Asheville - a Declining Beer City?

All i read is a bunch breweries were closing 2nd and 3rd locations so i don't think this means much as most of the still remain in South Slope .

If the same brewries having two or three locations all over makes you a "beer city" you're eventually gonna be in trouble .
Hope they all survive , but unless you're Treehouse, at least for the time being, 2 or 3 locations means you're fucked these days.

 

I can’t speak to Asheville specifically as I don’t think I’ve ever been there and know next to nothing about it. But I will say that I don’t subscribe to the “grow or die” business concept. I think smart businesses, breweries included, can establish themselves and find a sustainable market without having to constantly expand. Serve your existing customer base and if demand justifies it, grow conservatively outward as appropriate. But I think the choice between constantly growing as quickly as possible or absolute collapse is a false one. History is strewn with failed companies that expanded at an unsustainable pace and were thus not prepared to weather even a modest downturn.

 

I’ve been to Asheville 3 times over the last 10 years and always had great food and brewery visits. I don’t know if anything on that list I recall however, but a lot of those places are food trucks, restaraunts and lounges with a couple scattered breweries. Probably need a local Western NC resident to weigh in that knows more. So for now, I’m going with No it’s not a dying beer city. Beer tourism overall I think has declined some just due to oversaturation and maturity across the US as a whole

 

Asheville is reliant on tourism and I suspect many of those breweries survive by out of towners visiting. Is this just cost restructuring from losses during the Great Pandemic or are tourists just not feeling the need to visit breweries anymore? I can’t imagine tourism was down in Asheville with how travel boomed in 2023.

 

We have a similar situation in Denver: https://www.westword.com/restaurant...he-local-craft-beer-scene-in-trouble-17687736

That's from August and there have been another half dozen more since then. It sounds a bit doom and gloom until you look at how many places are left and check out the number of openings, too. It's waaaay more than usual, but it's not the death knell that it might appear to be.

 

This comes down to the business plan and the path to profitability. Unless you have capital to drop into a high risk business you have a loan and a boatload of expenses, and trying to maximize a smaller pie is a much more difficult path to survive vs expanding the pie. It can be done, and it’s good to defend your yard first, but more often than not it’s just a plain math equation, not a concept you can just choose to evade. The exceptions don’t make the rule here.

 

OK. I don’t claim to be a business genius. I just know that a lot of companies have gone under or had to cut way back because they allowed themselves to get overextended in the first place. If I owned a business I’d probably run it the way I run my own finances, which is to try to make sure I’m spending less than I’m earning. It’s worked out for 36+ years of adulthood so far. But I’ve never owned or run a business so I’m sure there’s a ton I don’t know anything about.

 

Wouldn't be surprised if brewery failure rates started paralleling those of restaurants or bars. Do we need more restaurants or bars? No, but the circle of life of closings and openings goes on.

 

Burial is still there (and they ship!), but we used to drive 4 hours after work to camp out overnight for Wicked Weed releases. Now, Asheville isn't on my radar.

 

You can't really equate it to your personal finances because you didn't have to pay your own way the first decade or two of your life, businesses have to pay costs before they have a product in most cases. Unless it's spun out by another successful business, you won't be earning anywhere near your day to day cost right out the gate, and that's not even to speak of the massive capital investment you'll have had to make in equipment and a building long before you do your sell your first pint. There's exceptions (contract brewing, getting crazy deals on equipment/building, having a crazy good rep as a brewer elsewhere) but you'll be lucky to not be at least fix figures deep before you sell your first pint. In some lines of business this isn't the case, I ran a software shop and given we all used our personal computers and no office, we weren't losing money while I ramped up sales.

If you follow the conventional route, you have to get to the point where you can service your debt from startup costs, and pay the daily overhead. Increasing sales usually increases that overhead, so unless you increase a lot, you'll not gain $1 against that run rate for every additional dollar in sales. If you just stick to your backyard, you better be in a place that isn't very competitive, and/or you need to be exceptionally good. Treehouse's youtube channel has many videos where he speaks about how they were fighting for their lives one ten gallon batch at a time when they were bootstrapping. While all this is all going on, the founders are usually paying themselves $0 and have to live off savings, debt, and ramen packets.

