The Beer Week Chronicles, in which we profile various beer weeks across the country, are focusing this week on one of the United States’ breakout beer scenes: Asheville, North Carolina.
With twenty-seven breweries within an hour of Asheville, it's kind of beer week here every week,” says Mike Rangel, the president of Asheville Brewing Company and one of the founders of Asheville Beer Week. “The Asheville beer climate is changing like crazy. With two of the three top craft breweries within twenty minutes of each other, it’s bringing a lot of attention to this area. Sprinkle in Oskar Blues thirty minutes away in Brevard, and you have a true brewers’ hot-spot.”
In 2012, Rangel became the committee chair for the first Asheville Brewers Week. He and fellow members—Jules Attalah of the Bruisin' Ales homebrew shop, Mary Eliza Lamb of Rogue Brewing, Adam Reinke of the Mountain Ale and Lager Tasters (MALT) homebrew club, TJ Gardner of Sierra Nevada, Anne Fitten Glenn of Oskar Blues Brewing, and Jimi Rentz of Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria—saw a need for a beer week in Asheville after visiting other states’ beer weeks.
“Our goal was to create an immersive craft beer experience that connected craft brew fans with the folks who make the beer and work in the industry,” says Rangel. And that’s just what they did. Now in its third year, Asheville Beer Week is bigger than ever, not just with more breweries but also with the addition of other local organizations, too.
"Asheville Beer Week has evolved in a ton of small ways,” says Rangel. “One of the coolest, I think, is that more and more non-traditional craft brew businesses are getting involved. Restaurants are jumping aboard, and that helps us educate our local food places on the importance of having a craft beer presence on their menus.”
Asheville Beer Week, which begins today and runs through May 31, has also gained international recognition in its short lifespan. “We also noticed that the emails we are receiving with questions about ABW are from all over the world,” says Rangel. “We expected to get some regional buzz but didn't think we would have people in England, Japan, Germany, Australia, etc. who would be interested in attending.”
The events at this year’s ABW beer week include beer dinners, tap takeovers, and beer and food pairings, as well as capstone events such as the North Carolina Belgian Beer Festival, Westside Fest, Funk Asheville, and a film festival by Carolina Cinemas and Oskar Blues, among many others.
Asheville Beer Week 04"The Asheville craft breweries have tons of respect and admiration for other cities that helped create the explosion of the artisanal beer movement,” Rangel says. “Without Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, etc. we wouldn't have a blueprint to follow on how to become a real ‘beer city.’ And next year, with the Big Three all up and running, Asheville Beer Week will make another quantum leap.”
Photos courtesy of Asheville Beer Week