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LIBATION NATION: Southern App blazed trail in city

Andy and Kelly Cubbin opened the first craft brewery in Henderson County in April 2011.

At the same time Kelly and Andy Cubbin were looking to open a brewery in Asheville, a lot of other brewers had the same idea.


“In the first four years, four breweries opened in Asheville,” Andy says. “I remember the day I was going to pick her up and I saw a fermenter being loaded into a building that I thought would be perfect for a brewery. I called Kelly and I said, ‘That’s it. No more Asheville.’
“It was like every building I thought would make a great location somebody took it,” he adds. “We just felt like it was getting crowded.”
This was one time when the rich didn’t get richer. The Cubbins went east, to sleepy Hendersonville, where, lo and behold, there was no brewery at all.
“I saw this area, which was similar to areas we were looking at in Asheville,” he says of the small warehouse district on Locust Street, where his neighbors would be an antique mall, a commercial dry cleaner and two oil companies. “Kind of an up-and-coming neighborhood, affordable rent, industrial. Not only did we see Asheville as getting a little crowded, we really saw that Hendersonville had some great opportunities.”
It soon became obvious that Henderson County’s building inspectors were inexperienced in permitting breweries and overconfident in their knowledge. The regulatory apparatus would be test-driven by Andy Cubbin, who found it to be woefully underpowered.
Inspectors who had never permitted a craft brewery before threw up hurdles, if for no other reason, the applicants thought, than the deep recession.
“They had plenty of time on their hands,” Kelly says.
Their myopic examination — and misreading of the regulations, in Andy’s mind — contributed to a six-month delay in opening and countless email appeals to the inspectors’ bosses in Raleigh.
“It happened about four different times,” Andy says. “One of the inspectors looked at my tanks, which are not in his jurisdiction, and said those are not ASME certified. ‘Are you telling me the brewery I just bought I can’t use in this county.’ ‘That’s true,’” came the answer. “‘If you have a problem you can go talk to Raleigh.’ So another month (of appeals ensued) … It was a six-month fight. By the time we were ready to open, we were just dead. We had nothing left.”


‘Music Appreciation Club’

If Henderson County caused the building inspections hassle, the state of North Carolina and its prohibition-era alcohol laws accounted for the patchwork of retail permitting.
“When we first opened, in order to have a wine and beer license, you had to have a liquor license,” Andy explains. “Since you had a liquor license, you either had to be a restaurant or a private club. We weren’t a restaurant so we opened as a private club.”
“We would have done it free because we were being forced to do it,” Andy adds. “But we had to charge at least a dollar. After 5,000 members we said we should have charged at least five.”
“We had two canine members,” Kelly adds.
Plus a few independent spirits who resisted membership in a “private club.”
“They would only pay in cash,” Andy recalls. “We didn’t officially know their names. We just called them by their number — ‘Oh, it’s No. 152!’”
New patrons scratched their heads when Kelly, a welcoming front-of-the-house type, asked an unusual question: What are your three favorite bands?
Kelly was by the book. She understood that if she owned a club, the club had to be about something. “It’s a Music Appreciation Club,” she’d say.


‘Ready or not …’

If the couple questioned whether slower-paced, retiree-rich Hendersonville had a thirst for craft beer, they soon had their answer.
On Saturday, April 30, 2011, after a long and painful labor, Southern Appalachian Brewery was born.
“We opened at 4 that day,” Kelly says. Customers “literally just said ready or not here we come.”
“We were still literally opening boxes of pint glasses,” Andy puts in.
“We didn’t expect it,” Kelly says.
“Some were angry,” Andy remembers. “They said, ‘What’s taken so long?’ I would just try to hold my temper.”
The new brewery had a tiny taproom and a large concrete patio surrounded by a towering block wall and an eight-foot chainlink fence. It looked more like a prison yard than a playground for toddlers. The market decided otherwise.
“It’s amazing how it’s evolved into a family, community space,” Andy says. “We never envisioned that. … We hear from people every week that say ‘we were going to move to Asheville but we didn’t want to move away from this place.’”
SAB hosts kids’ birthday parties in the concrete yard, where toddlers mix with friendly dogs and dodge beanbags flying toward cornhole boards.
“We have a whole family that has four little boys,” Kelly says. “She’s potty trained them all in our bathroom.”
Like a lot of entrepreneurs, the Cubbins are too busy focusing on the next thing to dwell on the past. SAB distributes statewide now and has recently expanded to South Carolina. Bottling for retail sales is next.
“I think we have really good products,” Andy says when a visitor asks him why SAB has worked. “We have a great atmosphere. People love this place. Kelly is a huge part of it. When she’s gone, everybody says how much they miss her.”
Kelly has left the interview at that point to go serve customers, wipe tables and check with the bartenders.
“I think it was timing, too,” she says a few minutes later. Asheville was hot, to be sure, but in Henderson County there was no Sierra Nevada, no winery, no competition. “Because we opened before the beer craze was so big, it was good timing,” she says. “People were looking for another place to hang out. They wanted family, they wanted community. We were able to do that.”