I’ve been meaning to pay a visit to NoDa Brewing for a couple of years now, but could never seem to make it to the Charlotte, NC, brewery in person.
They have a small, 15-barrel brew house that’s been gaining a lot of attention for their weekly one-off experimental brews and wicked-good IPA’s. Finally, like a dream come true, NoDa Brewing came to me. Sort of.
I was in my local beer shop and found a four pack of Hop, Drop ‘n Roll — NoDa’s flagship IPA that’s getting ridiculously good views.
I bought a four pack of tall boys and worked my way through them fast, enjoying the citrusy hop bomb that NoDa has created.
Hop Drop ‘n Roll is one of the better examples of an IPA you can find in the South, coming out of a tiny, hyper-local brewery that most of us living outside of their small distribution area wouldn’t be able to experience if it weren’t for one of the greatest inventions of modern time: The mobile canning system.
Imagine a van that drives around the country, visiting small breweries who make amazing beer, like NoDa, but don’t have the space or capital to buy a canning line of their own. 
The van pulls up with the canning line in tow, and “Bob’s your uncle”—that tiny brewery gets to can a small batch of their beer. Asheville’s Pisgah Brewing got to can a run of their uber-popular Pisgah Pale thanks to a mobile canning system. Devils Backbone, Hardywood Park, and Wild Wolf have all used mobile canning systems in the past. Even tiny nano-breweries working on two-barrel systems have been able to get in on the caning action because of these mobile canning systems.
The breweries are still hyper local, and their distribution is still small, but with one-off canning runs, they have a chance to get their beer into the hands of more people. People like you and people like me. So keep an eye out for unfamiliar labels in your local beer shop: The cans are coming.
