Brevard's Robust Brewing Scene Emerges in the "Blink of an Eye."
At the start of 2012, Transylvania was a dry county and Brevard was devoid of brewers. The industry has since established itself as a significant employer and a big part of the community's identity.
PISGAH FOREST — Posted up at the bar in Ecusta Brewing Co.’s expansive new taproom on Sunday afternoon, fishing buddies Ken Voyles and David Simchock discussed the merits of their favorite local beers.
Noblebrau Brewing’s lager is an ideal “daily drinker,” said Voyles, 54, who also has a soft spot for another creation of the company’s owner, Cody Noble.
“If you’re going to watch a World Cup soccer match at 10 in the morning, Cody’s stout is the best breakfast beer.”
Brevard Brewing Co.’s pilsner is Simchock’s top pick during the summer, he said, but he really looks forward to November, when the company begins offering a black German lager called schwarzbier.
“It’s not too malty, not too hoppy,” said Simchock, 58. “It’s kind of nutty, very dark. It’s just very drinkable, just really good.”
At Ecusta, the Dead Drift Pale Ale is his “go-to beer,” he said, before marveling that Brevard offers so many beers suitable for so many venues and occasions.
“I think for a small town, our beer scene is pretty (effing) good,” he said.
Maybe even very good and definitely very new. Think of it this way. Brevard’s main tourism draw and source of community identity, the Appalachian Mountains, are roughly 480 million years old. Brewing may be more of a complement to this feature than a rival. But it’s become a major complement. And it’s only 10.
“It’s just in a blink of an eye that things have changed,” Josh Chambers, co-owner of Ecusta, said of the industry’s local emergence.
Unincorporated Transylvania County was dry until 2014 and though alcohol sales were already allowed in Brevard, it was a brewing desert as recently as 2012.
Brevard Brewing Co. opened on East Main Street in April of that year. It was quickly followed by national powerhouse, Oskar Blues Brewery, which is staging a series of events this weekend to mark the tenth anniversary of its first day in business, originally promoted as “12/12/12.”
Ecusta’s new brewery in Pisgah Forest, meanwhile, offers the clearest sign of still-strong demand; business has been “fantastic” since it opened on Oct. 1, Chambers said.
Two other brewpubs, Noblebrau’s 185 King Street and UpCountry Brewing are both in the city’s Lumberyard District and both have loyal followings. Taprooms can be found in remote corners of the county, including Cedar Mountain, and even in seemingly incongruous retail settings. Shoppers, for example, can settle in behind a cool pint of Transylvania-brewed IPA after selecting a sleeping bag at downtown’s D.D. Bullwinkel’s Outdoors or filling their cars’ gas tanks at local Triangle Stop convenience stores.
With so much beer in Western North Carolina, it’s hard to stand out as a Mecca. But an analysis provided by the Transylvania Economic Alliance shows the county has become a “hotspot” for brewing employment, providing 109 jobs in the industry, or about 18 times the average expected nationally for communities its size, a mere six.
Beer has also become a significant draw for visitors, according to preliminary survey results provided by the Transylvania County Tourism Development Authority. Respondents ranked the county second among seven regional communities for the quality of its “wineries, breweries or distilleries,” according to an email from executive director Clark Lovelace.
Beer marries perfectly with other local attractions such as music and, especially, mountain biking, Lovelace said, and has helped cement the county’s reputation as a destination offering both mountain scenery and a vibrant social scene.
“What makes Brevard special is we’re a mixture of both of those things,” Lovelace said, “and that’s hard to find.”
A No-Nonsense Pioneer
By 2012, the country’s craft brewers were already well on their way to transforming America’s notoriously insipid beer scene into one of the world’s most inspired and varied.
The first American craft brewery of the modern era, Anchor Brewing Co., opened in California in 1965, according to a timeline on craftbeer.com, and the industry began to grow in earnest in the 1990s.
In some respects it had gone mainstream by the early 2000s, when Brevard Brewing’s owner Kyle Williams began working as a host in the Spartanburg, S.C. location of a now-defunct Florida chain, Hops.
“Like a brewery in an Applebee’s,” he called it.
He later became the location’s chief brewer and went on to work at other beer makers in the South, notably Knoxville’s Smoky Mountain Brewery, where he learned to appreciate traditional German varieties.
As he prepared to open his own business in 2011, he saw opportunities in two markets — one entirely untapped, the other nearly so.
Scouting for locations in downtown Brevard, he said, he couldn't help but notice that “there were just no bars.”
