Business

BIG FOREST: The courtship of Sierra Nevada

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. in Mills River. [PHOTO BY PAULA ROBERTS]

By Bill Moss, Published: April 7, 2014

Part 1: Teddy bears and Torpedo beer

Andrew Tate got a call on March 1, 2011, about an industrial prospect. There was nothing new about that. The president of the Henderson County Partnership for Economic Development since 2007, Tate had recruited new companies to the county and helped others expand. He knew the initial ping
from an industrial site hunter was at best the first step down a long road and often a false alarm that led to no road at all. The prospect was code named Fish Bowl. It would be six months before Tate learned that the client was Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., the second largest craft brewer in the U.S.
"We heard about project Fish Bowl from a business and industry developer with the Department Commerce, Garrett Weickoff," said Tate, a 36-year-old native of Fuquay Varina, east of Raleigh. "He'd been contacted by Austin consulting, which was the firm engaged by Sierra Nevada. The first time we heard about project Fish Bowl, there was a requirement that there be rail on the site, which has always been a very limiting factor, especially for Western North Carolina. We honestly did not see an opportunity to respond with a competitive site at that point in time."
He submitted the material on two industrial sites then forgot about Fish Bowl, figuring the client would scratch Mills River — no train track.
Tate had no way of knowing what had gone on behind the scenes already. And he had no way of knowing that this still-secret client would soon take him and the industry recruiting apparatus of Henderson County on a six-month thrill ride that would end in one of the biggest victories ever for the Partnership.

Based in Chico, Calif., Sierra Nevada had a good problem. It could not make enough beer to quench its growing legions of fans. A star in the burgeoning craft brewery branch of American beer, Sierra Nevada had the style, the name and the taste. It had a national distribution reach matched only by Boston Beer Co. and its flagship Samuel Adams brand. And it was growing fast.

Brian Grossman talks about Sierra Nevada's decision to choose Mills River."We got to the point where our sales, roughly five years out, were going to be out of capacity," Brian Grossman, the son of Sierra Nevada founder Ken Grossman, said in an interview at the brewery construction site. "What are our options? You could either sell the company, you could expand in Chico or you could build a brewery somewhere else. Obviously we weren't going to sell the company, and that's where it came to the family decision.
"If we expand in Chico, it's got some advantages for sure. Out here it complicates things immensely. A, one of us had to move out here, and B, now we've got a full other brewery to run, which is extraordinarily difficult," continued Brian, who became the one to move and signed on as co-manager of the new brewery. "That's where the family decision was, that the most sustainable (strategy) for the company is to have a secondary brewery out here. We sat down as a family — I remember I was in my sister Carrie's daughter's room, stuffed animals around us, we were all sitting around having this conversation about building a hundred-plus million dollar brewery with a teddy bear. That's when we made the decision of 'OK, we're going to do this.' That's when we came to the action team and said, 'All right, let's start this.' That's when Stan took the bull by the horns."
Stan was Stan Cooper, the do-everything company executive who is part of the three-member executive team, along with Ken and Brian Grossman, that would put the Sierra Nevada stamp somewhere east of the Mississippi.
"The strategic team developed criteria that included airport access, roads, schools, the look, tone and feel of the community," Brian said. "We wanted something sort of like Chico, we wanted a big farm-to-table farmers market that people like to be at, outdoor-centric. Our drinkers are outdoors drinkers. It was a year of just coming up with precursors that this is how we're going to select our cities. We got down to 20 and that's when Stan went out."
The company's site selection consultant had pinpointed the optimal geographic hub of a distribution wheel — Harrisburg, Pa. A prospective site near there looked good. Cooper flew out to visit. Checking into a motel, he asked a desk clerk where he might get a beer with dinner.
"And she said, 'You're not from here, are you?'" Cooper recalled. "She said, 'You can't get beer here. Closest place you can get a beer is about 5 miles down the road.'" Cooper took out his cell phone and called the boss. "Get out of there," Grossman said.

