Dino Radosta had never brewed a beer in his life when he opened a brewery.
What he had was a downtown he thought was being wasted.
He started by buying buildings
Radosta is from New Orleans. He moved to Wake Forest in 1997, chose it for the land and because he thought it would be a good place to raise a family, and after two decades considers himself a local. He had run several successful businesses before, none of them in beer.
What happened next he has described plainly. Having some free time and money after those earlier ventures, he got involved in the civic side of downtown development. Then he started buying real estate: buildings he thought were underused, with the intention of making them nice again and putting some life back into the corridor.
He has said he has always loved downtowns and always loved historic buildings, and that a thriving downtown is a large part of a town’s sense of itself.
One of those buildings was a 1930s car dealership at 218 South White Street.
What he did to it
Radosta stripped the facade off, working back to find the original character of the structure underneath. Wake Forest, like most Southern downtowns, spent the mid-twentieth century covering good brick with bad cladding. He undid that.
White Street Brewing Company opened in September 2012 in the result: exposed brick, exposed beams, and an exposed brewhouse. There is no glass wall between the taproom and the equipment. You can see, hear, and smell the beer being made while you drink it.
That decision is the whole design philosophy compressed into one architectural choice. The company’s line is that the same values run through the beer, with no gimmicks and no distracting facades, just flavors with nothing to hide.
Radosta’s stated mission when he opened was to bring relevance back to the downtown corridor. The brewery was as much about creating a place for the community to gather as it was about the beer.
The beer got serious fast
For a business started by someone with no brewing experience, the awards arrived quickly and at a high level.
The Kölsch took Gold at the 2014 World Beer Cup. The Scottish Ale took Gold at the 2016 Great American Beer Festival, where 286 medals were awarded across 96 categories in the competition’s thirtieth year. GABF is the largest commercial beer competition in the world.
Radosta’s comment on the Scottish win is worth quoting for what it reveals about the approach: the goal was never awards, just beers that meet an increasingly high standard, and they loved that beer because it exemplifies a classic style that does not rely on trends.
Not relying on trends is the core of it. The flagship Main Street Series has been built around Kölsch, Scottish Ale, Hoptimist IPA, and Emmalynn Belgian Blonde. These are not beers designed to chase whatever the market wanted that quarter. The brewery’s own framing is that if you want to know what a Kölsch is supposed to taste like, or a stout, or an IPA, taste theirs first.
The current lineup has expanded well past that, into a Russian Imperial Stout called Koschei the Deathless, a Belgian tripel, an amber, a hard seltzer, fruit beers, and a Vanilla English Porter, alongside the classics.
They outgrew the building without leaving it
By December 2014 the taproom brewhouse could not keep up. Radosta opened a production facility on Park Avenue in Youngsville, in Franklin County, to brew at volume with better quality control and to bottle.
At the sneak preview he gave the numbers: a little over two years in business, started with one employee besides himself twenty-six months earlier, twenty-five paid employees at that point, expecting fifty by the end of 2015. His tagline for the company was Big Time Beer, Small Town Soul, and his theme for the night was that the big time beer just got bigger.
He also said something that mattered more locally. They were never leaving downtown Wake Forest. The building was near and dear to him and the original system was staying exactly where it was.
It did. The original exposed brewhouse on White Street is still running today, and Radosta reframed its role as a brewers’ playground: with production volume moved to Youngsville, the downtown tanks were freed up for seasonals, one-offs, and experiments. His argument was that you need that freedom to try things, and that some seasonals become mainstays.
What it is like to drink there
Bar service only, no table service. High ceilings, red brick, an open floor plan, typically ten to twelve beers on tap.
No kitchen, and this is deliberate rather than a shortcoming. You can bring food in from anywhere, and several downtown restaurants will deliver straight to the brewery.
The room fills with a specific mix. The local running club has used it as a meeting point for its weekly run, finishing where they started. It is a good place to sit with a group and a bad place to be precious.
Why the hard way
Fourteen years on, White Street’s case is that shortcuts show up in the glass. Sweat every detail. Do not cut corners on methods or ingredients. Do not go home early.
Radosta arrived at that from real estate rather than brewing, which may be exactly why it holds. He came to the business from a conviction about historic buildings and downtowns, applied the same instinct to beer, and ended up with two gold medals and a taproom that helped turn a quiet block into a destination.
White Street Brewing Company, 218 S. White Street, Wake Forest. whitestreetbrewing.com