhere. The beer runs the full range, from hop-forward and hazy IPAs to Czech and German lagers, barrel-aged sours, and imperial stouts.

What ties it together is the programming. Seasonal and one-off releases keep the tap lists changing, and most of these breweries run a full calendar of trivia nights, live music, and rotating food trucks that turn a taproom visit into a night out. Below is our guide to the Winston-Salem breweries we’ve visited and written up — each entry links to a full write-up with history, details, and our take. For the wider picture, they’re also part of the complete Winston-Salem food and beverage cluster.

Brouwerij DuBois
Fiddlin’ Fish Brewing Company
Foothills Brewing Tasting Room
Foothills Brewpub
Incendiary Brewing Company
Joymongers Barrel Hall
Lesser-Known Beer Company
Small Batch Beer Co.
Wise Man Brewing
Closing Thoughts

Brouwerij DuBois

If you enjoy saisons, Brouwerij DuBois should be at the top of your list. Founder Jordan DuBois turned a former gas station on Country Club Road into a taproom centered on Belgian and French farmhouse ales, with a front porch, a lawn, and a patio that set it apart from warehouse taprooms elsewhere in the city. For now it operates as a curated taproom with house brewing on the way — the brewery side has been under construction — but the saison focus and the family story behind the name make it worth the stop. Not a saison drinker? The curated draft and bottle lists are built to introduce you to styles you haven’t tried.

Fiddlin’ Fish Brewing Company

Fiddlin’ Fish Brewing Company is a family-owned brewery in the historic Big Winston Warehouse on North Trade Street, opened in 2017 by Stuart and Lindsay Barnhart with cousin David Ashe. The name comes from the founders’ Blue Ridge roots — the fiddle for the family’s Galax, Virginia Old Time music tradition, the fish for fly fishing — and the taproom keeps that alive with open-format Old Time jam sessions. Expect a 15-barrel lineup that runs from crisp lagers to bold IPAs like the New England-style That Fish Cray, plus eight TVs and a 150-inch projector for game day, a covered patio, and rotating food trucks. It sits right next door to Broad Branch Distillery, making a beer-and-spirits afternoon easy.

Foothills Brewing Tasting Room

The Foothills Brewing Tasting Room is the taproom at Foothills’ main production brewery on Kimwell Drive — a 48,000-square-foot former manila envelope factory with 28 taps, the deepest Foothills lineup anywhere. Foothills has been brewing in Winston-Salem since 2004 and is one of the largest craft breweries in the Southeast, with more Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup medals than any other North Carolina brewery. This is the place to find tasting-room exclusives — small batches that never leave the building — alongside the core lineup and the famous Sexual Chocolate imperial stout. Roll-up garage doors, a patio, and the Footmobile food truck round it out.

Foothills Brewpub

Foothills Brewpub is where it all started — the original Foothills location, open on West Fourth Street since 2005 in a former late-1920s car dealership. Unlike the Tasting Room, the Brewpub is a full-service restaurant, so you can pair the full Foothills lineup with a proper kitchen: burgers, the smoked chicken sandwich on spent-grain bread, and the fried pickles it’s known for. The chicken tenders are our own pick — the breading sets them apart, and they’ve been some of the best we’ve had in North Carolina. Open until midnight seven days a week, it’s one of the more reliable late spots downtown, with a patio, live music, and a walkable West End location near the downtown hotels.

Incendiary Brewing Company

Incendiary Brewing Company anchors the ground floor of the historic Bailey Power Plant in the Innovation Quarter, opened in 2018 by Winston-Salem natives Brandon Branscome and John Bacon. Its signature outdoor space is the Coal Pit — the concrete-lined former coal-feeding courtyard, now a patio framed by the plant’s brick smokestacks and home to the free CoalPitLive concert series each summer. The rotating lineup covers IPAs, stouts, lagers, and experimental releases; our warm-weather favorite is the Tangie Dream. With Cugino Forno wood-fired pizza right next door, it’s an easy place to settle in for the evening.

Joymongers Barrel Hall

Joymongers Barrel Hall is the Winston-Salem outpost of the Greensboro brewery, set in a restored 1920s Spanish Colonial garage in the West End across from Hanes Park. What makes it unusual is the focus: it’s a dedicated barrel-aging taproom, one of the few breweries in the country to give barrel-aged production its own separate home. The 17-plus taps mix Greensboro-brewed IPAs, pales, lagers, stouts, and sours with bourbon- and wine-barrel-aged beers made on site, many of them exclusive to Winston-Salem. Cocktails, wine, cider, and seltzers cover the non-beer drinkers, and there’s live music, trivia, and bingo on the calendar. Note that it’s retail-only — no cans or distribution, so the taproom is the only place to drink it.

Lesser-Known Beer Company

Lesser-Known Beer Company is a lager-focused microbrewery just down the block from Old Salem, opened in 2022 by college friends Will Loring and Ryan Gramlich in the restored Yates Service Station. The name is a nod to its focus on less-common styles — Czech and German lagers that take longer to make and get less attention than the usual IPAs and stouts. There’s a fitting bit of history in the location: the Moravians who founded Salem in 1766 came from Central Europe, tying the brewery’s lager tradition back to the roots of the city. Despite the name, it’s become one of the livelier and more popular stops in the local scene.

Small Batch Beer Co.

Small Batch Beer Co. has been part of downtown Winston-Salem since it opened in the former Kopper Kitchen on Fifth Street in late 2013 — one of the city’s earliest craft breweries. It started as a true nanobrewery, brewing one barrel at a time, and still holds to that name, with small batches often built around a local ingredient like Black Mountain Chocolate. The rotating tap list runs through IPAs, pilsners, and seasonal experiments, and the kitchen is a genuine draw — the burgers, especially The Winston with grilled onions, potato chips, and pimento cheese, are worth the trip on their own. On Liverpool match days it doubles as a soccer bar.

Wise Man Brewing

Wise Man Brewing opened in 2017 in the roughly 90-year-old Angelo Brothers Building, one of the breweries that helped kick off the city’s craft beer boom. Named for its founding by “three wise men” — a chemist, a lawyer, and an accountant — it runs a 15-barrel brewhouse with an ever-changing lineup of hazy IPAs, cream ales, lagers, fruited sours, and imperial stouts. Its doppelbock, Living a Double Life, was named one of the Best 20 Beers of 2023 by Craft Beer & Brewing. The high-ceilinged industrial space has abundant indoor and outdoor seating, and its Industry Hill location near Earl’s and the Ramkat makes it a natural anchor for a night out.

Closing Thoughts

Winston-Salem punches above its weight when it comes to craft beer. For a city this size to support this many distinct breweries — a lager house, a barrel-aging hall, a saison-focused taproom, two Foothills locations, and a handful of others each doing their own thing — says something about how deep the scene runs. And because so many of them sit in repurposed tobacco warehouses, old garages, and factory buildings, a brewery crawl here doubles as a tour through the city’s industrial past.

The best approach is to pick a corridor and walk it. North Trade Street pairs Fiddlin’ Fish with Broad Branch Distillery right next door; Industry Hill puts Wise Man near Earl’s and the Ramkat; and the Innovation Quarter centers on Incendiary at the Bailey Power Plant. Whichever you choose, check taproom hours before you go, since many run rotating events and seasonal releases worth timing your visit around. For the full picture of where to eat and drink around town, browse the complete Winston-Salem food and beverage cluster — and if you make it to any of these, we’d love to hear which one became your favorite.