Sidetracked Brewery strikes gold again in regional competition

Budweiser may call itself the “King of Beers” but the brewmaster and owner at Sidetracked in Morganton could rightfully lay claim to the title.

Butterfly Riot Belgian blonde ale brewed in downtown Morganton was awarded Best of Show at the 2025 Carolinas Championship of Beer (CCB) in Hickory on Saturday, April 12.

This is the second time in three years that Sidetracked has been judged No. 1. In 2023, the Florere Barrel Aged Kriek Belgian Sour Ale was the big winner.

The 2025 winner began as a simpler beer, originally called Butterfly.

“Then I changed the recipe,” Joseph Ackerman said. The resulting beer needed a new name that matched its updated flavor profile. “I liked the (juxtaposition) of butterfly, which is softer, with riot.”

The Morganton brewery competed with 178 beers from 31 breweries in the 18th annual competition. The award winners were announced during the 21st annual Hickory Hops Beer Festival in downtown Hickory.

The win is more than a feather in Ackerman’s cap.

“I want people to walk in and respect what I do,” he said as he nodded toward the many ribbons and medals on the brewery’s beer menu board. “Our customers know that judges have objectively said, ‘That’s a good beer’ based on specific characteristics and standards.”

His journey began in college as a homebrewer in Columbia, S.C. That hobby turned serious when he trained at Chicago’s Siebel Institute and co-founded Columbia’s first post-Prohibition production brewery.

He and a group of investors opened the Palmetto State capital city’s first production brewery since Prohibition. He separated from those investors and brought his brewing talents to Morganton.

Ackerman approaches brewing like both an artist and a chemist. Beer is far more complicated than combining water, malt, hops, and yeast and hoping for the best.

Ackerman can provide a rapid-fire breakdown of the process, from gravity, temperature, pH, and fermentation activity. Water used to make Sidetracked’s Absolute Block begins with replicating the traditional water profile in Dublin.

The water in the Bavarian hefeweizen Weizenbahn mimics the profile in Germany. Local water is best for making IPAs. Terms like wort, mash and sparge are thrown out as effortlessly as the words used in the old “Dick and Jane” books.

He’s also strategic when it comes to competitions. Beers that have already medaled are typically left out, giving new creations a chance to shine.

For the competition, each participant sent bottled or canned beer for judging three weeks before the festival. More than 60 volunteers gathered at Olde Hickory Brewery to judge the unmarked beers for adherence to specific category characteristics. Three hours later, the judges gave 33 beers gold medals in their respective categories, along with 38 silver and 44 bronze winners.

For CCB round two, a smaller group of certified judges convened to determine which gold medal beers stood above the rest. Called the Best of Show round, after two hours of tasting and deliberation, three beers were identified as the best of the best.

Sidetracked’s Butterfly Riot took top honors, followed by Olde Hickory Brewery’s Event Horizon, a bourbon barrel-aged imperial stout, and the Downtown Oatmeal Brown brown ale from Balsam Falls Brewery in Sylva placed third.

Proceeds from this year’s CCB will be donated to the North Carolina Brewers Guild for use promoting the state’s more than 450 craft breweries.