April 8, 2022

A Day in the Life: Brewer Chad Henderson

While the city sleeps, NoDa Brewing Company’s co-owner and head brewer finds zen in fermentation

By Allison Braden

Chad Henderson is the head brewer NoDa Brewing Co. Photo courtesy

Chad Henderson loved beer long before he became a brewer. “I would go to release parties and bottle shares,” he says, “and I would get legitimately like a kid getting ready to go on a roller coaster.” He met his wife, Sarah, through the local craft beer scene, too. These days, after brewing at NoDa Brewing Company since it opened in 2011, he doesn’t get the same hyped-up tingle, but he’s come to appreciate a wider array of styles. “Back in the day, when I was getting into it, the more adjectives you could put into the beer’s description, the more crazy it was going to be and everyone’s freaking out, like triple-barrel-aged, blah, blah, blah,” he says. “Now, I can get just as excited on a really clean Pilsner.”

He’s stayed with the brewery as it outgrew its original taproom on North Davidson Street and racked up a number of city firsts: first local brewery to release a new beer each week, to can its own beers, to win a World Beer Cup gold medal (Hop, Drop ’n Roll won in 2014). Today, the company operates its North Tryon Street flagship and a location at the airport, distributes throughout the Carolinas, and has plans to reopen the OG taproom this spring. Part of Henderson’s job is to oversee a rigorous quality control and assessment process, which requires him to taste beers gone bad. But even that hasn’t soured him on the drink that’s made his career. “I would say,” he says, “I’m more passionate about it now than I was before.”

Here’s what a day in his life looks like.

12 a.m. Every so often, after just a few hours of sleep, Henderson wakes up for work at midnight. “When we have a heavy brew day, we’re trying to produce three if not more what we call turns, which is basically full production batches off the system,” Henderson says. It takes about seven hours to get the batches into the fermenting vessel, where the yeast will take over and the brewing team will monitor the fermentation every day for a couple of weeks. In his decade of experience, Henderson has learned that he and the rest of the team prefer to start the process early, so they can wrap up during the day.

Now, Henderson works this schedule only a couple of times a month, and he admits that it’s not healthy to start the workday after so little sleep and none of those important REM cycles, but all the same, he prefers the early shift, when his alarm goes off at midnight. “You just get zoned in,” he says. “It’s quiet and it’s dark, and it’s just you and the hum of the bubbles and the pockets fermenting with different beers around you.” Two employees work the early shift for safety reasons, but no one’s coming up to Henderson with questions or emergencies. The first four hours of the day are peaceful. He says, “It really feels like you’re flying the ship.”

3:50 a.m. On a more typical day, when Henderson isn’t working the early shift, he gets to sleep in until a little before 4 a.m. He lifts weights at the gym for about an hour, then heads to the brewery to start work between 6:15 and 6:30.

6:30 a.m. The brewery wakes up. Drivers come in and load the merchandising vans and trucks with beer to distribute. By now, there are about a dozen staff members in the building. As head brewer, Henderson is in the business of constantly checking things. He monitors equipment and production: “‘Hey, how’s this process going? Hey, what’re your numbers on this?’ And it’s just trying to make sure everyone’s on the same page.” The checking often leads to troubleshooting. Every day can throw a different “fun curveball.”

8:30 a.m. On Monday mornings, the managers and owners meet to ensure that the entire company is aligned. Here, Henderson gets a bigger picture of where the beer goes once it leaves production and makes its way to bars and supermarket shelves. He says his production work can feel like it’s “in the trenches,” with its own stressors and skill sets. The meeting requires him to bridge multiple worlds as he engages with the sales and distribution teams, which have their own skills and objectives. “It’s almost like it’s a totally different language,” he says. “So we have to try to find this nice balance to not only make the product that we want and in the method that is best for the product, but also to to make the most for our sales and keep the product moving.” It sounds straightforward, he says, but it can be more challenging than it seems.

12 p.m. Henderson eats the healthy lunch he packed. “Very little of my life is balanced outside, so I might as well eat something balanced from time to time.”

2 p.m. A big part of Henderson’s job is quality control and assessment. A tight network of processes and cross-checks ensure that the team can catch issues, like whether a batch is “going sideways” or if the beer isn’t holding up to their standards. This can mean “torturing” the beers to see how they hold up under various conditions. “It really comes down to, does it taste good? Does it smell good?” Henderson says. He and his team constantly try to devise methodologies to determine not only how and when the beer goes bad, but also “apexes,” which help him define NoDa’s brand standards. These processes sometimes yield surprising results and can lead Henderson to innovative brewing methods and the fruitful experimentation that craft beer is famous for.

4:30 p.m. Henderson heads to 9Round, a kickboxing and circuit training gym. Afterward, he may stop back by the brewery to “check on a tank or something of that nature.” If he’s been up since midnight, he may also try to take a nap at home, but he says that by the midafternoon, when it’s bright outside and the city’s come to life, he often gets a second (or third) wind and has trouble getting to sleep.

7 p.m. After dinner with Sarah, the day winds down on the couch, with their dogs in their laps and a cooking show on TV — something like Iron Chef America (“mostly for the comedy of it”) or Food Network’s baking championships (Sarah likes to bake with NoDa’s beers). The pair’s dogs, Jacqueline and Thompson, were both named for authors, Jacqueline Susann and Hunter S. Thompson, but the dogs have gone on to inspire their own namesakes: NoDa’s brewing tanks are named after company members’ pets.

When the couple has more leisure time, they like to hike at Reedy Creek Park, go out to lunch, or check out Charlotte’s outdoor markets and pop-up events. And, Henderson says, “we might want to go out for a beer.”