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LIBATION NATION: County joins craft beer boom

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. draws thousands of beer tourists to the area. Over the Fourth of July weekend, the Taproom sold 11,160 pints of beer.

If there’s no single reason for the craft beer boom, there is one imperative that both beer makers and beer drinkers agree on. The beer has to taste good.

“For such a long time ‘beer,’ quote unquote, was one thing,” says Bill Manley, beer ambassador for Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. “I call it beer-flavored beer. It was just kind of there. And beer tasted like beer. Craft beer came along and said, no, that doesn’t have to be the case. Beer is a huge category of flavors. It can be almost anything you can dream of.”
Dream they have.
A half-hour drive from the craft beer mecca that wears the title of Beer City USA, Hendersonville also happens to be 15 minutes from Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., one of the most successful beer-touring destinations anywhere. Gary Glancy calls the Mills River plant and campus “possibly the most beautiful brewery in the world” and he ought to know. A certified Cicerone, or beer-tasting expert, Glancy has toured breweries all over.
With its proximity to Asheville and Sierra Nevada and its ready pool of well-off retirees, growing number of professionals and steady flow of adventurous tourists, Hendersonville was an inevitable target for the craft beer boom.
“First, I think it was just a matter of time,” Glancy says. “If there’s four breweries in Waynesville, they’re opening up everywhere. Craft breweries are no longer just certain pockets of the country, or certain pockets of North Carolina. It’s happening in every small town in America almost.
“No. 2 is when Sanctuary pushed to get those zoning laws (changed) to open up a brewery in the downtown district, that was huge.”
From zero breweries five years ago, Henderson County now has five, including one of the biggest on the East Coast in Sierra Nevada. One more is on the way. Add two cideries and two wineries and the county really has embraced the sport of sipping an alcoholic beverage for taste and variety.
There’s something of a natural marriage, too, in the ethic of the N.C. mountains and the character of the craft industry.
“I’ll go to the definition of what makes a craft brewery,” Glancy says. “One is small, one is independent and the other is traditional. I think they all tie together. People in Western North Carolina especially love to support small local businesses. You look at the popularity of tailgate markets in Western North Carolina. People want to be able to connect with the source of the products they’re consuming, and to be able to go to a local brewery and see the process really forms a connection between the consumer and the product.
“Craft beer is flavorful, it’s adventurous. The mass-market stuff is just so bland,” adds Glancy, who operates the Brewery Experience (see Page 7). “People want something different. Even in the recession, in 2008, beer didn’t take a hit.”


‘The beer in a plaid shirt’

The craft beer industry is stitched together by other common threads.
Brewery owners tend to be young and entrepreneurial — unafraid to do 90 percent of the work themselves when they start out. Often, a husband and wife team up. Brewers tend to be less motivated by profit than by the thrill of the hunt for the perfect pilsner or the most complex lager. Because they are at once a small manufacturer and a retail space — and because they’re seldom wealthy — they’re willing to set up in the lower-priced warehouse districts a few blocks from a town’s high-rent Main Street. And craft beer somehow is peas and carrots with bicycling, river paddling, environmental causes and adoptable animals.
“I think it has to do with the mindset of the people that started the craft brewery movement,” Manley, of Sierra Nevada, says when asked why this is so. “They were all people who were not satisfied with the status quo, they were people that kind of seized their own dream and kind of went about it in an unusual way and went after what they were passionate about.
“I don’t want to say counterculture but it’s almost like that. They’re people who are choosing to live their life in a more conscious way. Just like we joke about the beer in the plaid shirts but there is something to that. I know a lot of brewers and some of them are incredibly wealthy folks at this point. …(But) they have a laid-back, approachable vibe. They’ve chosen to do business in a different way. When you do that you get to make a lot of choices that a business that’s solely in it for profit margins maybe wouldn’t make.
“Brewers and philanthropy are one of those things that kind of go hand in hand too,” Manley adds. “We like to be part of the community. We rely on the community to support us and because of that we like to give back as well. It’s kind of a big part of how we do business.”


