Charlotte’s first brewery? ‘A sunken garden’ with 8-cent beer. We want a time machine. 

Apparently it wasn’t much to look at but the Boundary Avenue Beer Garden sold 12-packs for one dollar, provided free home delivery on Saturdays and crafted its brews from spring-fed creek water.

Martin Munzler opened Charlotte’s first brewery (and first beer garden) on July 4, 1878.

History remembers Munzler as the forefather of Charlotte’s brewery boom — just around 130 years too soon.

There are no photos of Boundary Avenue Beer Garden but you can draw a picture in your mind.

On the outskirts of what is now uptown Charlotte (Trade and McDowell streets), the Munzler home and brewery business was “something like a sunken garden, with a fine spring, shaded by large oak trees,” says an article from 1933.

Newspaper archives tell of a two-story “crude” building — built over the stream that would supply brewing waters — where lager was made and sold in the decades before Prohibition.

Munzler regularly advertised in the newspaper that he was looking to buy barley and hops for top dollar. He also sold rye bread.

The Boundary Avenue Beer Garden and brewery operation lasted about 10 years, recalled a local real estate agent in an old article.

Munzler’s son Fred ran the business in its latter years, before he joined the local police force. Munzler Sr. is buried, along with other family members, in Elmwood Cemetery in Charlotte. He had immigrated to the United States from Bavaria as a young man.

Olde Mecklenburg Brewery, now Charlotte’s oldest brewery and home to largest beer garden in the region, pays homage to Munzler with its Vienna Lager.

An even earlier first brewery in Charlotte?

Prior to opening the Boundary Avenue brewery and beer garden, Munzler had another brewing business but we don’t know as much about it.

In one ad it’s called the “Charlotte Brewery.” In another ad, he refers to the location being in the suburbs of Charlotte. Still another source (a story from 1933 in the Observer) suggests the earlier Munzler brewery was open by 1860, in the same place as the Boundary Avenue Beer Garden.

Some of Munzler’s property (including a malt house) and “Lager Beer Brewery” business was listed for sale at public auction in late 1862.

This story was originally published May 11, 2023 at 6:25 AM.

Anna Douglas

The Charlotte Observer

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Anna Douglas is The Charlotte Observer’s deputy managing editor and previously worked as an investigative reporter and news editor in the newsroom. Prior to joining the Observer, she worked as a local news reporter for The (Rock Hill) Herald and as a congressional correspondent in Washington, D.C., for McClatchy. Anna is a past recipient of the South Carolina Press Association’s Journalist of the Year award and the Charlotte Society of Professional Journalists’ Outstanding Journalism Award. She’s a South Carolina native, a graduate of Winthrop University, and a past fellow of the Dori Maynard Diversity Leadership Program, sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists. Anna has lived in Charlotte since May 2017.