Asheville’s Web of Beer – Charlotte Magazine

Karis Roberts has arrived early for our lunch meeting at White Labs Brewing Co., a brewpub housed inside a brewers’ yeast factory just south of downtown Asheville—on South Charlotte Street, in fact. It’s a Tuesday in late May and the middle of Asheville Beer Week, a local brewers’ showcase and series of events in its 13th year. We take seats at the bar, and I order a light lager. Roberts forgoes alcohol. “Got a long day ahead of me,” she says.

Roberts is the executive director of the Asheville Brewers Alliance, the organization behind Beer Week, and her schedule is jammed. She has another meeting here right after she meets with me. Tonight, she’ll shepherd a panel discussion of women in the Asheville beer industry.

“There are so many,” she says, then notices a young woman who approaches us. “And here! This is the head brewer at White Labs, Erin.” Erin Maynard has been head brewer here for nearly two years. I think of Erin Jordan, her counterpart at Resident Culture Brewing Co. in Charlotte, and joke with her about this seeming surfeit of brewing Erins.

If any city would celebrate women in brewing, it’d be Asheville, the North Carolina mountains’ progressive oasis. Not coincidentally, it’s also home to an evolved beverage scene that’s flourished since Highland Brewing—which Roberts refers to as “the O.G.O.G.”—opened in 1994, long before the craft beer revolution. Charlotte has more taprooms—more than 100 in the metro area, compared to about 50 in and around Asheville. But the Paris of the South is the national leader in number of breweries per capita, according to at least one recent survey. The city’s flagship brands, like Highland, Hi-Wire, and Wicked Weed, have spread their suds and reputations far beyond the bounds of western North Carolina.

Roberts is 35 and the first person of color to lead the Brewers Alliance. She’s a former elementary school teacher who tends bar at Wedge Brewing Co. and used to work at The Mule, a bar inside the production facility of Devil’s Foot Beverage Co., which her life partner, Jacob Baumann, co-owns. Since she was hired as director at the beginning of 2023, she’s championed diversity not just in gender and race but in types of beverages and business: distilleries, cideries, purveyors of craft sodas and cocktails, and out-of-town breweries that have bought or established locations in Asheville.

The Brewers Alliance was established in 2009, “and it has been mostly just beer and the owners of those breweries for the longest time,” Roberts says over the lunchtime hum. “Then, as breweries started to get bought out by bigger entities, we changed and started to allow non-independent breweries to join us.” (By comparison, Charlotte’s Brewers Alliance restricts its membership to independent Charlotte-area brewers; then again, the numerous Charlotte breweries haven’t achieved the national profile that Asheville’s have.)

Asheville breweries can feel more rural than their Charlotte counterparts—like Zillicoah Beer Co., on the French Broad River in neighboring Woodfin.

Roberts has worked to strengthen ties with the city’s hospitality and tourism industry—offering Asheville’s numerous hotels, for instance, “white-label” deals that allow them to sell local beers under their own brands. Brewing communities are famously cooperative, but Roberts says Asheville’s exceeds even that standard. “There’s a level of, like, ‘We’re not competing. We’re sharing the wealth,’” she says. “Yeah, you came in here, but you can also go next door to my competitor and enjoy their drinks. It’s a very cohesive, inclusive environment where everyone’s trying to help everyone else. … It’s a beautiful web of networking.”

Yet the city still has plenty of space for traditionalists, locals who set up in old buildings and stick to beer—the established way to buck the establishment. As a rule, Asheville taprooms have more bucolic settings than Charlotte’s, and it’s hard to imagine a more rustic place to drink than The River Arts District (RAD) Brewing Co., which sprawls over a wooded, creekside plot southwest of downtown.

New Jersey native Robert “Lem” Lemery opened The River Arts District (RAD) Brewing Co. last year.

Roberts has recommended it as a fine example of a new Asheville brewery. A New Jersey native named Robert “Lem” Lemery opened it in May 2023, in a century-old stonecutter’s workshop, and took pains to preserve the original wood. I chat with Shawn Robinson, the general manager, about whether he’s had any Charlotte beer. He has, it turns out; he hit Olde Mecklenburg, Sugar Creek, and Lower Left with his college roommate not long ago. Robinson, an Asheville native, says he “was very pleased” with the beer quality but notes that Charlotte breweries have “a more urban feel.”

I swing by one more brewery before I leave town, this one even more distant from any urban feel: Zillicoah Beer Co., which opened in 2017 in Woodfin, a small town that borders Asheville to the north. Zillicoah sits on the French Broad River’s eastern bank, and patrons read at picnic tables in the shade on a warm, sunny day as the river burbles by.

I sip a rye lager and ask the bartender if he’s ever sampled any Queen City beers. “Nah,” he replies. “I’ve never really had any reason to go to Charlotte.”

WANT TO GO?

For a comprehensive list of Asheville breweries and craft beverage outlets, visit Explore Asheville.