Coffee, a soft pretzel, and coffee cake share the table at NOCO, where breakfast has a way of turning into brunch.
By 7 a.m. on a weekday, the doors are already open at NOCO Brews & Bites. The place fills fast, with climbers from Triangle Rock Club next door stopping in before or after a session, laptops opening at the communal tables, and the espresso machine getting a running start on a day the taps won’t join for hours yet. None of it happens by accident.
That’s the thing about NOCO that’s easy to miss if you only see the finished space: how deliberate it is. “We kept coming back to one question: Where would we want to spend our time?” says Jeremy Bond, who co-founded NOCO with his twin brother, Jay. “We wanted to build a place we’d genuinely enjoy coming to ourselves — a place we’d be excited to bring our families, meet our friends, work for a few hours over coffee, or unwind at the end of the day.” That question shaped everything from the layout to the hours, and it’s baked into NOCO’s tagline: From First Cup to Last Call™.
Jeremy and Jay already know what it takes to construct something people love. A decade ago, the two, along with co-founder Whit Baker — who remains a partner at Bond Brothers but isn’t involved with NOCO — opened Bond Brothers Beer Company in downtown Cary, back when “there really wasn’t a lot going on” there, Jeremy says.
Jeremy (left) and Jay Bond
“We started Bond Brothers almost 16, 17 years ago,” he explains of the slow growth before it was incorporated in 2014. It officially opened in 2016, and downtown Cary grew up around it. Since then, the award-winning brewery has grown into a second downtown Cary location and a presence inside Raleigh-Durham International Airport. It’s proof, if any were needed, that the Bonds know how to create a place people want to return to.
NOCO isn’t a rebrand of that success, though, and the brothers are careful to say so. “We didn’t start by deciding to open another brewery, a coffee shop, a restaurant, or a bar — Raleigh already has so many great places to enjoy all of those experiences,” Jay says. NOCO is an independent concept, built to complement rather than replace what they’ve already built in Cary. “After more than a decade of building places where people love to gather, NOCO gave us the opportunity to bring everything we’ve learned together in one place,” Jay says, “and create something with an identity entirely its own.”
That identity starts with the name. Literally, NOCO means no company. “There’s obviously a philosophy, and the thought process behind everything we do,” Jeremy explains. “However, we try to do things very naturally. We don’t really try to force anything.” That’s a distinction worth sitting with. NOCO was built to feel relaxed and unforced. The layout, the seating, the power access, the food and beverage program, the outdoor space, the ability to serve people well from morning through last call … all of it was thought through in advance.
NOCO brewmaster Daniel Elliott
The brothers “think very similarly,” Jeremy says — Jay studied music, Jeremy art — which made it natural to do something together. When Triangle Rock Club, the climbing gym anchoring the Salvage Yard side of Raleigh Iron Works, came calling about the space next door, the brothers didn’t have to think long. But NOCO wasn’t designed around TRC’s climbers alone. It was conceived, from the outset, for a much broader cross-section of the neighborhood.
First pour of the day, right on cue
A straight transplant of Bond Brothers wouldn’t have worked here, Jeremy says, and the food and beverage program reflects a wider ambition than beer alone. Protein-forward options lead the light-bites menu — bacon, cheese, and hashbrown bites; a sausage, egg, and cheese croissant sandwich — alongside grab-and-go offerings from local partners Union Special, Benchwarmers, and Sweet Nothings Bakery. “Not that beer is unhealthy,” Jeremy says. “It’s perfectly fine. But not having a food component and just bringing Bond Brothers here, we felt would not work.”
Enter Daniel Elliott, NOCO’s brewmaster, whose beer education traces straight back to Bond Brothers. Daniel trained there, left for a stint at Trophy, came back, went again, and finally landed at NOCO, where the Bonds already knew his beer, his personality, and his fit. The in-house beer program now spans seven brews, anchored by the flagship NOCO LOCO, a 4.4% ABV Mexican lager, alongside three ongoing collaborations with other local breweries and a couple of ciders.
Coffee wasn’t an afterthought, either. “We knew we wanted it to be a place for people to come and spend a long period of time,” Jeremy says, “so we wanted to bring the coffee component to the space.” It’s part of the same all-day logic behind From First Cup to Last Call: Offer a single space that holds a full spectrum of the day, rather than a brewery that happens to also sell coffee.
The mornings at NOCO now belong to remote workers who’ve traded a home office for a communal one. “We have power sources everywhere,” Jeremy says. “Outlets on the floor, outlets on the wall, comfortable seating, tables … different nooks where they can kind of focus and be in their own zone.”
