"You can leave your dogs at the dog park, and you can take the path that goes right around that beautiful pond to us and try some of the crafted beers that we make in-house here that are not available anywhere else."
That's head brewer Brock Kurtzman describing South Coast Beer Project in a WMBF News report earlier this year, before the doors even opened. He's talking about a stormwater retention pond, the kind of unglamorous engineering feature every commercial development in Horry County has to build to manage runoff. Most businesses fence theirs off and forget about it. Coastal Concepts Hospitality, the group behind South Coast, poured a thousand feet of lit concrete around theirs and made it the connective tissue between two restaurants.
That decision is the story here. Carolina Forest got its first brewery this spring, and the interesting part isn't the beer list. It's that the operators built a whole neighborhood hangout by treating a drainage requirement as social infrastructure.
Two Businesses, One Loop
South Coast Beer Project sits at 5020 Carolina Forest Boulevard. The Sneaky Beagle, a sister restaurant under the same ownership, sits next door at 5040. Between them is the pond, and around the pond is the path.
The mechanics are simple. If South Coast is packed on a Friday night, a guest can walk the loop, put their name in at Sneaky Beagle, grab a drink, and circle back when a table opens. Reverse it and the same thing works the other way. Neither restaurant has to absorb overflow it can't seat, and neither guest has to get back in a car to try the other menu.
That's a different model than most restaurant rows on the Grand Strand, where separate businesses share a parking lot but nothing else. Here, ownership deliberately built a physical link between two different food concepts, Detroit-style pizza and sauce-and-char wings at South Coast, a different menu next door at Sneaky Beagle, and let guests treat the pair as one continuous outing rather than two separate decisions.
Built By People Who Already Lived Here
Chris Evans and Susan Heryadi, the owners of Coastal Concepts Hospitality, didn't pick Carolina Forest because a market study told them to. Evans has said plainly that the group lives in the community and watched the growth happen in real time, then moved before residential development ate up what little commercial land was left along the corridor. Horry County planning estimates have put Carolina Forest's population above 38,000, enough that if it were incorporated as its own city, it would rank among South Carolina's largest.
That local ownership shows up in how the place was pitched from the start. Brock Kurtzman told WMBF News the venue is "definitely geared toward the locals in Carolina Forest," tourists welcome but not the point. Evans made the same case to the Post and Courier when the project was still under construction, describing a dog park behind Sneaky Beagle and a playground at the brewery specifically so parents from the neighborhood could bring both kids and pets without planning a whole outing around either one.
The Calendar Does the Work the Building Can't
A patio and a walking path get people in the door once. What keeps a place in weekly rotation is programming, and South Coast has built a recurring one.
Recent weeks have included:
- Woofstock, a full-day dog festival with live music and local vendors, run jointly across both properties to benefit the Grand Strand Humane Society
- Back-to-school movie nights on the 18-foot outdoor screen, including a recent showing of "Grown Ups"
- Standing happy hour from 4 to 6 p.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays
None of that requires a special occasion. It's the kind of scheduling that turns a new restaurant into a place people default to on a Thursday without having to decide anything.
The Beer List Reads Like Local Shorthand
Kurtzman spent years building a reputation at New South Brewing and Southern Hops Brewing Company before taking over South Coast's brewing program, and the house lineup leans into regional references rather than generic style names. The rotating list has included a blonde ale called Blondes Do It Better, a mocha white stout named Queen Anne's Revenge after Blackbeard's ship, an American brown called Board Meeting, a West Coast IPA called All Roads Lead West, a Hazy IPA called Pogue Life, and an amber called Amber Lenses. For guests who aren't drinking, the brewery also makes its own Hop Water and a White Peach Hop Water in house, so a designated driver isn't stuck with soda.
None of these beers are distributed elsewhere yet, though Evans has said the group is positioning the property's zoning to eventually supply its other restaurants and possibly local grocery stores. For now, trying one means showing up.
What This Actually Changes for Carolina Forest
The Grand Strand overall has roughly doubled its number of craft breweries since 2020, part of a broader boom that Visit Myrtle Beach has tracked through its own regional beer trail guide. Carolina Forest, despite holding tens of thousands of residents, had none of them until this spring. That's the gap South Coast filled, and the retention pond path is why it filled it as a district rather than a single address.
The corridor along Carolina Forest Boulevard between River Oaks Drive and Village Center Boulevard was, as recently as last year, undeveloped forest land next to a doctor's office. It's now a two-restaurant loop with a dog park, a kids' playground, an outdoor screen, and a beer list that reads like an inside joke for people who already live nearby. That's a fast turn for one stretch of road, and it's a preview of how much of the rest of that corridor still has room to fill in as the community keeps growing around it.
If you're weighing what a fast-changing corridor like this one means for a Carolina Forest home search, that's exactly the kind of neighborhood texture Modern Fortress tracks block by block. Schedule Your Private Tour and we'll walk you through what's actually changing on the ground, not just what's listed on a spec sheet.
