86 NOVEMBER 2019
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barrels of beer annually—10 times what their original taproom
can produce. When I visited, renovations were ongoing for a
cocktail cellar, a party lawn, and a restaurant overseen by chef
Brian Canipelli of Asheville’s Italian hot spot Cucina 24. Reiser
had just launched Ambient Terrain, a series of rustic lagers made
in collaboration with other craft breweries around the country.
But beer was just the start of the wares he was planning to
produce at his new facility.
“We made a rice lager last week and turned the spent rice
into fried rice. We’re curing local peppers in bourbon barrels.
We’re making house vermouth. We’re gonna use beer cultures
for yogurt, and the chokeberries that grow on the property will
go for house kombucha. Why not? I would love to say everything
we make is in-house one day.”
Reiser’s expansion has local precedents. Highland, for in-
stance, has grown over the years to become the Southeast’s
largest family-owned native craft brewery. Today, it’s housed in
a former movie studio with a rooftop bar and a massive array
of solar panels powering its round-the-clock beer production.
Asheville’s first tasting room, the punk-rock bar where Green
Man Brewery launched in 1997, burst its seams long ago and
swallowed up buildings down the block. Today, you can sit in
a sleek, art-filled barroom overlooking Green Man’s bottling
line and have a certified Cicerone walk you through the malty,
Brit-style ESB and its flowery Trickster IPA.
And new brewers keep coming. One of the city’s youngest
beerworks is Brouwerïj Cursus Kĕmē, a handsome spot that
opened in the summer of 2018 on the site of a former dump for
18-wheeler trucks along the Swannanoa River. Cursus’ Jeffrey
Horner fashioned his high-gloss bar out of old truck beds and
used their engine blocks to hold it up. The taps run through the
trunk of a fallen black locust tree, which hangs on a wall that
Horner charred using the Japanese technique shou sugi ban.
There’s a grassy biergarten, an outdoor kitchen where patrons
grab sausage-and-duck-egg croissant sandwiches, an orchard
to harvest fruit for cherry-laced kriek, and even a small hop
farm on-site. It’s a post-industrial wonderland for enjoying
beers brewed over a live fire and fermented with house-cultured
yeast inside large, medieval-looking barrels.
Horner made beer for 19 years in Washington, D.C.; San Fran-
cisco; and New York’s Hudson Valley. He ran production at
Nantucket’s Cisco Brewers. How did he land in an old dump by
the river? He poured me a rauchbier he called Incendia. It tasted
of wood smoke and ripe cantaloupe. “I was looking for the right
community in which to make esoteric beers,” he shrugged. “The
scene just brought me to Asheville.”
TOP: The wood-fired brew
kettle at Brouwerïj Cursus
Kĕmē, on Asheville’s
Swannanoa River. BOTTOM: At
Bhramari Brewing, the
burger is topped with hop-
smoked cheese.