PART 2: Fish Bowl to Big Forest
Back in Hendersonville, Tate suddenly got another call, on Aug. 1, from a client code-named Big Forest.
"We did not have enough information to know that project Big Forest was project Fish Bowl," he said. "The difference between it and Fish Bowl is it would allow us to respond to sites that had off-site (rail access), a rail transload facility. As it Andrew Tatewas later explained to us, the company had narrowed down to two sites in Virginia and Tennessee that met the requirements. It met all the check marks but didn't have what the company wanted. They decided, let's rename this project, let's adjust this parameter here that says you have to have rail, and let's call it Big Forest."
Henderson County was back in the running.
Tate submitted Ferncliff, which was undeveloped woods between Asheville airport and the French Broad River, and Broad Pointe, an established industrial park on N.C. 280 across the river.
Things started picking up quickly.
Nine days after he submitted the sites, Tate met with the brewery's site selection consultant, Don Schjeldahl. The project was extremely competitive. Counties were scrambling to land the unidentified company that promised a $100 million investment and 125 good paying jobs. Schjeldahl had come to North Carolina to assess 15 sites in five counties on behalf of Sierra Nevada, including the two in Mills River.
"We met in the Raflatac parking lot, which is a great vantage point," Tate said. "You can look kind of down across the floodplain and you can point back over to the Ferncliff property. So Don took a look at everything and within a pretty short period of time they narrowed that list of 15 sites to three in Western North Carolina, within a matter of days."
One was in Black Mountain and the other was in McDowell County. The Grossmans liked the sound of the deep woods at the edge of the regional airport in a small town called Mills River. It was a big forest.

PART 3: 'Oh, you're going to have visitors?'

Bill Lapsley, the principle engineer of W.G. Lapsley and Associates, has been involved in many of the major developments in Henderson County for 40 years. As the engineer for the Ferncliff property owner, Vaughan Fitzpatrick, Lapsley had worked with Fitzpatrick, Tate and Bill Moyer, the former chairman of the county Board of Commissioners, to turn the site into a prospective industrial site. When he got the call from Tate, Lapsley was ready to show the property to the client. He explained the water, sewer and road availability, described the lay of the land, how graders could move dirt. He still didn't know the identity of the client. But Schjeldahl wanted to start running numbers.
Bill Lapsley talks about engineering work for a company code named Big Forest."At this point I don't know what's inside the building. All I know is the number of employees, water supply, sewer discharge," Lapsley said. The client wanted to "develop a budget for site improvement."
It's not just a factory.
"We're going to have visitors," Schjeldahl told Lapsley.
"'Oh, you're going to have visitors?' 'Yeah, a lot of visitors.' 'Why do they need to come?' 'You don't need to know that yet. We're going to have a lot of visitors.'"
It's not known just how many people a fully developed brewery campus might attract. The covenants of the property list permitted uses including a restaurant, tours, gardens, beer camp, a conference center, special events, walking trails, bike trails, visitor center and canoe and kayak docks. Estimates of visits per year have ranged from 200,000 to 500,000. (The Biltmore estate attracts nearly 1 million visitors a year.)
Cooper, the co-manager of the Mills River plant, was asked about the tourism potential at a Mills River Town Board meeting last April. He could not say. But of one thing he was sure.
"It will be a showcase brewery for the world, I know that for a fact already," he said.

PART 4: Zodiacs to the rescue

Fitzpatrick is a fifth generation descendant of the Westfeldt family, which had owned the property since the 1870s. The family had used the woods on the river as a summer retreat from New Orleans since the early 1900s. A rambling two-story wood-frame home, which the family called the Green House, had served as headquarters for the extended Westfeldt family for generations. Now, in August of 2011, the house and its wide wrap-around porch became a meeting place for the Grossmans and the county economic development team. The day after they toured the site on their own, without the Partnership team, the Grossmans and Cooper set a meeting with the recruiters. The visit, Tate knew, would be critical.
Rocky Hyder"We were told we were going to have X amount of hours with them on Monday, Aug. 22," Tate said.
"We met at the Green House, very attractive, great vantage point. People loved being there. We entertained them on the porch of the Green House, started with a site overview, went over everything from utilities to transportation. We really played up the river in a substantial way and then we pitched for the first time some different options for where this rail transload facility could take place. We went through an extensive vision for the property. Vaughan and I years ago developed a written shared vision for the property."
But Tate and his team didn't just want to tell about the French Broad. They believed they had an asset that their competitors could not match.
"We wanted them to get on the river and be close to the river," Tate said. "Chip Gould, who was on our board at the time, actually went out and measured the boat ramp at Westfeldt Park to see if he could pull his boat out of Lake Lure and take everybody on it; we decided that wasn't going to work.
"So we made an emergency call to (county emergency management director) Rocky Hyder and said, 'Rocky, we understand you've got these Zodiac boats for swiftwater rescue, do you want to help us take some clients out?'
"Rocky totally jumped on it and completely took ownership of it. By the time we showed up there, they had a tent set up with rescue personnel that had life jackets and radios; it was a very well managed process.
"We put their team — Ken Grossman, Brian Grossman, Stan Cooper and Don Schjeldahl, that was their team — and we put their team two at a time on the boat and we put Vaughan on the boat with them to kind of tell them about the history of the river," Tate said.
Roads, rail and waterlines were important to the brewery. A river was not on the list.
"It was pretty entertaining," Brian Grossman said of the boat ride. "When we first shot out for site selection, being next to a body of water wasn't a big thing for us. It was just another advantage to the property. We're looking at it (and saying), 'Here's this great water access. We can do something with that.'"
Stan CooperUnplanned, the rescue worker driving the boat Cooper had boarded made a detour that was one of a thousand small turns that helped tilt the decision.
"He sees a garbage bag full of garbage hung up on some rocks and he says, 'you guys mind if we try to go get that?'" Cooper recalled. "'No.' We went and retrieved it. Guy didn't have a clue who we were, and that was very impressive. He didn't put on a show — it was legit. That just sort of set the tone for this whole region that people care."
If a tone had been set, the deal was far from done. Other competitors remained in adjoining counties and adjoining states. Some were offering free land; the Ferncliff owners weren't giving away their family heritage property. Still, other competitors fell away.
On Sept. 12, Tate got an email. "McDowell's out," it said. "Henderson County's still standing."
"And two hours later," he said, "I was meeting with Steve Wyatt to catch him up to speed."
Wyatt, the Henderson County manager, had been quick to respond to industrial prospects. The board that he worked for had always placed a strong emphasis on job creation, all the more so since the deep recession of 2008.
The planning that Tate had done with Fitzpatrick several years earlier was paying off now. The Partnership had assembled a thick book of information and certifications on the site that would save a client time and money. The idea is to eliminate risk on the front end and to draw a clear picture of the cost and process of getting water, sewer, gas, roads, electricity and other infrastructure to the site.
"This notebook's important," Tate said, taking it out of a file cabinet. "It's thick, someone's put time into this. This is very intentional, this is not an accident, and that's what this shows. They latched on to these at this first visit. They each had one. We set up a shared Dropbox folder (for sending large files the Internet) where we put all these things in the cloud and we started sharing information that way. ... Timing was an issue; that's what that notebook and that certification issue are all about."

PART 5: Picking a travel squad
In a competitive economic development hunt, a recruiter never gets overconfident.
Even-keeled on the outside, whatever anxiety and excitement he felt inside, Tate continued to push the project.
Sierra Nevada invited the Henderson County team to visit Chico on Sept. 25-27.
Tate and Garrett Wyckoff, a state Commerce Department industrial site specialist, began assembling the team.
"Anytime you're taking a trip you would sit and talk about who would be part of that team, who would bring value," Wyckoff said. "We got lucky with some of the people — (the Grossmans) being hikers and bikers. It wasn't always about business. There's a connection there with the locals and this potential new business."
Except it wasn't luck.
Tate could spout in his sleep the statistics about trips per day, kilowatts per hour and gallons per minute. But industry recruiting is both an art and a science. He had to get this right.
Mike Edney, the chairman of the Board of Commissioners, could not make the trip because he was on a Disney cruise in the Caribbean with his family. Wyatt and Tate settled on Marcus Jones, the county engineer and the manager of the county-owned Cane Creek Water and Sewer District. Ken Grossman, a trained chemist, would want to know everything he could about wastewater treatment and public water supply.
"Here's a guy who can talk intelligently about how to make something like that happen," Tate said of Jones. "But we also liked Marcus because he was young, he's a road biker. We knew at that point in time the family was into biking significantly. We were crafting a careful team.
"The other important piece of that team was Chuck McGrady," then in his first year in the state House. "He, like Marcus, offered tangible and intangible benefits, being part of that trip. It was good for us because we needed an elected official on that team. At that time we weren't positive alcohol legislation would have to change but we knew it was about to become a very serious discussion item. But also (because of) Chuck's interest in conservation and environmental issues, it was a good fit."
Besides, Jones and Tate were both graduates of the University of North Carolina. They knew Sierra Nevada's human resources director, Carrie Alden, had graduated from UNC in 1998, two years before Tate. The UNC alums could talk about Franklin Street and Carolina basketball.
The team also included Kelly Leonard, a commercial banker who was then chairman of the Partnership; Advantage West CEO Scott Hamilton (and Tate's predecessor at the Henderson County PED) and Wyckoff. Dale Carroll, an assistant commerce secretary, joined the team in Chico.
McGrady boarded the plane in Charlotte on a Sunday morning without knowing the name of the company he was to visit or what it made.
"Sen. Apodaca said it was something I ought to make time to do," he said. "They thought my background with the summer camp, the Legislature and the environment and business would be a good fit and that was kind of unusual."
Cooper picked up the visitors at the Sacramento airport that Sunday afternoon and drove them to Chico.
"We had dinner, didn't talk any business, and that's when you saw some of those relationships play out," Tate said. "Next morning we were picked up at 7. We met with Ken and Brian at the brewery, had a two-hour tour of the brewery, had lunch and met some family members, both of Brian's sisters and some of their kids. It was not just a business decision; it was going to be a family decision, and we knew those were important relationships. One had a one-year-old baby and one had a baby that was a couple months."
As soon as Tate saw the glass-walled executive conference room he connected a dot that reached back to March 1. The fishbowl, they called it.
The Chico operation impressed the visitors.
"I thought it was a company that really cared, that had a culture that was really focused broadly on being a sustainable company, and they really try to live those values," McGrady said. "I don't know that I've ever seen a cleaner factory than that one. I started to understand why Andrew and those guys thought this would be a good trip for me to be on."
Leonard, a Lexington native and son of an evangelical reform preacher, was a banker who knew how to talk finance and knew how to listen. That first night in Chico the team seated him with Ken Grossman.
"We all served different purposes on that trip," Leonard said. "Marcus Jones was the wastewater guy and one of the things Ken was really interested in was that process, so that worked out that Marcus went with us. He was great. Ken worked him over the whole time we were there, just riddled him with questions. He knows the torque on each screw-head he's got in that brewery."
Grossman is "a real mild-mannered type person," said Leonard, who is 56. "He's just a different sort of entrepreneur. We found out we were about the same age. He and I hit it off pretty good because we talked about rock bands and stuff like that. ... Chuck was sort of the legislative guy, to talk about laws. Marcus is a bike rider. Brian likes to cycle. So they hit it off and started talking about that.
"Andrew was our project salesman," Leonard continued. "He had done all the legwork. He's a very talented young man and he really showed that when we were out there. ...Everybody had a role to play. It was not scripted. We just all went and it all came together."
It was a factory visit unlike any other the team had made.
"It's not normal that you go off to an economic development trip and at every meeting they're offering you a beer," McGrady said. "I know at some point someone said, 'This is a helluva negotiating strategy.' "
On Day 2, it was time to talk business.
"We sat down in the afternoon and had a really strong meeting, everything from what's the site missing, what's it lacking, what are the problems, where are the hurdles and what are we going to do to fix it," Tate said. "We pored through all of it and agreed to present a plan the next morning to overcome some of those hurdles."
The Henderson County team members had a problem and they knew it. Tennessee and Virginia had offered free land or industrial sites that were already improved.
Tate looked up a chart from that day. It had a number, $16.3 million, that represented the cost to acquire and improve the site. Team North Carolina had to catch up.
"It's a puzzle," he said. "The trick in that is you match these upfront expenses with the partners. We knew we could tap this and this and this to get it down to zero. This is a good looking page (of local and state grants) to you and I but if your competitors have zeroes across the board you don't look that great. ... I was concerned at the high cost. But we also knew that some of our utility costs were substantially cheaper. We did a lot of work to figure out how we matched up; our hope was we'd show that you could break even in three years" based on lower electric, natural gas and property tax rates.
The team members felt they had done what they came to do. But they still weren't sure. The state commerce secretary had called in on a conference call but Gov. Bev Perdue had not. The team members thought the state's chief executive might have blown an opportunity to nudge the Grossmans across the finish line. They knew that Ferncliff was the higher priced site. They were bummed out.
"Just remember," a Sierra Nevada executive confided to one of the visitors as they headed for the airport. "With Ken, it's not always about money."

PART 6: 'Do you, Sierra Nevada, take Mills River ...'

By the time his flight left California, McGrady knew that he might be called on to sponsor legislation enabling the brewery to sell beer from a visitor center. "There was sort of a sidebar conversation and within a relatively short period of time that issue was on the table," he said.
Two weeks later, on Oct. 13, the Partnership learned that the project would indeed require a legislative change. Tate began communicating with the state ABC chair and the agency's attorney to understand how North Carolina law would restrict the business.
Tom Apodaca"Within 24 hours of that, Sen. (Tom) Apodaca and the folks he worked with were very very involved in that process," Tate said. "I think we probably spent a week to two weeks just getting a handle on where the problems were and how they were going to get fixed. We also learned that people cared significantly throughout the state about even minor changes to alcohol law. Distribution was a highly protected entity or concern. So we had to be really really careful in terms of what change would allow them to operate here but not create 800 other issues."
Apodaca would be key.
As the Rules chairman, Apodaca, a jocular one-time bail bondsman, held the second most powerful post in the state Senate. He had the power to shepherd the bill through the tight constraints of a special session. But he had not become the most influential state legislator from Hendersonville in more than a generation by making reckless use of his power.
Everybody who was in the room remembered the moment when the Henderson County team suddenly became less than deferential to the man who was ready to write a $100 million check. Sitting across from Grossman, Apodaca posed the question.
"It seems like we've been courting and dating," the senator said. "If we're going to start changing state law, we need to get engaged and get married."
Although Apodaca had delivered the line in a light way, the meaning was clear.
"It got a smile out of everyone," McGrady said, "but it pretty much characterized where we needed to be."
The recruiters teetered on the edge of two emotional responses. They had spent weeks as sales reps, pushing this asset, making that commitment, orchestrating unprecedented cooperation among town, county and state regulators — and here was a state senator making a demand. Maybe Grossman would walk. But on the other hand they were relieved. Finally, someone had said it. Apodaca had uttered what everyone was thinking. He had pointed to an imaginary cathedral aisle flanked on either side by waiting faces and populated at the altar by a large wedding party and a priest, and posed the question: "Do you, Sierra Nevada, take this county ..."

Apodaca and McGrady went to work.

An offseason legislative session is generally a closely managed affair. The governor and legislative leaders get to say what's taken up. A legislator from the mountains, even a powerful one, can't just shoehorn an unrelated bill onto the agenda.
Chuck McGrady"There were not a lot of vehicles out there but there were a couple of bills that were eligible to move," McGrady said.
Called a train or a Christmas tree, a must-pass bill is the vehicle every legislator wants to ride. With Apodaca as the chief traffic cop for the flow of legislation in the Senate, there was no doubt that the Sierra Nevada changes would make it on board.
Rep. Edgar Starnes, a 15-year House veteran, Baptist deacon and Sunday school teacher from Granite Falls, "had never voted for an alcohol bill," McGrady said. "But part of this was his bill." Starnes voted yes.
A General Assembly that is filled with conservative Bible-belt sensibilities on just about everything had pushed the bill through by a wide margin.
"We talked about stars aligning," McGrady said. "And at every point we all sort of pinched ourselves that the stars tended to align."
Three days after Thanksgiving, on Nov. 28, the bill passed. Perdue signed it 10 days later.
Apodaca said the legislative action boosted the state's position in the Grossmans' eyes.
"I think they were fascinated the General Assembly was able to turn that quickly," he said. "I understand that was instrumental."

