Beercation: Asheville, North Carolina

Nestled in the cradle of the Blue Ridge Mountains in western North Carolina,

has everything you’d want in a perfect craft-beer town—clean water, endless outdoor activities, and a cool counter-cultural vibe that both honors and defies its Deep South locale.

THERE’S AN UNDENIABLE CREATIVE

magnetism to Asheville—from George Vanderbilt’s visit in the 1880s that convinced him to build one of America’s greatest estates (Biltmore House) to the 1933 founding of the seminal Black Mountain College (home to luminaries in the world of art, architecture, music, and dance), the mountains of western North Carolina have been a draw for those in search of space to do something a bit different.

It’s no surprise, then, that Rolling Stone Magazine named Asheville the “new freak capital of the U.S.” in 2000. A haven for art galleries, independent bookstores, musicians, locavore restaurants, farmer’s markets, and the like, it’s equally no surprise that craft beer took hold of the city in a serious way in the 2000s and is poised to play an even larger role in the city’s future.

Not One, But Three Major Satellites

For most cities, having one major national craft brewer locate a new brewery within your boundaries would be a big deal (just look at the number of cities that bid for Stone Brewing Company’s East Coast expansion brewery). Asheville, however, currently boasts two major satellite breweries—sierra Nevada’s Mills River facility just south of Asheville proper and Oskar Blues’s location a bit further south in Brevard, North Carolina. A third major brewery, Fort Collins–based New Belgium, will open less than a mile from central downtown in late 2015. With almost two million barrels of brewing capacity coming online in less than two years, Asheville is—undoubtedly—the fastest growing craft-beer city in America.

Sierra Nevada’s decision was driven by a number of factors. Sales were booming in the eastern United States, so it made sense to build an East Coast brewery “to bring beer to the market fresher with less of an environmental impact,” says Sierra Nevada Beer Ambassador Bill Manley. “Once we decided to go east, there was a quantifiable list of things we needed in a new city—access to good water, ease of shipping and access to highways, things like that. And then there were the cultural intangibles,” such as access to the outdoors, good schools, and even live music. It also meant local recycling programs and efforts toward alternate energy production, among other sustainability efforts.

There was a final cultural intangible to check off the list as well: the city’s local beer