Brewing brotherhood

The brotherhood of brewers is strong.
Soon after it announced its Mills River plant, Sierra Nevada flew brewers from every Asheville brewery to its Chico, Calif., for beer camp — all expenses paid.
Andy Cubbin, the founder of Southern Appalachian Brewery, has an even more personal story of professional courtesy run amok.
When his kettle was leaking steam, he called a friend at Sierra Nevada. Next thing he knew the big brewer’s head engineer was in his brewhouse diagnosing his leaky kettle.
“He says, ‘Oh yeah, I know what our problem is. I’m going to send out a couple of welders.’ They took the two best welders off the job to send them here for three days,” Cubbin says. “They tore apart the kettle. It was hanging from the ceiling so they could weld the bottom. Top of their game welders — they get paid a lot of money. And one of them said, ‘I don’t know who you are but I’ve never been pulled off a job like this to come help somebody.’ I kept saying, ‘You guys gotta send me the bill.’ They said, ‘OK, we will.’ They didn’t send the bill.
“So basically, out of their kindness of their hearts they sent guys to help us out of a big jam,” Cubbin says. “That’s the kind of people they are. I would have had to buy a new kettle and that’s ten-grand. I’m sure the bill for the welders was six, seven thousand, three days. …
“They’re kind people,” he says of Sierra Nevada’s owners. “They realize the good of little guys like us doing well, because they did well.”


Could we become tapped out?

For all the brotherly love, craft brewers, it seems, at some point must look around and ask how many friends they can afford. They must ask: Is it a bubble?
“People talk about that often,” Manley says. “I feel like it depends on what you mean by a bubble. It’s true that stores only have a finite amount of shelf space and so brewers kind of compete over that one small portion of the store. Everybody’s trying to get their beer on the market and that’s where competition gets a little bit fierce.
“That said, that’s just one way of being in the business. If you are a brewery like Sanctuary, focused on draft only and do a lot of the business over the taproom counters, I think there’s almost an infinite amount of market space. It’s not like you have to make an either-or choice. There are lots of people who really like beer and there are lots of different beers and lots of different tastes. As long as that continues to be true we’re not in much danger of something like a collapse of the market.”
Nationally, brewery openings outnumber closings nearly 10 to 1, Bart Watson, an economist for the Brewers Association, told NPR for a recent report. While some cities are indeed “pushing the limit,” Watson said, there’s still room for growth. The U.S. has more than 4,000 breweries now, with more opening every week. But there are 8,000 wineries in the U.S. and, as Watson told NPR, “Americans drink a lot more beer than they drink wine.”
Another reason for craft beer’s high ceiling is that the industry does not have to create a new beer drinker to expand its market. It just has to pluck one more buyer from the pool of Bud and Miller drinkers — a loyalty shift that’s happening daily.
While national brands like Budweiser, Coors and Miller have seen sales plateau, “the craft segment (growth) for at least seven or eight years has been double-digits,” Glancy says.

A distinct vibe, varying scenery and unique beer style of each new microbrewery also tend to refresh and build the market. But Cubbin, the first brewer to open in town, recognizes that the customer base is not infinite.
“I do think there is a bubble. It is Hendersonville,” he says. “It’s not a huge population. It’s growing but not at the same percentage that spaces are opening. I don’t worry about our business because we’ve done things to make it sustainable. … I do worry about the industry. It’s a black eye if somebody closes or doesn’t make it.”
He worries, too, that a talented home brewer or a new brewery school graduate absorbs the local craft scene on a warm summer night and think it’s an easy buck.
“You don’t see the books,” he says. “You don’t know what it’s like in January and February. It’s harder than it looks.”
Manley acknowledges that, on the production side especially — if everyone puts their product in bottles and cans and tries to squeeze into the supermarket beer case — there is the danger of saturation, Manley says. But taprooms can still pop up and succeed, he predicts, as long as they pour a brew that tastes good.
“I feel like there’s an awful lot of room to run for a lot of different years, especially if you’re focusing on producing a good product and selling it at your place and letting the market tell you when it’s fine to grow up rather than pushing forward (too soon),” he says. “I think there’s a whole bunch of space to move there.”