PART  7: DOT engineer: 'Make it happen and get on it'

Step by painstaking step, Tate and his team pushed the rock up the hill.
If Schjeldahl, Cooper or the Grossmans had a question, they got an answer. If a barricade cropped up, they tried to move it. They tried to anticipate problems. That led to the Department of Transportation, an agency whose name is synonymous with turf battles, siloing and bureaucratic inertia. The situation on Old Fanning Bridge Road, the local officials believed, invited the worst of these delay-causing inefficiencies.
From Highway 280, the two-lane road starts in Henderson County, crosses into Buncombe County then goes back into Henderson County. Worse, the roadway lies not just in two counties but also in two different DOT divisions.
This time, though, would be different — stunningly different.
Tate and the Sierra Nevada team met with the two division engineers on Old Fanning Bridge Road to talk about intersection improvements.
The division chiefs, Jay Swain, of Asheville, and Joel Setzer, of Henderson County's division, agreed that Setzer would handle the project.
"Joel took the lead, and we basically said (to Sierra Nevada's team) you won't need to communicate with two different divisions," Tate said. "We're going to streamline this, we're going to make it easy. This is not a company that is accustomed to having a positive working relationship with state agencies at all."
Jones, the county engineer, was impressed.
"You think of the dogmatic, bureaucratic DOT and that wasn't happening," he said. "It was the division engineer coming out in the meeting and telling his district engineer, 'You need some overtime, don't you, for your road crew?' He said, 'Make it happen and get on it.' Everybody quickly realized the importance of getting those folks tuned in together. There were not your typical boundaries or borders that got in the way."
Setzer hatched the idea of an industrial roundabout to separate beer trucks, employees, visitors and through traffic where Old Fanning Bridge Road reaches the industrial park.
"They were flabbergasted at DOT's response," McGrady said of the Californians. "They were pleasantly surprised and I must say I was pleasantly surprised. Again, it was the stars aligning. Everybody seemed to be on the same page. The quarterback, though, was Andrew Tate. He kept us on track. If there was an impediment or slowdown somewhere he jumped in. He was very adroit and sort of set the professional tone."
The Sierra Nevada team encountered the same cooperative reception when the general contractor, Gary Fowler, who is from Chico, sat down with Mills River town officials.
"I remember one comment that was actually huge," Cooper said. "One of the questions he asked was, 'So when I submit plans for a permit how long will it take?' And the team from Mills River looked at each other and they go, 'three to five, we might be able to do it faster.' And Gary goes, 'What?' because he's thinking three to five weeks. So they say, 'OK, maybe a couple days then. We might be able to do it in two days, three at the max.' And Gary's jaw dropped. 'OK, that'll work.' That's the kind of team support that we got from Mills River."
Yet, the county was not home free.
"Every day we're getting more and more encouraged because we're marking things off the list," Tate said. "We're getting over hurdles but there's still things that can go wrong to the point that would eliminate us from consideration. They were doing similar things in the other communities at the same time."

PART  8: Clean abundant water

In the fall of 2011, Cooper and the Grossmans had narrowed the list to Christiansburg, Va., Alcoa, Tenn., just outside Knoxville, and Mills River.
It turned out the decision was about more than money.
On site selection trips, Cooper sent water samples home from prospective sites, from Winston-Salem to Mills River.
"As we got closer to this area, the water just got better and better," he said. "That kind of turned a light on, too."
The first test well reached water at 525 feet and produced 8 gallons a minute. "At the time it was bad news," Tate recalled. A month later, on Dec. 12, a drill struck water at 300 feet and got a flow of 100-plus gallons a minute.
"I'll never forget sharing that news with them, and of course we didn't know at the time but once water samples were sent off to Sierra Nevada, they came back as very high quality," he said.
Ken Grossman and his son had said from the start that he would not locate his east coast brewery in a town that didn't want it.
"Asheville was bounced off the list because one of the line items was we didn't want to be within 50 miles of another small craft brewer," Brian said. "We didn't want to be the 800-pound gorilla. We would feel awkward if someone our size came into Chico. We probably pulled out of a half dozen prime locations because of that. They didn't give us a good feeling that they would want us in the area."
Instead of giving the Grossmans the cold shoulder, the Asheville Beer Alliance made contact with them and invited them to the mountains.
Brian Grossman and Kelly McCubbin, of Southern Appalachian Brewery. The Asheville Brewers Association enthusiasm for Sierra Nevada was 'huge,' Grossman said."We sat down and had an open dialogue conversation," Brian said, "and they gave us overwhelming support."
"That was huge," Cooper said.
"Huge," Grossman added.
"We cut our teeth just like they are," he said. "We have a brand called Life and Limb because brewers risk life and limb" to survive from barrel to barrel. "These startup brewers, they pour everything into it and a lot of them don't make it. My dad started on a shoestring just trying to get it working, he was working a million hours, he was retrofitting dairy tanks, and he came from nothing and he built a very successful business."
The Grossmans flew craft brewers from the area to Chico and treated them to a beer camp experience where they brewed a product from start to finish.
"We were all blown away by the facility in Chico," said Andy Cubbin, the owner of Southern Appalachian Brewery in Hendersonville. "It's an incredible undertaking and I think the most incredible thing to all of us was it seemed to be the happiest place to work."

