Asheville, North Carolina Day 1
I originally planned on traveling only on Amtrak, public transit and Lyft, however while the train is lovely, it also just takes a long time to get from point A to Point B. In order to do and see, and taste more I decided to hop a flight from D.C. to Charlotte, North Carolina — which is the closest large airport to Asheville. Asheville has a regional airport, but the flights are really expensive. From Charlotte I was able to book a seat on the Asheville Shuttle, which runs multiple trips to Asheville daily. On my first night I stayed in an amazing Airbnb 15 minutes outside Asheville in Swannanoa. This Airbnb gem was an old (yet refurbished) Amish cabin from the 1800s. It was the perfect place to experience the Asheville mountain life that I was looking for, and the hosts were absolutely fantastic.

After dropping off my luggage I headed into Asheville for my first tour of the day at New Belgium. New Belgium broke ground on the property in 2012 and in May of 2016 they opened. Apparently the most common question asked on the New Belgium tours is: Why build your second brewery in Asheville? The answer: it was a distribution play. It costs a lot of money to ship their beer through the rockies to the east coast, so a brewery on the east coast makes a lot of since from a business perspective for New Belgium.


The New Belgium Tour in Asheville is very comparable to the one in Fort Collins, but one notable difference is that in Asheville you ride a slide at the beginning of the tour (Thanks again Brian).



New Belgium Fun Facts
- Barnum & Bailey Circus used to train on the grounds the brewery was built on. This is part of the reason the brewery features a lot of circus art, they also host a circus, Tour de Fat, every year.
- New Belgium employees are gifted a 12 pack every week and after 5 years of employment they’re given a paid vacation to Belgium to visit Brugs Beertjes, the bar in which New Belgium was conceived.
- New Belgium is currently in a race with Sierra Nevada Brewery to see whose employees can bike the most miles while commuting to work. It sounds like Sierra Nevada is winning.
After a few tasters in the New Belgium Liquid Center (AKA tasting room) I took a 20 minute Lyft over to Sierra Nevada in Mills River, North Carolina. This branch of Sierra Nevada is lovingly referred to as MaltDisney World, which is 100% true. More on this later…

Sierra Nevada offers the most robust selection of tours of any brewery that I’ve had the pleasure of visiting. Including an amazing self-guided visitors corridor with a raised mezzanine for bird’s-eye views of the brewing process.

Some of the current guided tour options are:
- Brewhouse Tour
- Beer Geek Tour
- Trip in the Woods
- LEED Tour
- Guided Education Tasting
I started off with the LEED Tour. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and is a certification given by the U.S. Green Building Council. Sierra Nevada Mills River is the first production U.S. brewery to be LEED Platinum certified. A few other brewery taprooms might be LEED Platinum, but not their actual production facility. It is incredibly difficult to earn the Platinum certification and it was a goal the Sierra Nevada had on the onset of building the brewery in 2012. Sierra Nevada was founded by Ken Grossman in 1979 and Ken has always been a big outdoor enthusiast and a sustainability advocate.

The brewery has established a wide variety of sustainability practices from having bike tracks and priority parking for low emission vehicles, to solar trees in the parking lot and rainwater cisterns on the building to capture rain which is then used for irrigation and flushing toilets.

Mills River, NC (Where Sierra Nevada is located) gets about 50 inches of rain a year. To accommodate this vast amount of rainfall they created an extensive stormwater recovery system. Permeable pavers allow water to percolate into groundwater supplies and nearly 530,000 gallons of cistern space captures rainwater from the rooftops and paved surfaces. The water is then distributed around the brewery for non-potable uses. Excess water is channeled into the nearby French Broad River through an engineered stream, offering cleaner water to the river and helping to prevent erosion.

On average it takes a brewery 6 barrels of water to produce 1 barrel of beer. Sierra Nevada only uses 3.5 barrels of water to produce one barrel of beer. They also have their own on-site water treatment facility, which takes effluent water from the brewery and pre-treats it through anaerobic digestion before sending it to the municipal treatment facility. Methane produced from the wastewater treatment process is recovered and then used to fuel the boilers and microturbines at the brewery.

The vast majority of Sierra Nevada’s waste diversion comes from their on-site recycling facility in which they recycle and compost. Through this facility they are able to divert 21,000 tons of waste annually. A big chunk of this diverted waste is the spent grain left over after the brewing process, which is given to local farmers to feed their cows. The leftover hops are composted as hops are poisonous to most animals.
The brewery itself is absolutely gorgeous and there is amazing wood decor throughout it. Sierra Nevada had to cut down about 26 acres of their 218 total acreage to build the brewery. They took the felled trees and sent them to a local lumber yard to be processed and reclaimed about 200,000 linear feet of wood that was used to build the cabinets, chairs, benches and most wood furnishings that you see in the brewery.
Of course since at the end of the day this was a brewery tour, the tour ends with a few beer tastings. My tour tasted: Pale Ale, Sidecar (Orange Pale Ale), Otra Vez (Gose), Oktoberfest, and Tropical Torpedo IPA. It was hands down the best green beer that I’ve ever had.

I was amazed by the dedication to sustainability that Sierra Nevada has. They’re setting a high sustainability standard and I hope that other breweries follow their LEED.
Steal My Trip
Breweries:
Tours: http://www.newbelgium.com/Brewery/asheville/tours
Food truck: On-site most days and very tasty!
Tours: https://www.sierranevada.com/brewery/north-carolina/brewery-tour
Food: Amazing full service taproom, as well as the Back Porch bar that has beers and food truck style casual options
Housing:
