Water fueled Asheville’s flourishing breweries. Then it ravaged them.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misspelled Johnathan Parks’s name. This story has been corrected. Originally moved Oct. 24.
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Two weeks after Hurricane Helene destroyed most of his brewery, Jonathan Chassner sat on his back porch and sipped a warm coffee. He also had a lead on where to find a hot shower later that day. Both felt like a balm at a time when his family still didn’t have running water - potable or flushable - at their Asheville, North Carolina, home.
Despite the small comforts, Chassner’s thoughts drifted to beer, and to his ravaged business on the banks of the French Broad River. He founded Zillicoah Beer Co., located about two miles northwest of downtown Asheville in Woodfin, North Carolina, with his brother, Jeremy Chassner, and business partner Johnathan Parks in 2017. The three built much of it themselves, cutting concrete and finishing bathrooms. The work then turned to brewing beer, primarily lagers, on a relatively low-tech, hands-on system. The trio preferred it this way.
Chassner remembers precisely which beers were in his steel tanks when the storm hit: 465 gallons each of an applewood-smoked helles and a light, vibrant kellerpils. On Sept. 26, gallons and gallons of those beers merged with the same raging floodwaters that mangled the brewery’s fences and swept away its entire interior. Asheville’s water - coveted for its pristine, soft qualities - was the lifeblood of its celebrated brewing scene. With Helene, it became something Chassner could not have imagined: a destructive force. Two days later, when he was finally able to survey the damage from a high point 300 yards from the brewery, he struggled to recognize the scene in front of him.
“I thought, ‘This is unbelievable,’” he said. “I am in disbelief. Things are just gone.”
The significance of Hurricane Helene’s damage to western North Carolina breweries emerges day by day, piece by piece. With cell service disrupted for weeks, initial news trickled out by word of mouth. Neighbors left notes for one another on pen and paper. Inspectors from the Federal Emergency Management Agency continue to conduct site evaluations.
Of the approximately 55 breweries in the greater Asheville area, four or five are likely to be declared total losses as a result of the storm. Some seven miles southeast of Zillicoah, in Asheville’s Biltmore Industrial Area, New Origin Brewing was leveled by a Norfolk Southern railcar borne upon the floodwaters like a locomotive. Just down the block, Brewery Cursus Keme was reduced to planks and tangled wires. New Origin co-owner Dan Juhnke said his brewery is among several awaiting municipal planning department communication that will inform them whether they can rebuild on the floodplain. Even one of the city’s largest breweries, the East Coast campus of New Belgium Brewing, remains closed and won’t be able to fulfill beer orders for several weeks.
For a city of roughly 100,000 people, Asheville has an outsize reputation as one of the country’s most dynamic beer cities. It’s referred to as “Beer City U.S.A.,” the result of its multiple wins in an annual poll conducted by celebrated brewer Charlie Papazian that began in 2009. The camaraderie and commitment of its brewers is what drew Juhnke, New Origin co-founder and head brewer, there five years ago.
“If you’re a really good chef and you want to hone your skills, you go to New York or San Francisco. For the brewing community, that’s Asheville,” Juhnke said.
Asheville’s oldest brewery, Highland Brewing, is structurally intact, but it was without running water for more than two weeks. Like Chassner, Highland CEO Leah Wong Ashburn found her concept of water transformed by the storm. Her husband is an engineer and had previously conducted a study of the brewery’s watershed, revealing the massive volume funneling into nearby Gashes Creek and the Swannanoa River. Despite this, Ashburn could not anticipate the devastation that these waterways could produce. Rivers were Asheville’s navigational compass, its recreation corridors, its brewers’ pride. The hurricane turned them into battering rams.
“It will change the face of the city,” Ashburn said. “It’s already changed.”
The extent of that change has massive economic implications for Asheville. Ashburn’s father, Oscar Wong, founded Highland in 1994. In this artsy, outdoorsy town at the forefront of the local food moment, dozens of other breweries followed. The thriving small brewery scene eventually attracted national brands, including New Belgium and Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., to open East Coast outposts in the region. Today, these breweries support an entire supply chain. Riverbend Malt opened in 2011 to turn grains from area farmers into malt for brewing; a quarter of its brewery clients are located in western North Carolina.
Asheville-area breweries alone contributed just shy of $1 billion to the economy in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available from Riverbird Research, a division of the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce. Much of this comes from beer-related tourism. About a quarter of the $3 billion that visitors spend in Asheville annually goes to food and beverage establishments, including breweries.
Ashburn calls tourism “essential” to maintaining business at Highland’s 40-acre campus, which features a taproom, two wedding venues, a music stage, a disc golf course and five sand volleyball courts. Even without water to brew beer, Highland still kept some of its 105 employees working in the weeks after Helene. They cooked meals for each other and offered space, forklifts and logistical support to local nonprofits. One of these, Flush AVL, is a grassroots group formed in the wake of the storm to distribute and refill 250-gallon non-potable water totes to area residents. It’s so far delivered more than 500 of the totes, enabling people to flush their toilets.
“My vision is that breweries will be really desirable places to go after all this,” Ashburn said. “There may be fewer of them but … I hope these are places people really want to patronize because they know how much we leaned in.”
Highland turned a corner in mid-October, when plumbers were able to re-engineer the brewery’s equipment to use water pumped in a tanker, rather than municipal water. The brewery is now paying tens of thousands of dollars to truck water in from a private source an hour’s drive away. It’s allowed Highland to run its packaging equipment and, soon, to turn its brewhouse back on. This downtime is especially painful during October, Asheville’s busiest tourist month. Ashburn says that, even as customers make it a point to support their local breweries, October sales have been half their normal level.
As the industry slowly picks up the pieces, brewery owners and beer enthusiasts are rallying behind those most affected. GoFundMe pages were established to help breweries like Zillicoah and New Origin rebuild, and other breweries have held their own fundraisers to benefit their neighbors. The North Carolina Craft Brewers Guild launched the Pouring for Neighbors initiative, allowing breweries nationwide to donate proceeds from a designated beer to relief efforts. (As of mid-October, 290 breweries had signed on.)
Asheville brewery DSSOLVR, mostly spared by the storm, spearheaded a collaboration IPA called Higher Calling, with net profits benefiting the North Carolina Craft Brewers Foundation. Burial Beer, another Asheville brewery, immediately opened its doors to neighbors in need of electricity, dry goods or a free meal.
Burial co-founders Doug and Jess Reiser said they felt eerie echoes during Helene. They lived in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit and witnessed the way storms can reconfigure a city. They remember how breweries, artists and small businesses played a vital role in stitching it back together. Doug Reiser is moved by the way Chassner has been processing the destruction of Zillicoah, in part by playing guitar at friends’ breweries. It reflects the city’s artistic ethos, its tenacity and its fierce commitment to gathering around food and drink.
“That’s what you’re going to see here in this town. People are processing it emotionally and turning that from one art form to the next,” Doug Reiser said. “This isn’t only about business. It’s about their higher purpose, and they’re going to fight for that as long as they can.”
Rather than pushing brewery owners out of Asheville, Helene - or, rather, the community’s response to it - has strengthened their resolve to stay. The Reisers say they’ve never been more committed to remaining in Asheville. Even the owners of Zillicoah and New Origin say they intend to rebuild there. Chassner is steadfast: His brewery, and many others in Asheville, are more than their buildings, more than their equipment, more than the beer itself. And the employees and customers who made Zillicoah what it was aren’t going anywhere.
“The physical side of life is just that: It’s just physical stuff. The minds and hearts and souls that created this place known as Beer City U.S.A. are still here,” Chassner said. “You can’t kill the soul of that.”
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