Palmetto Brewing Co. is staying on the Charleston peninsula.
Last month the brewery bought the Huger Street property it has rented for 23 years, paying $2.9 million, The Post and Courier reported. Palmetto had planned to move to a nearly 6-acre site near North Charleston’s Park Circle neighborhood that it bought last year for $2.37 million.
“When I looked at my opportunities and what the options were, I had the opportunity to buy the property and everybody knows where we are, so I jumped on it and I did it,” co-owner Larry Lipov told the newspaper.
The chance came when White Point Partners, which owns almost 3 acres in the area between King and Meeting streets, decided earlier this year to sell the building that houses Palmetto and Charleston Coffee Roasters. The Charlotte-based firm bought 2.9 acres on Huger Street for $7.8 million in 2015 and is planning a 194-unit apartment development there.
Palmetto now plans to expand into the space Charleston Coffee Roasters is leaving as it moves to North Charleston. Lipov said that will nearly double the brewery to about 12,000 square feet, with more room for retail, warehousing and storage.
He said the brewery sits in the middle of its core market, the under-35 crowd renting new apartments nearby. “As a brewery, you can’t be in a better spot,” Lipov said.
The search for a new home had run for years. Palmetto announced in 2014 that it was moving, and a 2015 deal to buy 17 acres on Azalea Drive with Firefly Distilling fell apart, the Post and Courier reported last year. Lipov said then that real estate prices downtown were “prohibitive.”
Lipov said Palmetto has no plans for the North Charleston site, which lies between O’Hear and Chateau avenues next to the Factory at Garco apartments. “I’m just sitting on it,” he said.
Palmetto has brewed on the peninsula since 1994, according to the Post and Courier.
