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 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.