Table Of Content
Highland also offers brewery tours for those who want to learn more about how some of the best beer in Asheville is made. Join us downtown Asheville in our second taproom space on the mezzanine of the S&W Market, Asheville’s first food hall. Enjoy a Highland beer and a taste of the city from local all-star food vendors on the market’s first floor. While the rooftop bar and events center were completed before 2020, the outdoor spaces now include popular volleyball, disc golf and cornhole areas.
Downtown Taproom
Today, the company is led by Wong’s daughter, Leah Wong Ashburn, and serves as the largest independent, family-owned and operated brewery native to the Southeast. Located in a rehabilitated manufacturing facility in East Asheville, the brewery affords space for thousands of visitors to enjoy limited-release beers, tours, and live music. In 2021, Highland will make its return to downtown Asheville to open doors on a second taproom within the city's first food hall – The S&W Market. “City on a Hill”—that’s what Highland Brewing Company is to Asheville’s prolific craft beer scene.
HIGHLAND BREWERY ASHEVILLE GUIDE
The packaging hall is where we put our beer into bottles and cans. Changing any of the form inputs will cause the list of events to refresh with the filtered results. Visit our hilltop brewery and see what else goes on beyond fermentation. Additionally, they repurpose spent grains as cow feed, use repurposed materials for some of their brewing systems, and have several mindful operating protocols to minimize energy usage and waste. But the Highland Brewing Company was the very first Asheville brewery.
Event Views Navigation
Not getting metaphorically flattened is part of why Wong Ashburn was brought in to succeed Wong as head of the brewery — though if she had her way, Highland would have been a true family business far earlier. Wong Ashburn made several attempts to join the company in the brewery’s first decade, including as a local beer seller, but Wong says he didn’t think it was the right thing for her to do at that time. The brewhouse has the third largest solar array of any craft beer brewery in the US, and the 13th largest brewery solar array in the world.
Beer
None of the other Asheville NC breweries we’ve visited offer quite so much behind the scenes access. Their Asheville beer tour happens twice on Monday and Tuesday, and on four different occasions each afternoon for the rest of the week. Founded in 1994 by retired engineer Oscar Wong, Highland Brewing was the pioneer of craft brewing in Asheville. Which has, of course, since become the Blue Ridge Mountains’ hottest destination for serious beer connoisseurs. Highland Brewing got its start in 1994 as a retirement hobby for former engineer Oscar Wong.
Visit Us At Our
Asheville music club scene this week - Citizen Times
Asheville music club scene this week.
Posted: Fri, 20 Nov 2015 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Aside from their original scenic location, Highland is also making a move towards being among the downtown Asheville breweries, opening a second location at S&W Cafeteria. We have a 3-BBL Pilot Brewhouse where we test new brews that are only available on draft at our brewery Taproom and Downtown Taproom. The comments section is here to provide a platform for civil dialogue on the issues we face together as a local community. Xpress is committed to offering this platform for all voices, but when the tone of the discussion gets nasty or strays off topic, we believe many people choose not to participate.
Highland Brewing was founded in 1994 by retired engineer and entrepreneur Oscar Wong, establishing it as the pioneer of Asheville, NC’s now booming craft beer industry. Proudly regional, Highland’s beers are distributed in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia. Highland is committed to quality and sustainability, boasting the sixth largest solar array in an American craft brewery. Today, the company is led by Wong’s daughter, Leah Wong Ashburn, and serves as the largest independent, family-owned, and operated brewery native to the Southeast.
Core Bites, August 21 - Hendersonville - BlueRidgeNow.com
Core Bites, August 21 - Hendersonville.
Posted: Fri, 21 Aug 2015 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Wong and McDermott liked the balanced flavor of the English brown ale base but didn’t know the creation would be “it” as far as a flagship brew went. Wong says that status came along more naturally and actually dawned on him a few years into Highland’s run when he was ready to try new things and possibly take the brewery in a different direction. After visiting North Carolina for the first time, Senior Writer Jonathon Engels and wife Emma spent 2 years exploring Western NC in search of a homestead property.
