Two weeks into his first office job, Jason Glunt decided he could not do it. He quit and opened a beer shop. His wife, Dairelyn, loved her corporate job and kept it. She says he hated being in a cubicle and she loved it, and that is how Salud Cerveceria began.
The beer shop opened on North Davidson Street on March 15, 2012, with four taps and a few shelves of cans and bottles, according to a profile in PorchDrinking. The brewery that grew out of it now sits upstairs, and Axios called Salud the best beer bar in the United States.
It started with four taps
Jason moved to Charlotte from northern Michigan as a boy and stayed to play basketball at Queens University. Dairelyn moved from Santiago in the Dominican Republic to Statesville in 2000, at a time when fewer than five percent of North Carolinians were Hispanic and, she told Axios, people were less than welcoming. At thirteen she learned English in a single year to get ahead of the bullying. She came to Charlotte for college in 2007, met Jason, and never left.
They were living in NoDa when the space for the beer shop came up a short walk from their apartment. Salud Beer Shop became a neighborhood hangout with old Nintendo games and nineties hip hop, and a deli next door called Fud made waffle sandwiches. When the upstairs space became available a few years later, the couple decided to add a brewery.
The build was a misery. The room had five kinds of flooring and walls in the wrong places, and just as the work was finishing, a shop vac caught fire, according to PorchDrinking. The floors, the paint, the bar, the windows and the door all had to be redone. Salud Cerveceria opened on June 5, 2017.
The people behind it
Jason Glunt has described the building as a funky old one, not a clean strip mall, and said the couple embraced it. He told Charlotte Magazine that the building’s owners wanted Salud there and were committed to keeping one of the few remaining older buildings in the city while sprucing it up. He did not want to put the brewery in a warehouse away from the shop, and the upstairs space solved that.
Dairelyn Guzman-Glunt is the reason Salud is not a typical brewery. She told Axios she wanted a place where Latinos felt welcome in a craft beer world that, in her words, ignores a whole demographic. The beers carry her stamp: a Dominican coffee stout called Cafecito con Leche and a seasonal hefeweizen named the Dairelynerweisse. Her brother, Dalton Espaillat, owns the Sabor Latin Street Grill chain up the street, and the siblings competed on a Food Network show together in 2018, though they are not in business together.
What you actually order
Salud is a brewery, a coffee shop, a restaurant, a bottle shop and, at weekends, a dance floor with a DJ. In a city that runs on IPAs, Salud built its reputation on sours. The pizza from the kitchen competes with dedicated pizzerias, and the menu carries Dominican flavors Dairelyn grew up with. The patio was rebuilt during the pandemic, and canning the beer, which the pandemic forced, turned into a permanent line.
Dairelyn has said the pandemic gave Salud the push to do things they had planned and never got to. She calls it a blessing in disguise.
The brewery’s first year was small batches that rarely lasted a day, according to Charlotte Magazine, which is what made expansion a no brainer once the upstairs space came free. The space had been a venue called Upstage, and Jason has said the building’s new owners were supportive and wanted Salud there. Commercial real estate in NoDa had become expensive enough that a warehouse brewery elsewhere would have separated the beer from the shop, and he did not want that.
Dairelyn was named Salud’s owner in Axios’s 2021 profile, which noted that when she moved to Charlotte she did not know many Dominicans. She told Charlotte’s tourism bureau that her mother and brother live within ten minutes of her now, and two cousins she grew up with in the Dominican Republic have moved to the city. Having family close and having a business here, she said, are what make Charlotte home. She could not imagine living anywhere else.
Why it matters
Mecklenburg County’s Latino population grew by more than half in a decade, and Salud is one of the places where that growth is visible from the door. It sells art by Latino artists, plays music from the Dominican Republic and the nineties in equal measure, and it does all of that inside one of the oldest commercial buildings left on North Davidson Street.
Charlotte has more breweries than it knows what to do with. Salud is the one that started as a beer shop a couple could walk to from their apartment, and became the place a national magazine named the best in the country. The cubicle, for the record, never stood a chance.