And, in a craft industry dominated by hoppy ales, he found a niche in lagers, which are typically — and somewhat misleadingly — associated with light mainstream products such as Budweiser and Miller. The category also includes beers with a wide variety of alcohol content and hues, Williams said, and pointed to the ink-black schwarzbier as a prime example of a dark lager.
Lager’s defining characteristic is a crisp flavor achieved by its aging process — more than twice as long as that of ales and in tanks chilled to 32 degrees.
Though Williams’ company also brews a red ale and an IPA, accessing lager’s tradition of German brewing and American consumption suited the tastes of home-grown drinkers and his personal, no-nonsense aesthetic.
The taproom decor is minimalist, as is the design of the cans. The names of the beers are mainly just descriptions of what they are: “American Premium Lager,” for example, or “Bohemian Pilsner.” They contain plenty of the ingredients permitted by the seminal 1516 Bavarian Beer Purity Law — hops, barley and water — and few esoteric additives.
“I like to joke that we make beer-flavored beer,” he said. “We don’t make, like, pine-cone-infused double IPAs.”
Business has been strong enough from the start that he was able to buy the brewery building in 2016 for $1 million. “We’re doing good,” he said.
But sales have also flattened in recent years, and when Williams was asked if there is such a thing as too much beer, he answered that, at least, he sees signs of statewide market saturation.
About two years ago, he said, he realized he could increase production by brewing seven days a week and explored the idea of selling beer beyond his company’s established market in Western North Carolina.
“I went to distributors like in Charlotte, and nobody wanted it,” he said. “Their warehouses were just packed and they said, ‘We just can’t take any more craft beer.’ ”
Corporate but Community Minded
But both sales of craft brews and their share of the national beer market — about 13 percent — were still growing through 2021, according to the Brewers Association industry group, while North Carolina ranks 14th nationally in per-capita craft beer consumption.
It’s this wider market that Oskar Blues targets, said Aaron Baker, a Brevard City Council member and senior marketing manager of the brewery off Old Hendersonville Highway, and the two main themes of his tour of its operations last week were mass production and growth.
At Brevard Brewing, beer-making is hands-on, requiring chief brewer Cliff Ellis to climb a short flight of stairs to add 55-pound sacks of malted barley into the heated water in the mash tun or dip a wooden measuring stick into a neighboring vat to check levels of the boiling, sugar-rich wort.
“I don’t need a gym membership,” a slightly out-of-breath Ellis said during a brief break last week.
At Oskar Blues, most of the grain is automatically transported to mash tuns through chutes connected to outdoor silos, while brewers track the weight of these contents on digital readouts.
A line on the factory floor separates several rows of towering, stainless steel, 200-barrel (6,300 gallon) brewing tanks from several more rows of even more imposing 300-barrel vats added during the plant’s 2017 expansion. Baker also touted the recent addition of a million-dollar centrifuge, which removes solids from beer, and a lab allowing staff scientists to check for bacterial contamination.
The brewery’s production has increased from 46,000 barrels in 2013 to a projected 180,000 in 2022. And the brewery, which opened with 20 workers in 2012, now employs 105, part of a total count of workers provided by brewers that came in slightly higher than the number from the Economic Alliance.
The Alliance’s report also found that many of the jobs in the industry, such as bartending positions, are in the service sector, and that the average annual wage — about $45,000 — is only slightly higher than the county average of $42,000.
But many of Oskar Blues’ workers earn significantly more than that local industry average and receive health insurance and other benefits, Baker said. That’s because, unlike most other local breweries, Oskar Blues is primarily a manufacturing operation, opened as the eastern arm of a Colorado-based company that sells its products across the country.
Both the brewery’s size and corporate structure raise the question: At what point does a craft brewery become just a brewery?
The first big change at Oskar Blues came in 2014, when it teamed up with five other brewers to form the CANarchy brewing collective. One of the Brevard plant’s main products is Jai Alai, the ninth-most popular IPA in the nation and the creation of another CANarchy member, Florida’s Cigar City Brewing. Earlier this year, the collective was purchased by Monster Beverage Corp., maker of Monster Energy drinks, for $330 million.
Its annual production is still well under the craft group’s generous membership cap of six million barrels. The organization says breweries cannot be considered “craft” if more than a quarter of their assets are owned by a non-craft maker of alcoholic beverages — but says nothing about ownership by makers of non-alcoholic drinks such as Monster.
