The beer camp bus traveled more than 5,000 miles, attended seven festivals, and poured beer alongside nearly 700 breweries on its journey... and it didn’t break down until it got to North Carolina. When it finally pulled into Mills River, the grand opening celebration of Sierra Nevada’s new brewery was in full swing.
“Sierra Nevada was vocal and intentional about becoming a part of the Asheville community,” says Luke Dickinson, the head brewer at Wicked Weed Brewing. Dickinson and John Stuart of Green Man Brewery were the two representatives of the Asheville Brewers Alliance (ABA) who brewed the Beer Camp collaboration with Sierra Nevada.
“Asheville is a funky place. We wanted the beer to be unique to our region, where traditionally Scottish settlers came to live,” explains Dickinson. So he, Stuart, and the brewers at the new brewery in Mills River wrote the recipe for the Tater Ridge, a Scottish Ale brewed with North Carolina’s state vegetable: the sweet potato.
sDickinson and Stuart wanted to brew a beer that could involve all of the ABA’s brewery members, so they invited all twenty-seven of them to help them smoke the 1,000 pounds of sweet potatoes that went into the beer at their respective breweries. A local smokehouse, 12 Bones, also pitched in on the smoking. All of the smoked potatoes were delivered to Wicked Weed on the brew day and put directly into the mash tun with the grain.
The six-row malt used in Tater Ridge was provided by the Riverbend Malthouse, a local craft maltster that is focused on malting winter barley. “Riverbend makes mainly six-row barley malt, which is different from the two-row barley malt we typically use for our beers,” says Bill Manley, the Beer Ambassador at Sierra Nevada Brewing. “This different malt variety adds different flavor characteristics to the finished beer, different from what we typically feature.”
20,000 pounds of Riverbend pale malt went into Tater Ridge. “It is of excellent quality and really helped round out the flavor profile of the beer,” Manley adds.
At top: John Stuart (Green Man Brewery) grabs a Tater Ridge mash sample from Scott Jennings (Sierra Nevada).