Asheville, Here We Come!

Beginnings

The modern story really begins in 1994, when Oscar Wong, a retired engineer and dedicated homebrewer, founded Highland Brewing. Highland started as a very small operation in the basement beneath Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria in downtown Asheville, and it became the first legal brewery in Asheville since Prohibition.

That’s an important distinction, because Western North Carolina certainly had a long tradition of making alcohol outside the law. Moonshining was part of the mountain culture for generations. But the modern Asheville brewing scene wasn’t really born out of illegal brewing. It was born when people like Oscar Wong finally had the opportunity to brew commercially and legally.

Highland was followed by other early Asheville breweries, including Green Man in 1997 and Asheville Brewing Company in 1998. Slowly, a real local brewing community began to emerge.

Then North Carolina changed the rules.

Pop the Cap

For decades, state law had effectively put a ceiling on the kinds of beer North Carolina breweries could make. The state’s six-percent alcohol limit meant that many stronger beer styles being brewed elsewhere simply weren’t legal here.

That led to a grassroots campaign known as Pop the Cap, in which brewers and beer enthusiasts across the state pushed to change the law. In 2005, they succeeded. The legal limit was raised from six percent to fifteen percent alcohol by volume.

And that opened the door.

North Carolina brewers suddenly had the freedom to make a much wider range of beers, and the craft brewing industry began expanding rapidly. Asheville was particularly well positioned to take advantage of that change. It already had a thriving tourism industry, a strong food and arts culture, the natural draw of the mountains, and a population that seemed perfectly comfortable spending an afternoon sitting around a taproom talking about hops.

Important NC Beer Explorer Tip: When consuming alcohol, always have a designated driver. Be safe out there, friends! Follow these simple tips for safer consumption.

Growing Recognition

By 2009, Asheville had gained national attention by being named Beer City USA, sharing the title with Portland. The following year, Asheville won outright.

And the momentum just kept building.

More local breweries opened, the South Slope neighborhood developed into one of the most concentrated brewery districts in the country, and some of the biggest names in American craft brewing decided that Asheville was the place to be. Sierra Nevada established its massive East Coast brewery nearby, and New Belgium eventually followed with its own Asheville operation.

At that point, Asheville wasn’t simply part of the craft beer movement anymore. It had become one of the places people traveled specifically to experience it.

Over the past year, we’ve been traveling around North Carolina in search of great beer. We’ve made our way to Charlotte and Winston-Salem, traveled down to the coast, and visited plenty of breweries closer to home. Along the way, we’ve met some terrific people, tasted some seriously good beer, and learned that there is a whole lot more to North Carolina brewing than we ever realized.

But there’s one place we’ve been deliberately saving for a bigger adventure: Asheville.

And there’s a pretty good reason for that. Asheville has been called the heart of North Carolina beer country, and for years it has consistently ranked among the great beer destinations in the United States—and sometimes even among the best beer cities in the world.

So, naturally, we figured we should probably work our way up to it.

After all, you don’t want to walk into Asheville having only visited a handful of breweries and immediately start pretending you know what you’re talking about. We figured we should at least look like we knew what we were doing before we got there.

That brings us to September 14th, when we’re finally heading to Asheville for five days of exploring breweries, taprooms, neighborhoods, beer history, and—if everything goes according to plan—a completely unreasonable amount of beer.

But before we get there, it’s worth asking a pretty interesting question: how did this relatively small mountain city become such a powerhouse in the American craft beer movement?

Oscar Wong played a huge role in the development of the Asheville brewing scene.

Big Challenges

Of course, Asheville’s brewing story has had some pretty serious challenges, too.

In September 2024, Hurricane Helene devastated much of Western North Carolina, and Asheville’s breweries were hit particularly hard. Flooding, power and water problems, damaged buildings and equipment, and the sudden collapse of tourism created an enormous challenge for an industry that depends so heavily on people coming through the doors.

But one of the things that stood out during the recovery was how many breweries became part of the response itself. Taprooms became gathering places, breweries provided food, water, electricity, and other assistance, and brewery owners and employees helped their neighbors while dealing with their own losses.

The industry has spent the last couple of years rebuilding, reopening, and finding its footing again. And that makes our trip to Asheville feel a little more significant than simply checking another city off our brewery list.

Because we’re going there at a really interesting point in Asheville’s beer story.

Many breweries experienced incredible devastation from Hurricane Helene in September 2024.

There are more than 40 breweries in/around Asheville, but this AI-generated map mainly shows the ones we plan to visit.

Planning Our Tour

We’ve put together a pretty ambitious itinerary.

We’ll start in Black Mountain, where we’ll visit Black Mountain Brewing, and then we'll visit Cellarest, before heading into West Asheville for stops at Diatribe and Archetype.

We’re giving ourselves a little breathing room on Wednesday, with a couple of afternoon stops around the Arboretum, including Hillman and Sweeten Creek. Then Thursday will be our big South Slope day, where we’ll visit some Asheville institutions, including Burial, Green Man, and Twin Leaf.

Finally, we’ll finish up on Friday with a trip through the River District, including Zillicoah and Riverside Rhapsody.

That’s a lot of breweries, but we’re hoping to get a lot more out of this trip than just a list of beers we liked.

We want to see the different neighborhoods, meet the people behind the breweries, learn more about Asheville’s brewing history, and get a sense of what makes this particular beer culture different from what we’ve found everywhere else in North Carolina.

Because after spending the last year exploring the state one brewery at a time, we’ve finally reached the place that has been sitting there on the horizon the whole time.

So, Asheville, we’re coming for you.

And if you’ve been following NC Beer Explorer as we’ve made our way around the state, we hope you’ll come along for this one.

We’ve been working our way up to it.

Now it’s finally time for the Tour D’Asheville.

This time, we did a vlog post first. If you prefer, you can listen and watch this post on YouTube.

The NC Craft Brewers Guild recently celebrated the 21st anniversary of "Pop the Cap" with a large-scale event at the new Fullsteam facility in the American Tobacco Campus.

Which Asheville breweries have you visited? What do you think of the beer and the city?