Drive up Country Club Drive in Hampstead today and the sign at 2368 no longer says Belvedere. It says Ironclad Golf & Beer Garden, and if you didn't grow up here, you might assume that's just another rebrand, a new coat of paint on an old fairway. It isn't. What happened at that address over the last six years changed which night of the week this town actually gathers, and the story behind it explains something about Hampstead that a weekend drive-through never will.
The Golf Course Hampstead Almost Lost
Belvedere Country Club closed in March 2020. For the neighbors whose backyards backed up to those fairways, the silence wasn't peaceful, it was ominous. They had watched this movie before. Echo Farms golf course on the Cape Fear River in southern Wilmington shut down and got bulldozed for townhomes after a lawsuit failed to stop it. Topsail Greens, another course right here in Hampstead, closed in 2013 and was sold to a developer the following year. Houses sit on those fairways now.
So when Belvedere went quiet, residents did the math. A closed golf course is 176 acres of green space with no protection and a for-sale sign eventually attached to it. Some neighbors started mowing sections of the abandoned course themselves, just to keep it from looking like an invitation to bulldozers.
Then Ted Coughlin, who owns Ironclad Brewery in downtown Wilmington, bought the whole property in June 2020. He didn't buy it to flip it into a subdivision. He bought it to keep it a golf course, just not the kind of golf course it used to be.
The layout itself dates to 1970, designed by Russell T. Burney in a figure-eight routing that starts along the Intracoastal Waterway before moving inland through the back nine. That geography didn't change. What changed was everything around it.
Fun Golf, Not Country Club
Coughlin and his vice president, Brandon Noel, renamed the course Ironclad Golf & Beer Garden and made a point of saying, publicly, that they weren't running a country club anymore. Noel put it plainly to a local reporter at the time: they weren't going to be bougie, they were going to be fun, golf with a scorecard or without one, whichever you preferred.
The back nine reopened in May 2021, and Noel has been upfront that greens neglected for years don't snap back overnight, this has been a multi-year rebuild rather than a flip of a switch. What came next mattered more to most Hampstead residents than the turf conditions. Next to the driving range, Ironclad built a 30,000-square-foot beer garden, among the largest in North Carolina, with room for more than 500 people across a multi-level outdoor space anchored by a stage they call the Shaka Stage.
The taco shop attached to it isn't an outside vendor either. Shaka Taco's owners, Cody Leutgens and Steve Christian, grew up in this area and opened their original restaurant in Surf City back in 2017. When Coughlin met them over dinner at that first location, the idea of putting a second Shaka Taco inside the golf course beer garden felt less like a business deal and more like coming home, in Christian's own words, since he and his crew had their first jobs in that same clubhouse building years earlier.
The Only Market That Opens After Work
Here's the part that actually reorganizes a weeknight in Hampstead. The Hampstead Farmers Market runs every Thursday, year-round, from 4 to 7 p.m., set up right inside that beer garden next to Shaka Taco. It's producer-only, meaning the people behind the tables grew or made what's on them.
Compare that to the rest of the Cape Fear region's markets:
| Market | Day | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| Hampstead Farmers Market | Thursday | 4 to 7 p.m., year-round |
| Wilmington Farmers Market at Tidal Creek | Saturday | 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. |
| Riverfront Farmers Market (downtown Wilmington) | Saturday | 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. |
Every other market within a reasonable drive asks you to show up on a weekend morning, before most people have finished their coffee. Hampstead's is the only one built for the hours after a workday, which matters in a town where a lot of residents commute toward Wilmington or Jacksonville and don't get home until late afternoon. You're not choosing between sleeping in and buying tomatoes. You're stopping on your way home from work, or you're already at Ironclad for a round of golf and the market just happens to be set up when you finish.
One of the market's founding vendors, Casey Glover of Green Drop Farms, summed up the reasoning behind the whole project in a line that's stuck with a lot of regulars:
"We believe that we are borrowing the land from our future generations."
It's a fitting sentiment for a market that exists on land that, five years earlier, half the neighborhood assumed would be a subdivision by now.
What Actually Happens on a Thursday
Show up on a given Thursday and here's the shape of the evening:
- Producer-only stalls selling meat, produce, and artisan goods, set up inside the beer garden
- Shaka Taco running its full menu until 9 p.m., the same menu as the original Surf City location plus a few additions built for the longer Hampstead hours
- Live music on the Shaka Stage, usually local musicians
- Weekly cornhole tournaments happening alongside the market, not instead of it
- Leashed dogs and kids welcome throughout
None of it requires a tee time. You can walk in from the parking lot, buy a week's worth of vegetables, order tacos, and stay for a set without ever touching a golf club. That's by design. Noel and Coughlin built this as an entertainment venue that happens to have eighteen holes attached, not a golf course that happens to allow visitors.
The Same Fairways, A Different Kind of Neighbor
What's easy to miss, if you're only comparing before-and-after photos of the clubhouse, is that the land itself never changed hands to a developer. The fairways Greg Katzman used to watch fill with weeds from his back porch are the same fairways his neighbors now walk past on their way to a Thursday farmers market. The fifth hole still looks out over the Intracoastal Waterway. The figure-eight routing Russell T. Burney designed in 1970 is still there.
What changed is who gets to use it and when. A private country club with a dress code and a membership fee became a public beer garden, taco stand, concert venue, and weekly market, all sitting on the same acreage that two other regional courses lost to bulldozers. That's the quieter story underneath the beer taps and the cornhole boards. Hampstead didn't just gain a fun Thursday night. It kept 176 acres of open land from disappearing into another rooftop subdivision, and it did it by turning that land into something the whole town, not just members, actually uses.
If you're already living here, you've probably felt this shift without naming it. The week doesn't build toward Saturday the way it does in a lot of towns. It builds toward Thursday, toward a beer garden built where a country club used to be, on a course that almost wasn't there at all.
If you're thinking about what makes a place like Hampstead worth putting down roots in, beyond the market data and the square footage, this is the kind of detail worth knowing. Joseph Zuba has been paying attention to these shifts in the Topsail Island corridor for a long time. If you want a conversation with someone who actually knows this stretch of coast, not just its listings, schedule a free consultation any time.