The Brewers Association website also lists more subjective qualities of its members, including that “craft brewers tend to be very involved in their communities.”
And Oskar Blues definitely meets this standard, Baker said.
Through its Can’d Aid philanthropy, Oskar Blues has, among other initiatives, promoted trail construction and recycling, and donated hundreds of bikes to economically disadvantaged children. Visit the Brevard location’s outdoor taproom on a Saturday afternoon, Baker said, and you are likely to see kids, dogs and the tent of a local nonprofit.
Such a neighborly atmosphere can also be found at other local taprooms and mitigates one of the potential hazards in a county awash in beer — alcohol abuse, he said. “If you’re trying to throw back 15 beers you’re probably not going to be happy about eight-year-old kids running around.”
And it helps fill a need that he identified as a student at Brevard College in the early 2000s.
The city’s lack of a nightlife — Dugan’s Pub, as he remembers it, was the only real bar in town — seemed like a symptom of a vanishing sense of community after the recent closure of several major manufacturing plants. They had served as social rallying points, he said, and were a big part of the county’s identity.
After the factories closed and “before we had the breweries, there wasn’t a centralized space to create community,” Baker said. “Maybe that sounds cheesy, but I think it’s true. I think each of the taprooms is a community hub.”
The Happy Marriage of Forest and Beer
The new Ecusta location is an especially tidy example of Transylvania’s shift from a manufacturing hub to one harnessing the paired economic drivers of outdoor recreation and brewing.
The 8,800-square-foot brick brewery served, in a previous life, as the medical center of the Ecusta Mill paper plant, which closed in 2002. Chambers said his company’s success will hopefully encourage the development of the much larger mill site that has long been stymied by a legacy of industrial contamination.
Chambers previously worked for a decade as a fishing and rafting guide, living in states such as Alaska and Colorado where he saw the craft brewing business grow to meet the demand from his clients and other outdoor enthusiasts.
When he and co-owner Don Osby opened Ecusta in 2016, they chose its location — 3,600-square feet in a plaza next to the US 276 entrance to Pisgah National Forest — specifically to tap into a steady stream of anglers, hikers and mountain bikers.
The new taproom on Ecusta Road is close enough to retain that connection and big enough to accommodate the company’s expansion. The basement brewery provides the capacity to produce more than 100 barrels of beer a month in a range of varieties that occupy nearly all of the 20 taps in the upstairs bar.
This features a polished concrete floor, metal stools, and a gleaming wooden bar and high-top tables. Customers can also sit at outdoor picnic tables overlooking a lawn where, on a recent visit, two small children tossed a football. Ecusta also leases space for a vendor of self-serve Tex-Mex food, Gordingos.
“The concept is basically a food truck on the inside,” Chambers said.
The expansion is a bet on the growing thirst for craft beer. Or, because about 80 percent of Ecusta’s beer is sold on site, at least a growing thirst among locals and visitors. Judging by the volume of customers and their comments, Chambers said, it seems to be paying off.
“After we opened in October, we went through more beer in 10 days than we would have gone through in a month at the old place,” Chambers said. “We were told we have created something unique for the area. Somehow we created more of a destination.”
They did this not just by building an inviting taproom, but by brewing the kind of distinguished beer that’s required for survival in industry that Chambers says isn’t necessarily overcrowded, just very competitive.
“It just means you have to be on your game,” he said. “You have to put out a great product.”
Which is where Michael Banales comes in. Like Osby, the chief brewer and a former geophysicist, Banales is a scientist. He has a degree in biochemistry and previously worked as a teaching assistant at Pennsylvania State University.
As a measure of his devotion to his new job as a brewer at Ecusta, he visited the taproom on Sunday, a day off, sitting at the corner of a crowded bar as a televised soccer match and football game aired in the background.
He said the skills he acquired in the lab also apply in the brewery and were instrumental in creating one of Ecusta’s newest offerings, Haze Me, an IPA touted on the company’s website as “OUR INTRO INTO THE HAZE CRAZE . . . A HAZY, JUICY AND TROPICAL BOMB!”
“You can see one being poured right now,” Banales said, nodding towards a pint glass being filled with a fittingly vibrant, pineapple-colored brew.
“We adjusted the PH a little bit and made some changes to the grain bill and I mean it came out just right,” he said. “It’s got that nice haze all the way through . . . It worked out perfectly and that was one of the big ones for me.”
Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com
We did. We missed having you there.
So much to learn from this article. Thanks Dan.