New Belgium breaks ground on East Coast brewery

ASHEVILLE, N.C. – With a celebratory toast of beer, the East Coast welcomed another major player in its craft beer community Thursday, when New Belgium Brewing Co. broke ground on its $175 million brewery in Asheville, N.C.

A large crowd gathered at the old Asheville Stockyards, where the 133,000-square foot brewery will be built. A building shell should be up by the end of 2014, and the brewery will be operational in late 2015, said General Manager Jay Richardson.

About two more weeks remain of bringing earth to the site to raise it from the floodplain of the French Broad River, Richardson said. The brewery will employ about 140 workers, and eventually produce a half million barrels of beer for sale in the eastern U.S. each year, he said.

New Belgium, based in Fort Collins, joins a vibrant craft brewing scene in Asheville, which has become the East Coast’s craft beer capitol. Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. has already opened its brewery near Asheville Regional Airport, and Oskar Blues built its expansion in Brevard. Buncombe County is also home to 16 smaller- to medium-sized breweries with a dozen more in surrounding counties.

‘Home run’

On the list of companies that have come to the Asheville area over the years, “There’s base hits and there’s home runs, and this is one of those home runs,” said Ben Teague, executive director of the Economic Development Commission for Asheville Buncombe County.

Construction alone could support about 1,252 jobs over seven years and pump $41 million into the community, the EDC has calculated.

The roughly 140 jobs to be created at the brewery are expected to pay an average of $50,000 — nearly $13,000 more than the average worker in Buncombe County makes per year.

The EDC has estimated that New Belgium will create another 260 jobs at vendors, suppliers or companies where New Belgium workers will spend some of their paychecks. That figure is based on a slightly higher estimate of the number of people who will work at the brewery.

It is “defintely in (New Belgium’s) culture to do business with other players in the community,” Teague said.

And, he said, there are intangible benefits from landing a company with respected leadership.

New Belgium officials “manage by keeping their eyes on the horizon instead of the moment right now,“ Teague said.

The Asheville brewery is coming about seven months later than originally planned, New Belgium CEO Kim Jordan said. The company used that time to increase capacity in Fort Collins. “All that we can do in the way of planning really helps the process go more smoothly,” she said. “We had that extra time fine-tune things” at the Asheville site.

Increasing property values

New Belgium’s arrival is “a big deal in a lot of ways,” said Tim Schaller, owner of the Wedge Brewery, located not far from the New Belgium site. “The value of property down there has skyrocketed and a large part of it is that project.”

Schaller expects New Belgium to pull many more visitors to the River Arts District, and to his brewery. “It’s a positive thing,” he said. “It will increase the tax base and increase the number of jobs (in brewing).”

His concern is making the the River Arts District affordable for artists who have filled the area with working studios. Without the artists “we won’t have a River Arts District,” he said.

New Belgium has already made its presence known in Asheville by supporting such entertainment events as RiverLink’s RiverMusic free concert series.

Sierra Nevada has also supported the series and will use its Mills River site for music and festival events. The competition for festival sponsorships has ramped up, said Oscar Wong, president and founder of Highland Brewing, the city’s first craft brewery.

“I feel pretty confident that the region will benefit” from New Belgium, Wong said. “I was a little concerned in the beginning, but looking at the big picture, and being philosophical, I have come to terms.”

On two wheels

Activist Mike Sule of Asheville on Bikes has argued for years that making the city friendlier to bicyclists benefits the entire community.

Now, he can just point to the New Belgium site on Craven Street.

“We have the third-largest craft brewery moving into our city, citing Asheville’s bike culture as a reason they have come. ... They are able to make the economic case for why a robust, active transportation system is a healthy thing, not just for citizens but for the business community,” he said.

Plans are already in the works to make Craven Street easier to use for bicyclists and pedestrians and to add a bike lane to Haywood Road just west of the brewery site.

The company gives employees bicycles and New Belgium workers are bound to make plenty of use of planned bike lanes and greenways. Sule says that will have a multiplier effect, making bicycling more attractive among the general population and a higher priority for funding for local and state governments.

“The more people that we get on bicycles ... it becomes less of a fringe thing,” he said. “It becomes normalized.”