South Coast Beer Project nears Carolina Forest opening with family-friendly brewery

South Coast Beer Project is taking shape as more than a beer stop in Carolina Forest. The brewery-and-restaurant project is nearly complete and is expected to open by the end of May, with a setup built for lunch crowds, parents with kids, live music nights and beer fans who want a place that feels closer to a neighborhood hangout than a bare-bones taproom.

The scale is the first clue. Visit Myrtle Beach lists the venue at 10,000 square feet with full-service dining and more than 400 seats. The plan also calls for more than a dozen craft beers, outdoor space for live music, a family-friendly play area with a playground, a walking path, a dog park and a scenic pond-side setting near Sneaky Beagle. That mix puts the project squarely in the hospitality lane, where the beer has to share the draw with food, space and ease of use.

The address is 5020 Carolina Forest Blvd., and that location matters. Carolina Forest has been one of the fastest-growing parts of the Myrtle Beach area for years, and an earlier 2023 report pegged the project for the northern end of a community that now tops 38,000 residents. South Coast Beer Project is being built to catch both local traffic and visitor traffic in a corridor that already leans heavily on family entertainment and dining.

The operators are not new to that game. Chris Evans and Susan “Harry” Heryadi run the project through Coastal Concepts Hospitality, a small group they say has five locations across three brands. That portfolio includes Grumpy Monk restaurants in Carolina Forest, Broadway at the Beach and North Myrtle Beach, along with Hop ’n Wich in Conway and Sneaky Beagle next to the new brewery. In other words, this is not a one-off taproom gamble. It is an expansion by operators who already know the Myrtle Beach market.

That broader strategy may be the point. In a soft craft market, a brewery that can also work as a restaurant, afternoon hangout and event space has a better chance of staying busy than one that relies on pint sales alone. South Coast Beer Project is betting that families, diners and beer drinkers will all want the same thing: a place that is easy to use, easy to return to and broad enough to serve more than one kind of outing.