82 NOVEMBER 2019
T
R
A
V
E
L
CLOCKWISE FROM
L E F T: A crisp Ber-
liner Weisse at
Zillicoah Beer
Company; High-
land Brewery
employees on
the rooftop; the
pickled egg
appetizer at
Bhramari Brew-
ing Company
housing small food and drink businesses; and loads of tourists
and their thirst. “There were nearly 11 million visitors in 2016,
and 6.6% of them listed beer as their primary reason for coming.
So it’s easy to keep breweries afloat, even if people come just
for one pint,” says local beer historian Cliff Mori.
Indeed, since 1994, when retired engineer Oscar Wong
launched Highland Brewing, the city’s first craft producer, in
the basement of a downtown pizza joint, only a few breweries
here have ever bitten the dust. The Asheville Brewers Alliance
lists 51 members in and around town, and though you’d think
that would make for a crowded field in a city with less than
100,000 residents, the scene keeps growing. “In Asheville,” says
Mori, “there’s room for everybody.”
That includes classicists like Zebulon Artisan Ales’ Mike
Karnowski, a maker of vibrant French-style saisons and other
European styles. On a Friday or Saturday afternoon when Kar-
nowski and his wife, Gabe, welcome the drinking public to sit
on Adirondack chairs in their tiny alleyside brewery in Weaver-
ville, this self-named “curmudgeon” will give you a detailed
earful of English porter history as he pulls you a roasty-toasty
pint painstakingly recreated from a 1922 recipe.
It also includes Gary Sernack, a former chef who treats the
beerworks at Bhramari Brewing Company like a gonzo test
kitchen. When I visited his South Slope brewpub, he poured
me an IPA called Phuket Dude, inspired by Thai green curry. Its
spicy, fruity nose came from the addition of lime leaf, lemon-
grass, toasted coconut, blue ginger, and galangal. Basil gave its
hoppy finish a bright green pop.
“This scratches that creative itch the same way cooking does,”
says Sernack. “But it’s not like table 32 needs their food on the
fly. I can work at my own pace.”
Not that Bhramari ignores the food. Most breweries in Ashe-
ville welcome food trucks; some partner with local restaurants.
At the two-year-old Hillman Beer, the dry, delicious, and amus-
ingly named Straw Boobies, a fruit-infused saison, goes great
with house-cured pastrami from sandwich-maker-in-residence
Rise Above Deli. But Bhramari, unlike most breweries here,
serves a full menu, and chef Joshua Dillard is just as creative
with the brew kettle ingredients as Sernack is. What spent grain
doesn’t go for cattle feed (for the beef in his burger), he turns
into soft pretzels.
But as out-there as things get at Bhramari, Sernack’s ambi-
tions are modest compared to some of his peers. One morning,
I walked with Burial Beer Company’s Doug Reiser across the
grounds of a camp that had been built for the Civilian Conserva-
tion Corps back in the 1930s. I’d met Reiser, an energetic former
litigator, the night before at a maker’s fair at his original South
Slope taproom, where jewelry designers and potters were selling
their wares to a happy hour crowd sucking down his Baptized
in Blood witbier and The Ballad of Chaos imperial brown ale.
At the new Forestry Camp, as they call it, Reiser; his wife,
Jessica; and his partner, Tim Gormley, are taking Burial to the
next level. Their production brewery there cranks out 10,000
“Asheville is where ... we could brush
the 9-to-5 tunnel vision off and make
a living making beer.” —John Parks,
Zillicoah Beer Company