Breweries
You can take your pup for a hike on Highland's hiking trail, play a game of volleyball, or challenge a friend to a round of disc golf. And when you need something to toast your victory with, you’ll have around 20 options to choose from. There, they created such beverages as Celtic Ale (later Gaelic Ale), St. Terese’s Pale Ale and Oatmeal Porter, which were served upstairs at Barley’s and bottled by hand for local distribution. The facility also has a concert stage, taproom, event venue, rooftop bar, and massive outdoor space.
They first lived in Brevard, where Jonathon taught writing at Blue Ridge Community College and extensively explored the Blue Ridge Parkway and Pisgah National Forest. For the last several years they have lived just off the BRP near Elkin, Southwest Virginia, and the NC High Country. The couple also volunteers with the Surry Old Time Fiddlers Convention, the Elkin Valley Trail Association, and Reeves Downtown School of Music. The S&W Cafeteria is an art deco-style architectural space that’s part of a move to help revitalize Asheville’s downtown (which Highland helped to do back in the 1990s). In addition to their public offerings, Highland Brewery Asheville also has two venues for private events.
In December 1994, when downtown Asheville was sleepy, Highland rolled out its first kegs from the basement to the alley. Built almost entirely of retrofitted dairy equipment, our original brewery could produce up to 6,500 barrels of beer per year in about 12,000 square feet of space. So Highland Brewery, which many locals consider the founder of the Asheville NC craft beer scene, has been doing it for more than 25 years. And even now, after the big brands have stolen the media spotlight, it remains one of the best breweries in Asheville. Operations began in the basement of downtown Asheville’s Barley’s Taproom, where Wong used retrofitted dairy equipment to create his beer. He continued there for 13 years and over time developed the recipes for what would become regional favorites like the Gaelic Ale, Black Mocha Stout, and Oatmeal Porter.
After spending years owning and running a Charlotte-based engineering firm that designed nuclear waste facilities, Wong bought a house in the sleepy mountain town of Asheville and was ready to settle into a slower-paced life. Instead, his home brewing hobby snowballed, and next thing he knew, he was opening a brewery. That mix of consistency and innovation has proved key to Highland’s sustained operations in an ever-changing industry. One notable exception is the popular Cold Mountain Winter Ale, which intentionally evolves slightly from year to year with different ingredients. Highland is now the largest family-owned brewery in the Southeast, and currently run by Oscar’s daughter, CEO Leah Wong Ashburn. Visiting Highland should be a big draw for anyone doing Asheville tours.
Highland Brewing likes to see itself as a business incarnation of the American dream. Of all the myriad North Carolina breweries, it’s the largest “native” craft beer producer, and remains one of the top breweries in Asheville. Close The Meadow is our tree-lined outdoor space featuring a seasonal bar, live music, and special events. CloseOur Event Center houses three levels of industrial chic private event space with soaring ceilings, expansive windows, a stage, a mezzanine, two bars, and more.
In addition to two bars, street-side seating, and a mezzanine, this location will also offer a food hall, with four different stalls to choose from. For smaller crowds of 100 people or less, they’ll be opening The Barrel Room in spring of 2020. It’s described as “posh without being stuffy, casual without being boring.” The room has a catering kitchen and a private bar in a setting that puts guests right in the middle of the company’s aging barrels. Their official Event Center features a main floor, a mezzanine, and a rooftop beer garden. It can accommodate up to 300 people for a seated dinner, and includes a stage with full audio and visual technology capabilities.
Xpress editors are determined to moderate comments to ensure a constructive interchange is maintained. All comments judged not to be in keeping with the spirit of civil discourse will be removed and repeat violators will be banned. Thank you for being part of this effort to promote respectful discussion. Her tenure has also overlapped with large enterprises such as Anheuser-Busch InBev and Kirin Holdings purchasing numerous smaller craft breweries. Wong and Wong Ashburn confirm that Highland has indeed fielded offers from so-called “Big Beer” and has received pitches to buy other breweries. Neither avenue is appealing to the Highland ownership team, and there’s also zero interest in establishing taprooms outside Asheville.
