Todd Ford came to brewing from 30,000 feet. He was a pilot for years, and a homebrewer since 1995, when he and his wife Suzie decided in 2011 that Charlotte, which then had two craft breweries, needed a third. They financed it largely from the retirement savings they had accumulated over their working lives, according to a podcast interview Todd gave the brewing software company Ekos. There was no looking back, he said.
For this, NoDa Brewing Company opened in October 2011 on North Davidson Street. Charlotte Magazine’s reaction was two words: about time.
It started with four beers
The Fords chose NoDa because it felt like home. It is the arts hub of the city, Suzie has said, and brewing is an art, so what better name for a brewery. They had traveled often to Portland and toured the West Coast breweries, and the plan was Northwest-style beer: an IPA, a double IPA, a pale ale and a porter, plus a weekly small batch available only in the taproom. Todd would be head brewer. Suzie described herself as assistant brewer and taste tester.
Chad Henderson joined as head brewer and co-owner, and the three built a company that grew faster than any of them planned. Coco Loco, the porter, won silver at the Great American Beer Festival in 2012, the brewery’s first year. In 2013 the company canned its first beers. In 2014 Hop Drop ‘N Roll, the West Coast IPA that was Todd’s original homebrew recipe, won gold for American IPA at the World Beer Cup.
We would not be here, Suzie said the following year, if we had not won that medal. The brewery could not keep up with demand for the beer, and in October 2015 it opened a second facility on North Tryon Street, the North End, a mile away in a stretch of garages and body shops that the Fords, ever the artists, saw as a blank canvas. The new building held 240-barrel fermenters and a canning line that runs 141 cans a minute.
The people behind it
Suzie Ford is president and co-founder, Todd is vice president and co-founder, and Henderson is head brewer and co-owner, in the company’s own description. The Fords are the public face, and the beer names carry Todd’s aviation past: CAVU, the blonde ale, is a pilot’s term for ceiling and visibility unlimited.
The medals kept coming. NoDajito won gold at the Great American Beer Festival in 2016, Gordgeous, the pumpkin ale, took gold in 2018 and again in 2020 alongside a silver for the Maibock. Todd’s position on all of it is easy: we don’t brew beers to win medals, he said, but if we do win medals, that’s okay too. In 2018 the company was named Charlotte’s philanthropic small business of the year.
Charlotte’s beer scene was two breweries when the Fords started, and Suzie has said the choice of neighborhood was as deliberate as the choice of beer. She often likens the raw ingredients, hops, barley, water and yeast, to an artist’s paints, and the original taproom on North Davidson was built with a view of Uptown and a window on the brew kettles so visitors could watch the work. The weekly NoDable small-batch series was the brewery’s way of keeping that experimentation visible.
What you actually drink
Hop Drop ‘N Roll remains the flagship, 7.2 percent, hopped before, during and after the boil with Citra and Amarillo, and it is the beer distributors across the state name first. Jam Session is the sessionable pale ale, Radio Haze the hazy IPA, Coco Loco the porter that started the medal run. The NoDable series, a new small batch each week, still runs at the original taproom.
The company has three locations: the original on North Davidson, reopened after a renovation in 2019, the North End brewery and taproom with its beer garden, and a taproom at Charlotte Douglas airport that opened in 2018. The taprooms run food trucks, live music, run clubs, yoga, disc golf and cornhole, and distribution has spread across the Carolinas, reaching eastern North Carolina in 2021 after what Todd called nine long years of waiting.
Distribution grew market by market: Greenville, South Carolina, in 2019, the Triangle and Charleston in 2020, and eastern North Carolina in February 2021 through Coastal Beverage Company, whose president said the Fords had created a company and culture that closely aligned with his own. The eastern launch carried Hop Drop ‘N Roll, Radio Haze, Jam Session, CAVU and Coco Loco in draft and sixteen-ounce four-packs, which is the lineup a Charlotte drinker will recognize as the core of the brand.
Why it matters
When NoDa Brewing opened, Charlotte’s beer scene was Olde Mecklenburg and Four Friends. The Fords’ bet, funded by their own retirement, helped turn the city into one with more breweries than it can count, and Hop Drop ‘N Roll became the beer that put Charlotte on national tap lists.
The brewery is still owned by the people who founded it, still headquartered in the neighborhood it is named for, and still run by a pilot who wanted to make beer. He was right about the ceiling.