822 Locust Street
Hendersonville, NC 28792
E-mail: mail@sabrewery.com
Website: http://www.sabrewery.com
Hours: Wednesday–Friday, opens at 4 P.M.; Saturday–Sunday, opens at 2 P.M.
Owners: Andy and Kelly Cubbin
Brewmaster: Andy Cubbin
Opened: 2003
Regular beer lineup: Belgian Blonde Ale, Copperhead Amber Ale, India Pale Ale, Black Bear Stout
When Andy and Kelly Cubbin first considered getting into brewing, they didn’t even live in North Carolina. The couple was in Chicago, working as photographers and looking for a change. Andy had been homebrewing for years. When they found a brewery for sale in Rosman, North Carolina, they decided to jump at the chance to get out of the city.
The property they bought was Appalachian Brewery. “It was really small,” says Andy, “somewhere between a nano and a micro. It was a five- or six-barrel Frankensteined kind of system, basically like a small homebrewing operation.” But it gave him something to cut his teeth on. The couple renamed the place Appalachian Craft Brewery, to try to distinguish it from Appalachian Brewing Company in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The couple moved the brewery to Fletcher and started making beer.
A view of fermentation at Southern Appalachian Brewery
It was not at that point a full-time undertaking. Unsure that the small brewery was going to support them, they kept pursuing photography. But over the next four years of brewing and perfecting recipes, they resolved to make a run at it. “We decided that we just couldn’t do it halfway,” says Andy. “We said to ourselves, We’re good at it. We can do it. Let’s go for it.”
They immediately began looking for a larger system and a new space for the brewery. They had originally planned to move into Asheville, but during the four years the Cubbins were looking at the city, four new breweries opened. So they decided to make their stand elsewhere and eventually settled on Hendersonville. It was a town they liked and could see themselves living in. It was also close enough to Asheville to still be part of the “Beer City” phenomenon. And they found what they describe as “the perfect space.” They bought a new, better, larger system and started the move.
Since the brewery wasn’t their primary source of income, they closed it to move. “We basically said to people, ‘We’re going to be gone for a while. I hope you put us back on tap,’ ” recalls Andy. They also renamed the brewery yet again, to distance it further from Appalachian Brewing Company. “People recognized us as Appalachian Craft Brewery, so we needed it to be similar. But it was still an issue, so we renamed it Southern Appalachian Brewery, really, to get to the other end of the alphabet.”
What followed were six months of bureaucratic delays. By April 2011, they were back in business, with a whole new set of challenges. “Now, we’re running a bar,” says Andy. “We’ve never done that before, so every day is a new learning experience.”
Andy is a self-taught brewer, and he’s proud of that fact. “I think that there are two types of brewers,” he says, “some who follow the science of brewing, and some that live in the art and the craft of it. If you can make good beer, you can always learn more of the science. But I think the hardest thing about brewing, just like it is with cooking, is being able to taste something and then improve upon it.”
Patrons enjoying themselves at Southern Appalachian Brewery
Band playing at Southern Appalachian Brewery
The Cubbins look forward to having the first full year of the brewery under their belts. “It’ll be great when the focus gets to become a little bit more about the beer,” says Andy, who currently fills the roles of accountant, bookkeeper, delivery man, and head brewer. “We’re looking forward to working with a distributor so that they can handle getting the product out and we can focus on getting it made.”
Due to the growth of the craft beer industry, the state’s farmers have increasingly looked toward hops as a crop, particularly as a potential replacement for tobacco. North Carolina’s climate, however, poses some interesting challenges.
Van Burnette is the sole farmer at Hop ’n Blueberry Farm in Black Mountain, one of the first hop yards in North Carolina to explore the possibility of growing hops commercially. Rather than growing an extensive variety or large acreage of hops, he works closely with the North Carolina Hops Project. The project, a team effort of North Carolina State University’s Departments of Soil Science and Horticultural Science, is designed to determine whether or not hops are a viable crop, what varieties can grow in the state, where the best possible geography is for hop farming, what the best strategies are for growing hops, and what problems (pests, diseases, nutrition) might arise in the state’s climate. The project works with six farms around the state that grow a variety of hops. The farms serve as working labs for field researchers. For information about the North Carolina Hops Project, including some of its early results and the farms it has worked with, visit nchops.soil.ncsu.edu/nchops.
Volunteers pruning hops at Hop ’n Blueberry Farm in Black Mountain
PHOTO COURTESY OF VAN BURNETTE
Burnette grows about a half-acre of American varieties—Cascade, Chinook, and Nugget—which seem to do better in North Carolina than European varieties. His farm is all-organic, which poses its own problems. Hops are susceptible to common garden pests and mildew. Still, those don’t worry him. “It’s not the heat or the humidity that hops really have a problem with down here,” Burnette says. “It’s the light.”
Hops grow best between the 35th and 55th latitudes in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. North Carolina just barely falls within that range. While hops have been successfully grown by hobbyists in all 50 states (which range as low as the 22nd latitude), most commercial hop farming takes place above the 45th latitude. That’s because the higher latitudes get much more sunlight in the middle of summer than the lower latitudes.
Hops grow incredibly quickly. The plants die back to the ground each winter and regrow their entire length—which can be upwards of 25 feet—each summer. In addition to water and nutrients, hops require an immense amount of sunlight to achieve such growth. Burnette has noted that his hops—especially second- or third-year hops—tend to start flowering before they’ve achieved their full length. “The days don’t get long enough for the hops to achieve their full growth before they start flowering, so we end up with smaller harvests,” he says. On the other hand, long Southern summers mean multiple harvests. Most commercial facilities cut hop bines down when the flowers are ready for harvesting. Since the bines are so tall, it is difficult and time consuming to harvest the hop cones from the plants. When they’re cut down, the flowers are easily threshed from the bines. Burnette harvests the first set of cones from the bines, leaves the plants up, and then reaps a smaller late-season harvest. Using those techniques, he is able to get an overall harvest close to a commercial harvest north of the 45th parallel. But he’s still not quite there.
All of Burnette’s hops currently go to Pisgah Brewing Company in Black Mountain for its annual fresh hop ale, appropriately named Burnette’s Brew. “It’s a lot of fun to bring the hops down there and throw them straight into the kettle with the guys at Pisgah, even if it does mean an entire season’s worth of work is gone all at once,” he says.
Burnette hopes to be able to find hops that grow better in North Carolina in the future. In the coming years, he plans to try new varieties that are reported to grow better in Southern latitudes, and he’ll continue to monitor his current hops as they enter their third year of growth.
Interested parties can visit the farm and even volunteer to help out with the hop yard. Burnette notes that it takes “about one person per acre of hops” working full-time to maintain a hop yard. He welcomes help. “I’m not getting any younger,” he jokes.
Among the hop farms in North Carolina are Hop ’n Blueberry Farm (hopnblueberryfarm.blogspot.com) in Black Mountain, Blue Ridge Hops (blueridgehops.com) in Marshall, Winding River Hops in Clyde, Echoview Farm (NCechoviewfarm.com) in Weaverville, and Cone & Bine Hop Farm (cbhopfarm.com) in Conover.