Bonds that developed between the pursued and pursuer also helped tip the scales toward Mills River.
On a trip in mid-November, Ken brought his wife, Katie, and their daughter, Sierra, who had a baby about a year old. Brian and his fiancée, Gina, were there. The Grossmans joined mayor Roger Snyder and Jaime Laughtertown manager Jaime Laughter on a long hike through the property.
"You had three generations of the family right there that were coming to see a wooded site, and see the possibilities of that brewery," Laughter said. "It made an impression on me that they were family oriented — to bring three generations on a site-visit hike. We didn't see a corporate feel there. And the other piece was sincere questions about the community. They really wanted to know were they going to fit in, live here and enjoy it."
When Sierra stopped to nurse her daughter, Laughter stayed with her.
"I stayed behind, having breastfed two children myself, and understanding that need to respond to the child," she said. "So we found a log and sat down and she nursed her child, which is always a beautiful thing, and we hiked on from there."
By mid-December of 2011, everything sped up, as if the Grossmans had set a New Year's Eve deadline to seal the deal.
On Dec. 12, the Board of Commissioners approved incentives of up to $3.75 million over five years, through property tax refunds based on investment targets and jobs created. Mills River approved a property tax break of $86,800 over seven years. The Partnership team helped get grants from the Rural Center, the DOT, the Golden Leaf Foundation, the One North Carolina fund, and other state sources. A Community Development Block Grant is paying for water and sewer lines. The decision by the Board of Commissioners to support the company was a financial tipping point, Tate said, because startup costs are critical.
"When you have to close a deal somebody has to do that," he said.
A week and half before Christmas, Wyckoff, the state commerce recruiter, flew to Asheville on the state plane and picked up Tate and Grossman for a trip to the governor's mansion. A host ushered the visitors through the house, decorated for Christmas, into a library with a large roundtable.
"She did great," Wyckoff said of Gov. Bev Perdue. "Anytime we had her in front of clients she was great. She was a great salesperson for the state. A lot of these big companies — the CEOs and C-level executives — they expect to get called by the governor of the state. Ken Grossman said he got calls from the governor of Virginia on a weekly basis or at least biweekly."
In 2012 Sierra Nevada bought 105.6 acres from Ferncliff Industrial Park (owned by the Fitzpatrick family) for $6.24 million, according to deed records. The brewery paid $1.15 million for another 78.8 acres owned by the Shuford family and adjoining Ferncliff. And it paid $1.375 million for 17 acres for the Norfolk-Southern spur and transload facility at Fletcher Business Park — a total of $8.7 million. In January 2013, the county finance director wired an order for $1.375 million to Chico, which matched the amount Sierra Nevada had paid for the rail access property in Fletcher.
The company's investment will far surpass the $107.5 million it committed to as part of the county incentive agreement, county officials say.
"I guarantee it wasn't entirely financial," Brian Grossman said of the decision to choose Mills River. "We wanted to make sure it was right. We accepted it was worth the cost for us. I love it out here. Pisgah's my friend."
Not that he has much time to enjoy the view.
With a new marriage and a new baby — two new babies if you count the brewery — Grossman helps conduct a construction symphony that includes 300 workers and 25 contractors and subcontractors. The company says it expects to make beer by early 2014.
"All of our mental capacity right now is just to get the brewery designed and built on a very aggressive timeline," Grossman said. "All the fun stuff will come later, when later we don't know yet. We'll have something (for visitors). We don't know what yet."

