12 Old Charlotte Highway, Suite H
Asheville, NC 28803
828-299-7223
E-mail: info@highlandbrewing.com
Website: http://www.highlandbrewing.com
Hours: Thursday–Saturday, 4 P.M.–8 P.M.
Tours: Monday–Saturday, 4 P.M.
Owners: Oscar Wong and John Lyda
Brewmaster: John Lyda
Opened: 1994
Regular beer lineup: Gaelic Ale, Oatmeal Porter, St. Terese’s Pale Ale, Kashmir IPA, Black Mocha Stout
Seasonals: Seven Sisters Abbey-Style Dubbel, Tasgall Ale, Cold Mountain Winter Ale, Clawhammer Oktoberfest, Cattail Peak Wheat
Awards: 2006 World Beer Cup Silver Medal for “Black Mocha Stout” 2008 GABF Silver Medal for “Black Mocha Stout”
Highland Brewing Company is one of the oldest operating packaging breweries in North Carolina. The idea was originally that of John McDermott, who discovered beer as a homebrewer in the 1980s and was in California when some of that state’s first breweries and brewpubs opened. Like a few homebrewers before him and many after him, McDermott started down the road to opening his own brewing business.
The brewhouse and fermentation operation at the original location of Highland Brewing Company PHOTO COURTESY OF HIGHLAND BREWING COMPANY
First came a stint at Catamount Brewing Company in White River Junction, Vermont, where he conceived the idea of opening a brewpub in Boston. When that plan didn’t come together, he moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to work for the Mill Bakery, Eatery, and Brewery, a chain of health-conscious brewpubs that is (unsurprisingly) no longer in existence. He eventually transferred to a branch of the brewery in Charlotte and also worked part-time at nearby Dilworth Brewing Company.
While in Charlotte, McDermott came across an ad in an agricultural magazine for some used dairy equipment. He decided to go for it, figuring he could use his experience and his background in mechanical engineering to retool the equipment into whatever he might need for a brewery.
Meanwhile, Oscar Wong was looking for a good business investment. Wong was living in Charlotte after a successful career as a completely different type of entrepreneur, having built his own engineering firm. When his company was bought out and the Charlotte branch closed, Wong was “coasting, cooking, and volunteering.” A friend introduced him to McDermott, who needed backing to start his brewery. “I always appreciated beer,” says Wong, “and I needed a hobby. My wife was glad to see me out of the house.”
At the time, they felt the Charlotte market couldn’t support another brewery, so they decided on Asheville as a startup location. They found a space beneath Universal Pizza and Barley’s Taproom and set up shop, albeit slowly. The cramped location needed a fair amount of refurbishment, and city inspectors who had never dealt with a brewery before gave them a bit of a hard time, but they eventually became Asheville’s first legal brewery since Prohibition.
John Lyda, now Highland’s director of brewing, was their first employee. He looks back at the early days with a shake of his head. “It was a big challenge, especially with sanitation. We were in the basement of a bar, so there was dust being kicked up all over the place.”
Wong adds a little spice to the story. “Cleaning out the tanks by hand meant a brewer going shirtless. Somehow, visitors who saw the naked top half of a brewer would, for some reason, assume that he was fully naked. We weren’t too quick to deny that.”
In addition, they were using equipment that was not made for brewing beer. Their mash tun was a 35-barrel Sealtest ice-cream pasteurizer with steam pipes running through the middle of it for heat. Their fermenters were 2,000-gallon dairy tanks.
Wong has many stories of the initial challenges. He’s particularly proud of Highland’s Oatmeal Porter because “it was born under duress.” After three 2,000-gallon batches of lager ended up in the sewer and a fourth was not quite up to par, they designed a dark beer to incorporate some of the lager. “We still had to dump most of it, because we didn’t have sufficient sales,” says Wong, “but it is now Highland’s second-highest-selling beer,” behind its Gaelic Ale. Oatmeal Porter no longer contains any lager.
A couple of years after opening, Highland started packaging 22-ounce bottles. “We didn’t have equipment that gave us confidence in the filling process,” Wong remembers, “so we pasteurized them in an open milk tank.” They would place about 1,300 bottles in layers in the tank and pump water through it, starting cold, slowly raising the temperature to about 160 degrees Fahrenheit, and then slowly reducing the temperature again. “We would lose up to 40 bottles each time, and a good day was 12 or less.”
The bar in the taproom at Highland Brewing Company
Lyda joined the brewery in the way many did in the 1990s. He was a homebrewer who wanted to do more. His mother had bought him a homebrewing kit at a church rummage sale when he was in college because she saw him spending so much money on Belgian beers, his favorites. He fell in love with homebrewing and, with a buddy who was a restaurateur, laid plans to open a cinema draft house. But Lyda wanted to go to brewing school and do things right. The Siebel Institute required three years of professional experience at that point, “so I figured I’d just keep beating on Highland’s door,” he recalls. After 10 years of homebrewing, his first brewery job proved to be his only brewery job.
While Lyda was away taking his brewery course, trouble was brewing back at Highland, which was having problems with consistency in its beer. Lyda talks about what happened with Highland’s original brewer: “McDermott was always more of an artist. He was a great brewer, but he had a habit of changing recipes, and not in a subtle way, and it wasn’t very good for consistency. It was no fault of his. He just wasn’t happy as an artist.” When Lyda returned from his brewing course, Wong approached him with an idea. Together, they bought McDermott out of the brewery. “The focus from the beginning for us was quality and consistency,” says Lyda.
Highland continued to grow at a breakneck pace. It quickly reached its full capacity at its basement facility—about 6,500 barrels per year—and still had a hard time satisfying demand. It became obvious that the brewery needed a larger plant. But Lyda and Wong didn’t want to move and immediately have the same capacity problems, so they shot big.
They began to contract their bottle accounts out of Frederick Brewing Company in Maryland while still satisfying keg accounts from their production facility in the basement of Barley’s. They used the contracted bottles to grow their distribution to a point they could easily match with a larger system. Meanwhile, they built their new brewery in a building that once housed Blue Ridge Motion Pictures.
Their brewery now resembles a large manufacturing facility, in sharp contrast to the old cobbled-together basement operation. The 50-barrel brewhouse has row upon row of 100-barrel tanks that tower throughout the giant warehouse. The constant rattle of the bottling line serves as a soundtrack as Highland’s crew fills case after case of beer, ready for distribution.
The brewhouse at Highland Brewing Company
Highland’s tasting room is bigger than many of the state’s smaller breweries. It has a long bar, hundreds of seats, and a stage for presentations and performances, all hemmed in by converted railroad cars that act as offices for some of the brewery’s staff. What’s more, the brewery still has plenty of room to grow in the tens of thousands of square feet it hasn’t put to use yet.
Although the brewery’s future is bright, Lyda says Highland is not necessarily after a national brand. “We want to stay regional,” he says. But since craft beer is still only a small percentage of the market, regional operations like Highland have the opportunity for an enormous amount of growth.