Tugs Soundside Tap House to open first brewery on Hatteras Island

Avon was set to gain a first for Hatteras Island, and for the Outer Banks beer scene it was a meaningful one. Tugs Soundside Tap House and Brewery was planning to open in Avon as the island’s first brewery, closing a gap that had left Hatteras as the blank spot in a craft beer corridor that already reached from Corolla to Ocracoke.

That gap mattered because the Outer Banks had already built beer tourism into its identity. The Outer Banks Visitors Bureau has promoted an OBX Beer, Wine, & Spirits Trail stretching from the Northern Beaches to Roanoke Island and Dare Mainland, and south to Hatteras Island. In other words, the island was already part of the region’s beverage route on paper; Tugs would give travelers and residents an actual brewery stop on the island itself.

The opening also underscored how far Dare County’s brewing culture had come. County materials trace the modern era back to Uli Bennewitz, who opened Weeping Radish in Manteo in July 1986 after a landmark legislative change that helped make future craft breweries possible in Dare County. Weeping Radish still bills itself as North Carolina’s first microbrewery, and its legacy is visible in the coastal beer economy that followed.

Lost Colony Brewery has been serving the Outer Banks for decades, with beers distributed across the region, while 1718 Brewing on Ocracoke Island shows how deeply the island chain’s beer scene had already spread south. Hatteras Island, though, remained without a dedicated brewery of its own until Tugs entered the picture.

For visitors, that means one more place where a pint can be tied to the trip itself, not just to a stop somewhere else on the map. For residents, it means a local beer destination in a place where island identity and tourism are tightly linked. And for the broader craft beer crowd, it is another reminder that the most interesting openings are still the ones that make a place feel newly complete.