Has Asheville reached brewery saturation point?

They can head to Knoxville. We have room.

 

Yes we are already getting alot of the canned stuff at the casual pints. Love the 10W-40 stuff. Looking forward to them coming. Bring the rest of the gang lol!

 

Possibly. But not for good beer. There is a lot of mediocre to bad breweries that take up space.
I can count on one hand the breweries that I cant miss while visiting. There are some that I just don't want to go back to or have bad beer.

 

This. Asheville has a ton of breweries that I'm fine drinking at, can find something to drink there if friends want to go, but I don't feel the need to go otherwise.

 

I don't think it's hit saturation yet but I think you'll see more changes like Habitat closing and Archetype opening a location in its space. And LAB closing and Oskar Blues/Cigar City opening up. I figure the big draws like Burial, Wicked Weed, and New Belgium will keep Asheville a beer tourist destination. And some of the average breweries with convenient locations will get enough foot traffic to stay afloat.

 

Asheville is an interesting example because the actual population of the city is relatively small, but it attracts large numbers of tourists and out-of-towners. Asheville has about 90k residents, making it only the 12th largest city in the state. Although one might make an argument that the residents of Asheville could (on average) more inclined to support their local breweries than, say, the folks in Fayetteville, it is no secret that the beer economy in Asheville is hugely supported by tourism.

This makes things tricky because the tourism market can be more fickle than a stable local user base. In the big tourism months, breweries could see big booms in business, but then likewise see the slow months hit harder. With a smaller base population, I feel like there is less insulation to deal with changes in the tourism scene than in cities like Raleigh or Charlotte.

One of the good things about beer tourism industry, though, is that building more breweries can bring in more visitors. The big Sierra Nevada and New Belgium breweries have surely done more good than harm by raising the profile of Asheville as a beer destination spot and bringing in more visitors. Burial exploding into one of the hottest breweries in the Southeast has probably been a net positive for their neighbors like Twin Leaf and Catawba. Someone might come in from out of town with the purpose of going to Burial, but they'll also probably stop at another brewery or two while in town.

It is a double-edged sword. More breweries can give you a smaller cut of the pie. The scare is that too many breweries will open too soon and it will spread the wealth too thin and cause a collapse. If tastes change or Asheville falls out of vogue as a destination city, I could see several breweries quickly going under. On the other hand, more breweries raises the profile of Asheville as a beer tourism city. The cut of the pie might be smaller, but it could grow into a bigger pie. If you build it, will they come?

I'm curious to see a study that measures the numbers and percentages of Asheville taproom sales from locals vs out-of-towners/tourists. I wonder how different breweries in Asheville would stack up against each other. I wonder how the average Asheville taproom would look against other notable beer cities. It wasn't really until the big craft beer boom of the late 00s-now that Asheville started getting so many breweries--I wonder what relationships we could see over the years between brewery creation and tourist population. Did breweries pop up as a result of Asheville tourism or do breweries do more to drive tourism?

Statistically speaking, I don't think that breweries fail often enough. Over the last 15 years, it feels like a large percentage of breweries that have opened are still open. About half of all small businesses fail within five years and the numbers are much worse for restaurants. If brewery creation continues at the same pace, it is inevitable that the percentage that shut down will normalize to something closer to the overall new business average.

As the beer drinking population becomes more discerning and the average quality of beer rises, it won't be enough to simply be a brewery--you're gonna have to make great beer to stay in business (or have a really great location). I think there's still room for more breweries in Asheville, but only if you can hang. DSSOLVR will do fine. Random small brewery #43? I dunno. A rising tide can raise boats, but it can also sink them if your boat makes mediocre beer.

 

Frankly when I go to Asheville now, I've noticed there's a handful I feel like I "must" hit (Burial, Hi Wire, Eurisko, a few others) a handful I never even consider (Wicked Weed, Catawba, a few others) and then that middle ground of "Let's see where the day takes us." By no means do I ever feel overwhelmed or that there's so much good stuff I can't possibly hit them all.

 

OMG there are 11 other cities in North Carolina more populace than Asheville?! :mindblown:

 

Keep in mind that two of our major population centers are, in truth, multiple cities and Charlotte has a couple fairly large suburbs.

Charlotte, the Triangle, and the Triad are 8 of the spots ahead of Asheville (Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro, Durham, Winston, Cary, High Point, and Concord). Chapel Hill is just behind Asheville at 15. Outside of those areas, Fayetteville, Wilmington, and Greenville are larger than Asheville (and Greenville not by much at all).