Over the past few years, craft breweries across North Carolina have increasingly turned to hemp-infused drinks to make up for slowing alcohol sales. But a recent move by the federal government has brewers grappling for answers.
The bill that reopened the federal government last month included language outlawing intoxicating hemp products starting in November 2026.
At Foothills Brewery in Winston-Salem, which began producing hemp beverages last year, leaders say they are still trying to understand what the change could mean for their business and for the industry overall.
Inside the brewery's sprawling production facility, amber bottles zip along a conveyor belt while machinery hums in the background.
Founder Jamie Bartholomaus gestures toward the assembly line.
"Here is where it gets rinsed, filled, and crowned, and then it goes into the boxes coming from above,” he says.
Today, the crew is packaging Hoppyum IPA, one of their signature beers. He leads the way to a room near the back of the warehouse, where they keep the key ingredient for their other signature product: hemp beverages.
“This is one of the emulsions. It is Delta-9,” he says, holding up a half-gallon bottle filled with a liquid that looks like milk. He's referring to the intoxicating compound infused into Little Trees, the THC seltzer Foothills introduced last year.
Bartholomaus says the drinks were an immediate success — so much so that they initially struggled to keep up with demand.
“We were delivering [in] our cars and, you know, pickup trucks, and just everybody was running around like crazy trying to get product delivered to people, because it was new, and it was moving very fast.”
Foothills now manufactures hemp beverages for more than a dozen other companies. The business has become a lifeline amid declining alcohol consumption.
Wholesale beer sales at the company have dropped by more than half since the pandemic, and total beer revenue is on track for an 18% decline this year. Marketing Director Bill Manley says hemp beverages have more than made up for those losses. That’s why news about the ban has hit especially hard.
"I feel like we have been working so hard to build this thing over the past year, and to think about it just ceasing to exist in another year is pretty scary place to be, honestly,” he says.
The fear isn’t unique to Foothills. The hemp beverage business is a roughly $28 billion industry nationwide. In North Carolina, there are now over 1,500 hemp producers — many of them with ties to the craft brewing industry.
That uncertainty was on full display during a statewide hemp beverage panel organized by the North Carolina Craft Brewers Guild shortly after the ban was announced.
“We don't know where this is going," moderator Lisa Parker told attendees. "There are no answers to what's going to happen around this right now."
Parker likened the event to whistling past the graveyard — or trying to stay cheerful in the face of something terrifying.
"We're going to do some whistling today," she said.
Some panelists said they hoped the move would lead to regulations that brewers could comply with, rather than an outright ban. But what those rules might look like remains unclear.
"It's really a guessing game,” said Matt Virgil of NoDa Brewing Company in Charlotte. “Using other states as models, like, what should we have on our can? What are the things that we need to have listed here?”
The debate has renewed questions about safety. Advocates say intoxicating hemp products need more oversight because they are widely available without enforceable age restrictions and with few standards for production. Attorney Patrick Oglesby, who studies the cannabis industry, says the government does not require testing for purity or safety.
“There's no inspection of the claims that they make, of how much THC they have in them,” he says. “Maybe they're using pesticides that are harmful to the user, and there's no checking on that.”
Oglesby says the majority of the industry is pro-regulation because of this. He says some are hopeful the federal government will include a carve-out in the law allowing for regulated hemp beverages and gummies, instead of an outright ban on all products.
Even without a carve-out, Oglesby says state lawmakers could still take action to keep the industry operating. Recently, Governor Josh Stein’s cannabis advisory council met to discuss how other states have regulated the products.
“I think that the state will be slow to ban these products, and the federal government's ban depends on enforcement," Oglesby says. "The federal government is not enforcing drug laws at the individual level; it's very rarely doing that.”
Still, he warns that the market in North Carolina may shrink significantly.
Back at Foothills, Marketing Director Bill Manley says one of the companies they manufacture hemp drinks for has already announced plans to close. He worries about how his employees will be impacted.
“Even with craft beer in decline, it's helped keep people employed," he says. "The sales guys who are out in the market who are Foothills employees, like some of those folks would probably be out of a job."
For now, Manley says they’re managing their inventory in order to protect against future losses should nothing change — and advising their craft brewing colleagues to do the same.