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Our Heritage
The Brewery
"111+ Years of Beverage Production and Bottling Onsite"
While you're enjoying our restaurant, tasting room, or patio, we're writing a Great American Story together. It began in 1903, when Herbert Vance Bolick (later joined by his brother Arthur F. Bolick) invested approximately $1,000 to launch Granite Bottling Works, a soda bottling company. A one-room brick building—dubbed "Bolick's Bottling Plant" —where thirty-five cases per day would be produced and product would be delivered by horse and wagon, took root on the property.
In 1978 the Bolick family sold Granite Bottling Works, which by then had grown into a major enterprise bottling and distributing Double Cola, My Cola, Cheerwine, Sun-Drop, and eleven other drink varieties across a twelve-county area of northwestern North Carolina, to Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Asheville. Three minutes later, this same November day, Coca-Cola Bottling sold the facility to Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company of Hickory, N.C., Inc.
In December 2012, Mastroeli-MacNeil Equity Investments, LLC, a husband and wife pair of Caldwell County-based investors, financed the purchase of the original Granite Bottling Works property from Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company. The principals financed a painstaking build-out, and are proud of the adaptive reuse of this warehouse/manufacturing space into a supper club, eatery, and old-style "watering hole." The 32,000 square foot configuration of three old warehouses situated on 2.08 acres contiguous to Downtown Granite Falls, with a panoramic view of the Blue Ridge Mountains at its back, has been repurposed as a restaurant and put back into commission as a beverage production facility. The brick two-story 1903 Bolick’s Bottling Plant still stands, and can be viewed exposed in our lobby’s interior, and the front restrooms and corporate offices. When you enter GFB’s lobby, you are literally stepping inside a century-old bottling plant.
The Owners of Granite Falls Brewing Company invite you to visit our site, indulge in an experience that is In A Glass By Itself, partake of laughter, fellowship and living history, lo and behold what we unearthed between the walls and specimens of the original Granite Bottling Works bottles, and become a part of a Great American Revival Story. One that is still being written today.
The Founders
Mario Mastroeli, President, General Counsel, and Chief Quality Control Officer
Mastroeli-MacNeil Equity Investments, LLC has its roots in Malvagna, Sicily (Italy); Barra, Scotland; Szamosszeg, Hungary; and Cheltenham, England. Mario Mastro holds a Master's Degree in Economic Development (Marketing) and specializes in Corporate Law and Private Equity (UNC-CH School of Law '00). Mr. Mastroeli’s cousins reside in Malvagna, Sicily where they cultivate grapes in a family vineyard and lemons (limoncello) along the base of Mount Etna.
Mario Mastro is the grandson of a Sicilian coal miner (Bishop, VA) and Hungarian mother of seven, and a commercial fisherman and his wife hailing from Edgecombe County. Mario’s wife of twenty years (the Competing Chief Quality Control Officer) is a surgical dentist and political analyst. Mastroeli-MacNeil is proud to partner with Head Brewer Joseph Ackerman and Brewer Jacob Rice to leverage its vision, in combination with their talents, to craft an exceptional product that is born, brewed, and raised locally, and proud to call North Carolina home.
