The Triumph of the Breweries
It’s one of those rarer winter days in Asheville where snow actually collects on the ground. I’m just off Riverside Drive, under the tall and howling Bowen bridge, peering into a dilapidated building with a huge brickwork chimney. Technically, I’m trespassing, but the gate was swinging open in the wind, so…
The building was part of a prewar cotton mill, though now it looks like it’s been shelled. The hole I’m gazing into was created by a corner that collapsed into a mound of bricks. Relics like these are my favorite buildings in Asheville, and there are a lot of them. From outside (I’m not going in there) I can see brave graffiti, stressed girders, tangled vines and a monstrous furnace at the base of the chimney. It broods there in the dark and cold. Like Ted Hughes’ “Tractor,” it hurts to look at. Yet it’s hard to turn away from this frigid hulk that wears the costs of time so honestly on its face.
Asheville is a city growing on top of another mostly dead city. Nowhere is this reality more evident than on Riverside, the artery of the “River Arts District,” just southwest of downtown. The drive runs along the Eastern edge of the ancient French Broad (the third oldest river in the world), separated by train tracks that come from a rail yard further south. It wouldn’t be wrong to say this place is in the final stages of gentrification, shifting from a largely working-class mountain city (on my way here I drove past Rogers & Sons Welding and the sprawling IPEX plastic plant that’s been here since the 1960s) into a serene destination for overeducated millennials with pedigree dogs (e.g. me), outdoorsy retirees and tourists hoping to sample craft beer and local history.
As I walk, I can see an abandoned three-story building with a faded BUDWEISER stencil beside a slightly taller historic building undergoing major renovation. A little further and I can see another cluster of buildings, their bricks taupe and creamy orange, that approximate what the earlier ones will soon become: an expensive (though unpretentious) restaurant called The Bull & Beggar and a wine bar named Bottle Riot. Many buildings around here house breweries of various sizes. Some twenty-three others are rented to artists at the encouragement of the city. I pass several of these studios on my walk, including one called Cotton Mill Studios and another that still has its defunct brand fading on its bricks: WHEELER BROKERAGE. This curious strip of time is frequently marked by flat concrete rectangles, and I never realized until now that these must be the foundations of the buildings that didn’t make it.
I decide I need a beer.
Virtually every square-inch of frontage on Riverside Drive is covered by commissioned graffiti, which gets especially dense as I approach the The Wedge at Foundy, a brewery amongst a hip collection of repurposed buildings in an area called “Foundation,” or “Foundy.” Most of it is run-of-the-mill street art: bloated calligraphy and colorful symbols that are graced by impressive murals—a detailed lion’s head, a trippy “goat snake” and a berobed Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
I’m close enough to The Wedge to smell malt. I see a skinny photographer framing up a mural on the side of a nearby metal shed. It’s not unusual to see artists working in Asheville—writers, sculptors, musicians, painters, poets, filmmakers—but this one is oddly skittish. He checks left, then right. Snaps a shot. The mural consists of a vague cartoonish face with huge black eyes, furry brows and possibly a mustache. Beside it, in red print, reads: COPS DRINK SHIT. The photographer backs away slowly, as if he had stolen something. He is sauntering away from the brewery when he suddenly turns around and looks right at me. Maybe he knew I was watching.
I head into The Wedge and find a tall and smiling woman behind the bar. I order a beer called an “Iron Rail.” When she returns with a pint I ask her if she knows what this building used to be. The brewery has an icicled metal roof that doesn’t quite reach the height of its older gables. She’s been asked this before, but she doesn’t know, only offering that before the brewery bought it the site used to be a “squatter’s paradise.”
The building was a leather tannery, apparently the “largest in the country,” built by Hans Rees and Sons in 1898. The company made leather belts for industrial engine transmissions. Now, the building is filled with a typical soft-handed Asheville cohort: attractive young people and young-looking old people, dressed in bougie hiking brands and serious winter boots. They cradle and grip glasses filled with enchanting hues of brown, gold and yellow—each vessel appropriate to the style of beer: standard pints for the easy-drinking stuff and snifters for the barley wines and farmhouse ales.
I sip my beer and wince—a ferric and syrupy bitterness overwhelms me. I check the menu again and realize I’m drinking an India Pale Ale (if I never have another IPA, reader, that’s fine by me.) I think I’ve mistaken “Iron Rail” for the “Derailed Brown Ale,” or the “3rd Rail Barley Wine,” but I’m not sure.
Every business and public place in the River Arts District fashions an aesthetic from the remnants and memories of what this place used to be (the foregoing beers are named so because The Wedge abuts the industrial rail yard.) The scheme is meant to cutely honor regional history but really just prettifies it. Walking back along the edge of the pallid French Broad, I see countless examples: the new RADView apartments built to resemble boxcars; a perplexing sculpture of reclaimed steel that looks like a bus stop; a huge metal fish with hubcaps for eyes, its gut filled with trash from the river; even the River Arts District landmark is a giant gear. Lofted on the river bank, overseeing it all, is a huge rusted silo whose spray-paint mural changes every now and then: when I first moved here it read STAY WEIRD, the last time I saw it, it read STAY HOME.
Unsatisfied by my first beer, I seek another. I find my car (cracked windshield, awesome) and drive North on Riverside to Zillacoah, a small, relatively young brewery just past the city line of Asheville. The simple marble-top bar is inside, past a huge awning and behind three truck bay doors. The brewery floor itself—steel tuns, kettles, tanks and racks of aging barrels—is separated from the bar by a flimsy wall of merch.
Zillacoah is a great brewery, mostly because its brewers haven’t succumbed to the whacky innovation that characterizes a lot of Asheville beer making (would you like a doppelbock flavored with responsibly-sourced kumquat and aged with pieces of local buck horn? — because I don’t) and focus instead on making beers that you find yourself craving. I order a glass of their helles, a favorite, a golden open-fermented lager that smells of fresh bread and lemon rind. Working the taps is a handsome guy in a tan Dickies jacket and a full beard. I ask him what the building used to be. He clicks his lips. “I think it was some kind of diesel operation.” I enjoy my beer and walk out back to look at the French Broad—lapping gently, the riverine air seeming warmer than before. I ponder what a “diesel operation” might be. When I get home, I snoop around online for more information about the building—but no dice. I did learn that “Zillacoah” is one of the names the enduring Cherokee tribes gave the river, something that’s been here far longer than anything else I’ve seen today.
