Its Coming!

It was almost a year ago when I made my first post about the upcoming brewery at the Wedge Gallery. Well, our wait is finally over. Almost. According to Tony Kiss, the Wedge has begun brewing beer and they hope to be open sometime by the end of the month. That could mean the end of this month, the end of June, or the end of September, but I'm hoping it is sooner rather than later. I myself have driven by more than once to take a look at the project, and until now the only thing I knew for sure was that they were working hard and they had signs on the bathrooms. The other thing I know for sure is that the beer is going to be great. Most of you are probably already aware that the brewer is Carl Melissas, former brewer at Jack and a lover of Belgian style ales. His first beer though is going to be an IPA, with a pilsner, bock, and the oh-so-good Gollum soon to follow. I hope to be able to talk to Carl soon to see if he has anything else up his sleeve.

I'm going to have a little bit of fun with statistics, and make the claim that Buncombe County has the most breweries per capita in the entire United States. Portland, Oregon has been making this claim, but they only have 30 breweries to serve the over 2 million people in the Portland Metro Area, for an average of 1 brewery per 66,000 people. Asheville/Buncombe has 1 brewery to every 37,500 people. Of course Black Mountain can claim one brewery to every 7650 people. Okay, so throw out the statistics, but I still like to think of us as the best small city for beer in America.

(picture taken from River Arts District webpage)