The name on the door is Dirtbag Ales, and the people behind it have never pretended otherwise. The Hope Mills brewery, tucked just off Exit 41 of I-95 at 5435 Corporation Drive, is owned and operated by three U.S. Army veterans: Tito, Eric and Jerry. Vernardo "Tito" Simmons-Valenzuela was the homebrewer, a soldier who had turned a gifted homebrew kit into an obsession. Jerry was already in business when they met him, running his tree service. Eric met Tito on Fort Bragg and liked his Kolsch so much that he decided to throw as much money at it as possible. The three of them built a brewery that now pours from 25 taps, plus two wines, a cider and a coffee, and that has spent years positioning itself less as a taproom with a parking lot and more as a Cumberland County living room.
That instinct is exactly why the Misfit Market exists. The brewery's grounds fill with a lineup of local makers, artists, vintage sellers and purveyors of handmade goods that the event's own description cheerfully labels "oddities" and "all the things you definitely didn't know you needed." The pitch is blunt about its audience: bring your friends, your shopping bag, and your questionable impulse control. Come for the beer. Stay for the weird. Leave with something awesome.
It is a market built on a premise most craft fairs avoid. Where a standard vendor show organizes itself around candles, cutting boards and monogrammed tumblers, the Misfit Market leans into the strange. The October edition lands squarely in the season for it, arriving in the middle of a fall that already has Hope Mills booked solid with corn mazes, hayrides and pumpkin patches. The Misfit Market is the counterprogramming: less harvest festival, more treasure hunt through a stranger's attic, if that stranger had excellent taste and a booth fee.
The market is an outgrowth of something the brewery already does well. Dirtbag Ales has run a Sunday farmers market, an open-air affair featuring locally grown fresh produce and other products from the Sandhill area, from vegetable stands to homemade jellies and jams. That market gave the brewery a template and a vendor network. The Misfit Market is what happens when the same infrastructure gets pointed at a different sensibility, one that trades heirloom tomatoes for taxidermy-adjacent curios and hand-thrown pottery with an unsettling glaze.
It is not a one-off experiment, either. The brewery has repeated the formula in other seasons, most notably with a Creepy Little Christmas Market that turned the taproom into what organizers described as a crossroads of the strange and the festive, complete with eerie antiques, mystical curiosities and offbeat art aimed at "the peculiar people" on your gift list. That event ran in the evening, drew live music and a food truck, and made clear that Dirtbag's definition of a holiday market includes gothic ornaments and arcane-inspired jewelry. The Misfit Market is the same idea without the tinsel.
What holds it together is the venue itself. Dirtbag Ales has built a reputation as a community within a brewery, the kind of place where a veteran-owned business packages a Homecoming Pilsner made entirely from North Carolina malt, hops and yeast to welcome service members home during Heroes Homecoming week. The brewery works with the Fayetteville Area Convention & Visitors Bureau, hosts comedy shows, movie nights, yoga and live music, and serves food from the chef-led kitchen Napkins. The Misfit Market fits that calendar naturally. It is a gathering that happens to involve shopping, rather than a shopping event that happens to have beer.
For anyone planning to go, the practical details are simple. The market is at Dirtbag Ales Brewery & Taproom, 5435 Corporation Drive in Hope Mills. The brewery has not published specific start and end times for this edition, and no admission price or ticketing requirement has been announced, so it is worth checking the brewery's events page or the Distinctly Fayetteville listing before you head out. What is clear is the shape of the thing: booths, a cold pour, and a vendor roster assembled on the theory that the best finds are the ones nobody was looking for.
That is the through-line of the whole enterprise. Three veterans who started with a homebrew kit and a promise of free beer for life ended up running one of the more distinctive gathering places between Fayetteville and the Sandhills. They named it Dirtbag on purpose, embracing the idea of stepping away from the status quo. A market full of oddities, vintage finds and delightfully strange handmade goods is not a departure from that identity. It is the most on-brand thing they could possibly host.