80 NOVEMBER 2019
T
R
A
V
E
L
Leah Wong
Ashburn,
president of
Highland
Brewing
T WAS AUGUST in North Carolina, and John Parks was
up to his knees in peaches. “They all ripen at different
times, so it’s tricky,” he said as he sorted some 1,600
sweet-smelling pounds’ worth.
Parks, 36, is head brewer at Zillicoah Beer Company,
and on the outskirts of Asheville in the light-flooded warehouse
that serves as his cellar and tasting room, he was finishing up
a wild peach lager, adding the best stone fruit to a wooden vat
called a foeder, where it would sit for four months, infusing the
naturally fermented beer with perfumy flavor. He took a minute
to lead me to the bar for a tall mug of Berliner Weisse, tapping
it slowly so that the foam built to a high, thick meringue that
grabbed the brew’s heady aromatics and released them into my
nose with each jiggly sip.
That expert pour, and the beer itself, a light-bodied but full-
flavored commingling of herbaceous Saaz hops and honey-on-
sourdough pilsner and wheat malts, were the impressive cul-
mination of a dream that started over a decade ago when Parks
and his business partners, Jon and Jeremy Chassner, were band-
I
mates and home brewers in Tallahassee, Florida.
“We never thought what we love to do would make us money,”
Parks told me, “but moving to Asheville changed that. Asheville
is where young people come to retire. We could brush the 9-to-5
tunnel vision off and make a living making beer.”
He’s right. Here in the North Carolina mountains, it’s a beer
maker’s nirvana. Some credit the water. With its neutral pH,
the clean mountain elixir is a blank canvas, says brewer Carl
Melissas. “We don’t have to fight minerals. We can just add back
in what we want.” At Wedge Brewing Company, named for the
warehouse filled with artists’ studios where he’s been cranking
out beers for more than a decade, Melissas can emulate the
calcium sulfate–rich waters of the Thames, for instance, by
adding gypsum to his London-style Iron Rail IPA; it brings out
the bite in the hops.
Beer lovers can also thank the culture of the town. It’s a com-
plex brew of outdoorsiness (post-hike ale, anyone?); a lively
artist and maker tradition that encourages craftiness in other
endeavors; plenty of old-timey, Art Deco buildings perfect for