 

I get all this, I guess I just don’t see how expanding as fast as possible (and thus accruing more and more debt to fuel that expansion) is ever going to get you ahead. Every business I’ve ever worked for seems to have employed a more conservative strategy, growing only as fast as seemed to make sense—but then they have all been privately or employee owned businesses (the company I currently work for has been around for more than a century). If you have shareholders/investors it’s probably a different ball game.

Anyway, I never meant to take this thread quite so far off topic, I just wanted to state that the “if you aren’t growing you’re dying” concept might be flawed. I appreciate your perspective.

 

No doubt there’s a lot of ill-advised hyper-expansion, Modern Times in my backyard comes to mind. The pace needed will always come down to the financials, even a brewery that has taken out a modest loan has a fixed runway where they have to grow or go out of business.

 

There will always be some "adjustments" in any business, including breweries and restaurants.

Closures:

• Catawba - Tasting room closed - Brewery purchased by Oyster City, basically moved everything to New Orleans after shuttering the original brewery location in Morganton. The Biltmore location was small and never that busy. They also completely shuttered brewery in Charlotte, and tasting room in Wilmington, NC
  
• Archetype - 2 tasting rooms closed - over extended?
• UpCountry - closed Asheville brewery, focused on brewery in Brevard. Another Brewery has opened in their location.
• Eurisko Brewing - closed but a Denver, CO based brewery is moving into their venue later this year.
• Bharmari Brewery - closed, is opening under new name, investors, and management, has opened a tasting room in Swannanoa (about 8 miles from Asheville) while remodeling in progress.

New Openings:

• Diatribe Brewing - opened in former UpCountry location. Haven't been yet, but have heard their brews are very true to the style.
  
• Salt Face Mule - Opened in 2023 just north of Asheville, with food service, miniature golf.
  
• Terra Nova Brewing - opening in 2024 in former Braharmi location. Tasting room with adjunct restaurant open in Swannanoa, just east of Asheville
• Trev Brewing - Denver based brewery opening in former Eurisko location, opening in 2024
• VooDoo Brewing - Franchise tasting room with food opened in late 2023 in south Asheville.
• River Arts District Brewing - opened in the RAD district of Asheville in 2023

I don't see a decline, and there are new breweries opening in neighboring counties in addition to these. Not everyone that makes good beer is a savvy businessman, and conversely, not every savvy businessman makes good beer.

 

Totally agree with you.

True that! And then there is the case of Blue Ghost who pour their hearts and souls into the biz to the point where family life is not where it should be so they have to sell. Feel for that family!

 

Like many "beer cities," Asheville has a lot of breweries. Some great, some good, most can safely be visited maybe once a year just to check in. I'm a quick drive away but go less and less because Charlotte quality is so high, so there's no pressing need. Zillacoah and Eurisko (RIP) are/were my only special trips.

 

Zillicoah is very underrated!

 

Like you were saying... I can only speak to Denver as well but I feel like the one's that closed here were just replaced by either 2nd or 3rd locations for local breweries or new out of state additions.

Dewey took over Mockery's old space
Left Hand (3rd location - RiNo)
TRVE (2nd location - RiNo)
BrewDog (from out of state)
Cerebral (2nd location - Aurora)
Dry Dock simply consolidated
Great Divide expanded to Lone Tree
Denver Beer Co. opened two more locations (Lowry, Littleton)
Prost (2nd location - Northfield)
New Image (2nd location - Wheat Ridge)
Westbound & Down (2nd & 3rd locations, Lafayette & Dairy Block)

The other smaller one's that closed simply didn't have great beer, bad location, or lacked a broad reach.

Only a few surprised
Epic had better beer competition in the draft accounts post COVID
10 Barrel - likely due to being owned by ABInBev in a craft beer market

 

Does anyone know if Zillicoah allows outside food?