Tate recalled walking to the Historic Courthouse with Ken and Brian Grossman, Cooper and Schjeldahl to sign the economic incentive agreement on Jan. 25, 2012, the day of the announcement.
"Everybody was tired but happy, relieved," he said.
There was no congratulatory call. No high fives. No email that said, You won! No fireworks in the sky.
"The reality of it was everybody involved knew, everybody was exhausted with the process that was going to lead to the announcement, and the announcement was an opportunity to kind of pause and celebrate."
The two teams that had spent so much time together since August met at a smaller house at the Ferncliff property before driving to the green house.
Cooper carried in a case of Sierra Nevada.
"We cracked open the beers and toasted each other, and then we went over to make the announcement," Leonard said.
Tate and the Partnership for Economic Development had landed a big prize, to be sure, but one of many, they hoped, and one that still needed nurture and feeding.
"The next day we had meetings starting at 8 a.m. to talk about, 'All right, now we gotta do this,'" he said. "Great, we had a public announcement. Now the real work starts."

In the end the hunt for the perfect site hadn't been about money.
But it hadn't not been about money either.
Who's to say that in the end the Mills River acquisition, which grew from Ken Grossman's original 20-acre order to 184 acres, won't bring a greater return than Alcoa, Tenn., or Christianburg, Va., ever would have?
"The thing that sticks in my mind that is remarkable," Cooper said, "is Brian's dad being able to walk these woods — when you can't see two feet in front of you —and he would start creating this vision of how this was going to lay out," he said. "That was truly amazing. Especially when we got the first team of contractors to look at it."
Brian quoted the contractors, "What the hell you want us to do?"
Ken Grossman sees in the Big Forest more than a brewery churning out 600,000 barrels of beer a year. He sees a destination that capitalizes on without unnaturally exploiting the assets — the undulating land, the clean water, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the deep woods. He sees, as Cooper put it, a showcase for the world.
The Grossmans started out wanting to double their capacity.'No, just Roger,' Snyder said when someone introduced him as Mayor Snyder.
"We love our breweries to death, and we spend a lot of time here," Brian said. "Having just a production brewery doesn't really fit us. We wanted to make it simple and it just didn't happen. It'll be nice."
The hunt for Big Forest came down to a thousand factors.
The Sierra Nevada team, sitting on the porch of the green house, wondered who was that cowboy-looking fellow leaning against a rail. Someone introduced him as Mills River Mayor Roger Snyder.
"The first thing out of his mouth is, 'No, I'm Roger,'" Cooper recalled.
The cliché about business — that it's about relationships — happens to be true in this case.
Kelly Leonard said he didn't know what his role was in the courtship of Sierra Nevada. But the rest of the Partnership did. When Tate called, Leonard said "what time and where?" When announcement day finally came, Leonard was the only North Carolina representative to speak besides the governor. Leonard had grown to like and admire Ken Grossman.
"That to me is the story here," he said, "just how fortunate Henderson County was and the region was to have a man of that caliber and a family of that caliber with a company of that caliber decide to pick us as their east coast home."
In the end, an emotional connection clicked into place.
"I think the most interesting part of the whole Sierra Nevada story," said Mills River Town Manager Jaime Laughter, "is they invested a lot in site selection, they went through a lot of process, when they got to the end, they stopped, and they looked at the two sites, and for whatever reason it didn't feel right, and that's a huge thing to say, after investing all that money as a business person. 'It doesn't feel right. So we're going to go back to the drawing board, and we're going to invest more money into looking somewhere that feels right.'"
It felt right.
Setting out three years ago, the Grossmans had never heard of a river named the French Broad or a town called Mills River or an adroit quarterback named Andrew Tate. They thought they knew what they wanted. But sometimes you don't know what you really want until you see it. They met in the woods by the river and found the Big Forest.