Carolina Forest This Summer: The First Brewery, a Belle Terre Reopening, and a Neighborhood Built for Locals

For years, the running joke about Carolina Forest was that you had to leave it to do anything after 8 p.m. The trivia nights were in Market Common, the breweries were downtown or over the bridge in Conway, and the "date night" restaurants were a Highway 501 slog away. Summer 2026 is the first season where that sentence stops being true. Three of the openings landing between spring and mid-summer weren't designed with vacationers in mind at all. They were designed for the people already living inside the 9,000-acre master-planned footprint between Myrtle Beach and Conway.

That is the shift worth paying attention to. Carolina Forest is no longer the bedroom community that empties out toward the coast every evening. The businesses moving in are saying so on the record.

"We are gonna have tourists here, and we hope that all the tourists come and find us, but we are definitely geared toward the locals in Carolina Forest. That family that mom and dad with their kids and their kids are gonna go over to the playground and the parents are gonna watch golf with their TV or hanging with their cronies." — Brock Kurtzman, head brewer, South Coast Beer Project

The brewery that isn't chasing tourists

South Coast Beer Project is the first brewery to open in Carolina Forest, bringing around 100 jobs to the area. That sentence alone is a milestone. A community this size, with this much rooftop count, has never had one of its own. It sits at 5020 Carolina Forest Blvd, opening spring 2026.

The physical footprint tells you who it's for. The 9,000-square-foot brewery will seat 150 to 175 people. It will also double as a venue to host parties and events, with space outside for around 250 to 300 people. Owner Chris Evans and Kurtzman have planned movie nights outside on an 18-ft screen surrounded by tables and patio chairs, along with bounce houses for kids while the parents relax and enjoy a beer.

Compare that ratio to a tourist-facing brewery on Ocean Boulevard, where seats turn over fast and the design assumes you're two blocks from a hotel room. South Coast is built for the opposite behavior: park once, stay four hours, let the kids run. That is a neighborhood venue, not a vacation stop.

What actually opened, and where

If you live off Carolina Forest Boulevard, River Oaks, or Belle Terre, here is the short list of what's genuinely new on your daily map, with addresses so you can stop guessing:

• South Coast Beer Project — 5020 Carolina Forest Blvd. Spring 2026 opening. Brewery, restaurant, outdoor lawn, movie nights, playground.
• End Zone Sports Bar & Grill — 3521 Belle Terre Boulevard, taking over a former establishment. This venture, led by local entrepreneur Adam Carroll, promises sports, games, and a new food menu following extensive renovations.
• O.A.K. Prime Kitchen and Bar — the Carolina Forest sit-down that finally earned outside recognition. O.A.K. Prime in Carolina Forest received a Michelin recommendation, and the visitor bureau describes it as a chef-inspired menu offering Southern flare and re-imagined classics, bringing a "one-of-a-kind" experience to Carolina Forest and recently earned Michelin recognition for its culinary excellence.
• Fullbelly BBQ — located in Carolina Forest, this smokehouse serves up classic Southern barbecue plates, ribs, pulled pork and homestyle sides.

That is a brewery, a sports bar, a Michelin-nod restaurant, and a barbecue joint, all inside one master-planned community, all opening or reopening within a year of each other. Two years ago that list would have been zero, one, or two entries.

The outdoor loop most residents already know

The other half of the Carolina Forest story this summer is that the outdoor infrastructure people were already using quietly got a lot busier. Visit Myrtle Beach's own community write-up now names the loop out loud: outdoor escapes like The Hulk mountain bike & run park, Carolina Forest Recreation Center, and Lewis Ocean Bay Heritage Preserve, along with Palmetto Adventure Land Playground, a large community playground.

That's a real weekend, not a brochure. Ride The Hulk in the morning, cool off at the rec center pool, walk a Lewis Ocean Bay trail before the afternoon storms roll in, then land at South Coast for the movie on the lawn. None of those stops require getting on 17 or fighting summer beach traffic.

For golf, the closest year-round public option remains World Tour Golf Links, a nearby public course open year-round, with premier golf at Legends and Myrtle Beach National a short drive out.

Then vs. now, in one table

A useful way to see the change is to look at where a Carolina Forest household actually spent its Friday nights a few years ago versus where those same trips can now stay inside the community.

None of that erases the coast. Carolina Forest is still a 9,000+ acre master planned community located between the sandy beaches of Myrtle Beach and the historic city of Conway, just 10 minutes from the Atlantic Ocean. The point is that the reasons to leave the community are shrinking, and the reasons to stay are stacking up in the same twelve-month window.

The market context, briefly

Visit Myrtle Beach's own executives have framed the shift in the same terms residents feel on the ground. Bob Harris, Executive Vice President of Group Sales for Visit Myrtle Beach, said, "From fresh-caught seafood to chef-driven dining, the Myrtle Beach area's growing restaurant scene has remarkably evolved over the last few years, meeting the tastes of today's travelers and residents. These openings not only provide a slew of options for scrumptious delights but demonstrate that chefs and restaurateurs have tremendous confidence in Myrtle Beach as a destination to live, work and visit."

The residents-and-travelers phrasing is deliberate. Restaurant operators are underwriting new leases against a customer base that stays past Labor Day. In Carolina Forest specifically, that customer base has been growing steadily along Carolina Forest Boulevard, River Oaks Drive, and the newer sections east of Postal Way, and the businesses opening on those roads reflect what a year-round household actually spends on: a Wednesday-night sports game, a Sunday BBQ takeout, a birthday dinner without a bridge crossing.

Why this matters if you already live here

Two practical takeaways for the current resident.

First, your evening radius just contracted, which is a quiet form of quality-of-life upgrade you don't have to pay for. The playground-adjacent brewery model at South Coast in particular is what turns a community from "houses near the beach" into a neighborhood with its own center of gravity. Movie nights on an 18-ft screen with your kids five minutes from your driveway is a different lifestyle than driving to Broadway at the Beach for the same experience.

Second, if you have out-of-town family who still think Carolina Forest is "the subdivision behind the outlets," the summer 2026 lineup finally gives you a full day itinerary that never crosses Highway 17. Tanger Outlets for a morning errand, The Hulk or Lewis Ocean Bay for the middle of the day, O.A.K. Prime for dinner, South Coast for a nightcap. That is a real answer to "what do you actually do out here," and it is a new answer.

The rest of the Grand Strand is having its own summer. Ole Smoky Distillery and Yee-Haw Brewing Co. opened its doors at Broadway at the Beach in May 2026, at 1214 Celebrity Circle, a 40,000-square-foot space that functions simultaneously as a working distillery, a craft brewery, a full-service restaurant, a live music venue, and a gathering place built around one of the largest screens in the Myrtle Beach area. That is a tourist destination in the classic sense. Carolina Forest's openings are the counterweight, smaller, closer, and built around the school-year calendar rather than the vacation calendar.

Work With Lindsay

If you already own in Carolina Forest, this is the summer to notice what your home is quietly becoming worth in lifestyle terms, not just square-foot terms. And if you're thinking about how the neighborhood's changing mix of amenities is affecting resale positioning in your specific pocket, that is exactly the conversation Lindsay Jones has every week from the on-site Grande Dunes Properties sales center. Reach out when you're ready to talk through what it means for your address.