But unlike so many fly-by-night microbrewers gone rogue, the first of the many Asheville, NC breweries now has a quarter of a century to its name. Let us craft an authentic brewery experience for your next special occasion. Private event venues include the Rooftop, Event Center and Barrel Room. A vast tree-lined space with shady table seating and a lush lawn to bring your own chairs. The Meadow bar is open for the summer featuring our year-round and small batch beers; cider and wine also available.
DOWNTOWN TAPROOM
Located in a rehabilitated manufacturing facility in East Asheville, the brewery affords space for visitors to enjoy limited release beers, walking trails, volleyball courts, and live music. In spring 2021, the brewery opened their second taproom and returned to downtown Asheville. The Downtown Taproom within the S&W Market, Asheville’s first food hall, is a great spot to try a taste of the city.
PRIVATE
As a perennial feature on Asheville beer tours and one of the city’s best breweries, Highland Brewing Co doesn’t really need to do much more to get noticed. And yet they do, with their many community-minded and environmentally aware initiatives. In 2020, Highland will also be opening a second site in downtown Asheville, at the S&W Cafeteria.
From basement to Beer City: How Highland Brewing changed Asheville - Citizen Times
From basement to Beer City: How Highland Brewing changed Asheville.
Posted: Thu, 02 May 2024 13:23:11 GMT [source]
COMMUNITY/SUSTAINABILITY INITIATIVES
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.
The future is family
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.
For more information, visit Follow Highland on Twitter at @HighlandBrews and Instagram at @HighlandBrewing. Highland Brewing Company was founded in 1994 by retired engineer and entrepreneur Oscar Wong. As the first craft brewery to open in Asheville, NC since Prohibition, Highland became known as the pioneer of the city’s now-booming craft beer industry. Highland's commitment to quality and sustainability boasts the sixth largest solar array in an American craft brewery.
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.
Explore Asheville Convention & Visitors Bureau
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.
The moniker also represents the pioneering brewery’s 40-acre hilltop campus that includes a taproom, performance stage, grassy meadow, volleyball courts, hiking trail, and disc golf course. In a city that has more breweries per capita than anywhere else in the U.S., it’s a testament to the beer and the people behind it that Highland is still the local favorite. In 2015, she took over as CEO, and the man often referred to as Asheville’s godfather of craft beer finally got his long-awaited retirement wish—just 10 years and one multimillion dollar company later.
ClosePosh without being stuffy, casual without being boring – The Barrel Room features racks of barrels, skylights, glass garage doors, a catering kitchen, and a private bar with views of our barrel-aged beer production space. We’re pretty sure that you know journalism faces big challenges these days. Media outlets around the country are asking their readers to chip in. For as little as $5 a month — the cost of a craft beer or kombucha — you can help keep local journalism strong. These spaces promise to be hopping on Saturday, May 4, for the brewery’s Big Bash celebration, during which multiple new beers will be available on draft, including OG Dub IPA, named in honor of Wong, and The Long Game tropical lager.
Complimentary guided walking tours of the facilities are available every day of the week. They last around 45 minutes, and include a beer tasting to celebrate the occasion. Amongst the many Asheville brewery tours we’ve taken, the Highland Brewery tour ranks right up there with the best.
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.
Spacious & friendly, the Taproom showcases our year-round beer lineup as well as our rotating small-batch brews. CloseFrom concerts to fitness classes, our stage is home to talent from Asheville and beyond. Asheville-based food truck serving Southern inspired & locally sourced fare!
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