Two Breweries Closed the Same Winter. Only One Corner Has Reopened.

If you walked past 205 W. Pennsylvania Avenue this past Thursday night, you'd have found a room full of people arguing about state capitals over pints, a scene that's been a Southern Pines fixture for years now under one name or another. Walk four blocks over to the corner of Southwest Broad Street and West Illinois Avenue, though, and you'll find the opposite: a street-facing storefront that's been quiet since before Christmas, its future still undecided nine months later.

Both spaces were breweries. Both closed within the same six weeks last winter. And by Labor Day 2026, one had a new tenant serving beer under a new name, while the other still didn't have a lease signed for its most visible storefront. The gap between those two timelines tells you something worth knowing if you live downtown and have wondered why some empty storefronts snap back to life in months while others sit dark for what feels like forever.

What Closed, and Why It Happened So Fast

Southern Pines Brewing Company had been the town's most visible craft brewery for eleven years, grown from three soldiers' hobby into a name most Moore County residents recognized. It didn't close all at once. The company shuttered its Air Tool Drive flagship and production brewery first, then followed several weeks later by closing its Pennsylvania Avenue taproom and its Buggy Factory location in Carthage, both effective December 31, 2025.

Hatchet Brewing Company, a veteran-owned operation that had been part of the downtown scene for six years, closed its doors just days earlier, on December 28. In a social media statement, the brewery pointed to declining distribution, production setbacks, and a drop in retail sales tied to that fall's government shutdown, layered on top of rising costs for materials, equipment, and labor that had been squeezing brewers nationally.

Two well-known local names, gone within the same two weeks. For a town that had built part of its downtown identity around craft beer, it left a real gap. What happened next is where the story gets useful.

The Building That Was Already Built for This

The Pennsylvania Avenue address didn't stay empty long. By late spring, Aberdeen's Railhouse Brewery, the oldest brewery in Moore County and veteran-owned since its founding in 2010, announced it was taking over the space. Owner Chris Weber, who'd become majority owner of Railhouse in early 2025, called the fit "a perfect fit," as reported by It's The Sway. The new location opened as Railhouse Brewery: Penn Station on Memorial Day weekend, roughly five months after Southern Pines Brewing's taproom went dark.

It's worth noticing what that building actually was before Railhouse walked in. It wasn't a production facility. The brewing equipment and the larger operation had already left with the Air Tool Drive closure weeks earlier. What remained on Pennsylvania Avenue was a taproom: a bar, tap lines, seating, a room built for pouring beer and nothing more elaborate. And this wasn't even the first time that specific shell had changed hands. Before Southern Pines Brewing occupied it, the address was the original home of Southern Pines Growler Company. Three different beer businesses, one building, because the building itself never had to change what it was.

Railhouse didn't need to build a kitchen or reconfigure the floor plan. The taproom opened without food service at all, encouraging customers to bring in takeout from nearby downtown restaurants instead, and it launched straight into a regular Thursday trivia night and a full weekend schedule. When a new tenant can slot into a space doing the exact same thing the last tenant did, the turnaround is measured in months.

The Building That Had to Become Something Else

Hatchet's old address never had that option. As The Pilot reported, Broad Street Plaza sits at the corner of Southwest Broad and West Illinois, and it stayed vacant for close to six months before Druther Homes, a local custom home builder run by Joseph and Liz Druther, purchased it for $2 million. Their plan wasn't to reopen it as a bar. It was to split the building in two: renovate the middle section into office space for their own company, and lease the street-facing portion to a future restaurant or other consumer-facing business.

That's a fundamentally different kind of project than Railhouse's. It isn't a tenant swap. It's a change of use, which means permitting, a redesigned interior, and a search for the right business to fill a storefront that doesn't yet have a defined purpose. Joseph Druther told The Pilot the building matters because of where it sits on the block. "That's kind of the very last building that is in the downtown area," he said, explaining that he wants something there worth walking to, so pedestrian traffic keeps moving further down Broad Street rather than turning around early.

The company's project manager estimated the office renovation would take three to four months, but was clear that the exterior update and buildout of the street-facing space wouldn't start until a tenant was actually chosen. As of the most recent public reporting, no tenant has been named. The street-facing storefront isn't stalled out of neglect. Its buildout is waiting on a tenant, because turning a former brewery into something else entirely takes longer than turning it into another brewery.

What This Actually Looks Like Right Now

If you're deciding where to spend a Thursday night or wondering what's coming to that corner of Broad Street, here's where things stand:

• Open now: Railhouse Brewery: Penn Station, at the corner of Bennett Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. No kitchen, but takeout from nearby restaurants is welcome, and trivia runs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
• Still in progress: Broad Street Plaza, at Southwest Broad and West Illinois. Office renovation for Druther Homes is underway, but the street-facing storefront has no announced tenant or opening timeline.

Neither outcome says anything about which brewery residents loved more, and neither is really a story about beer at all. It's a story about what kind of reuse a downtown building is built for. A room that's always been a bar tends to become a bar again quickly, because almost nothing has to change. A building asked to become something new takes longer, because everything does.

That's useful to know the next time a familiar storefront goes dark downtown. The speed of what replaces it usually has less to do with how popular the last tenant was, and more to do with how much the space itself has to change before someone new can use it.

I've watched enough of these turnovers happen on Broad Street and Pennsylvania Avenue over the years to know the pattern holds more often than not. If you're curious about what else is shifting downtown, or you just want a longtime local's read on a particular corner of Southern Pines, I'm always happy to talk about it. Bill Sahadi — Let's Connect.