Breweries and economic development: A case of home brew

<p>Something is brewing in small towns throughout North Carolina. Far outside the city limits of Beer City U.S.A. (also known to North Carolinians as Asheville), craft breweries are opening up in and around distressed downtowns throughout the state. Part industrial facility, part retail space, part bar/restaurant, and part real estate pioneer, craft breweries are emerging as innovative harbingers of neighborhood revitalization. Its leaders tend to break the traditional entrepreneurial mold, measuring their success not only according to profit margins but by the improvements in quality of life and neighborhood vitality that tend to follow in their wake.</p> <p>The case of Mother Earth Brewing in Kinston, a small town (population 21,667) in rural eastern North Carolina, exemplifies this pattern. At one time a thriving community with a prosperous economy based on tobacco and textile manufacturing, Kinston’s downtown had seen better days as it entered the twenty-first century. The tobacco and manufacturing heyday had come and gone and the once lively downtown storefronts were mostly vacant. Those looking for some semblance of a night life had better head out of town. Fast forward to 2013 and Kinston’s downtown now shows some burgeoning signs of life –lunch spots are packed by noon, folks head in and out of the shops on Herritage Street, and public art in the form of benches and bicycle racks dot the wide sidewalks. And once five o’clock hits, patrons from all over Kinston (and elsewhere) pour into Mother Earth, for locally crafted beer, fellowship, and on some nights, live music.</p> Mother Earth Brewery [...]