Last call starts here. A NOCO brew poured fresh from the tap.
By afternoon, the climbers filter in, and the green space fills with something entirely different. “We do get a lot of parents and children, which we love,” Jeremy says. “They can come and relax while the kids run around and enjoy themselves outside. We get quite a variety.”
That variety is written into the floor plan itself. Rather than one undifferentiated room, NOCO is organized the way a house is, into the Library, the Living Room, the Sunroom, the Porch, the Yard, and the Bar, each planned with a specific kind of guest and a specific kind of day in mind. Remote workers tend to claim the Library and Living Room, tucked-in spaces built for focus. Families spill toward the Porch and the Yard, where there’s room to run. And as the day tips toward evening, the Bar takes over.
It’s not the first time the brothers have built this kind of intentional community programming. Before Bond Brothers could even legally pour a beer, they’d already started a run club, meeting at the pharmacy next door because their own taproom wasn’t open yet. Over the years, that club has grown to more than 4,000 members. At NOCO, they planned for the same kind of community-building from day one, launching a climbing club that met for the first time just days after NOCO opened its doors.
Raleigh Iron Works itself is still being written, and that’s part of the draw. “Salvage Yard is phase two for the crowd, and what they do is amazing,” Jay says of the redevelopment, adding that the craft beer world is “a small, tight-knit family.” NOCO has already been trading notes with fellow tenant Ponysaurus Brewing Co. about what it’s like to help evolve a destination from scratch. “There’s still a lot to create,” he says about the desire for NOCO to feel like a home away from home.
Guests settle in beneath NOCO’s floral mural, one of the many corners built for lounging and lingering over a drink.
For Jeremy, “home” isn’t really a metaphor. He lives in Raleigh, close enough that NOCO is almost an extension of his own neighborhood and not a commute. “I only live about six minutes away,” he says, almost in passing, as if it wasn’t the whole point. But it is, in a way. You can’t build a place for people to linger in if you’re not willing to linger there yourself. It’s part of why the beverage program stretches well past beer and coffee to craft cocktails, wine, and THC-infused seltzers that sit alongside nonalcoholic options like mocktails, NA beer, and seasonal Italian sodas.
Appealing to all tastes so guests feel welcome to stay awhile is a different kind of pressure than what Jeremy and Jay felt opening Bond Brothers. Back then, Jeremy says, he and Jay were young and, by his own admission, a little naive — “We just were excited about beer” — opening in a downtown Cary block that had more promise than proof.
These days, “I know all the responsibility and the amount of work it’s going to take,” Jeremy says of NOCO. “I can see the road ahead. I know what we need to focus on, and it’s a little bit intimidating.”
Tucked into Raleigh Iron Works’ Salvage Yard, NOCO’s industrial exterior gives way to a landscaped patio that supports sticking around.
But pressure isn’t the whole picture, and Jeremy is careful not to let it be. “I’m excited; I’m looking forward to it,” he says, almost correcting himself mid-thought. The weight of knowing exactly what’s ahead — the work, the responsibility, the community’s expectations — hasn’t dulled the appeal of it. If anything, it has sharpened it. This isn’t the wide-eyed excitement of two brothers who didn’t know what they were getting into. It’s the excitement of two people who know precisely what they’re signing up for and are choosing it anyway.
None of it runs on Jay and Jeremy alone, and they’re the first to say so. Between long hours, little sleep, and a lot of hard work, the thing that’s actually made NOCO possible is the team they’ve built around themselves.
“We were pretty fortunate with a lot of people that we were able to find and hire,” Jeremy says. It’s a team that’s taken the reins on the day-to-day, freeing the brothers to work behind the scenes and be pulled in whatever direction the day requires. “We’re traveling back and forth between Cary and here, dealing with whatever needs to be dealt with,” Jeremy says. “A lot of it’s unexpected.”
Regulars and newcomers alike find a friendly face behind NOCO’s bar.
What hasn’t changed is what the Bonds believe a place like this owes the people who walk in. “You open a place, and you hope the community comes, and you’re hoping for a space that they enjoy and love, but you don’t know until,” Jay says. “There’s a responsibility when you’re opening, and it is for the community,” Jeremy adds.
It’s why NOCO doesn’t read like a brewery with a coffee bar bolted on, or a coworking space that happens to serve beer. It reads like a house with a lot of deliberately built rooms, each one planned with a specific kind of guest, and a specific kind of day, in mind.
Pops of pink on the walls, six named rooms, the dawn-to-drinks menu … every facet was intentional. What’s left up to the guests is simply how they use it. That, as much as anything, is what makes NOCO feel like home.
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