Dispatch from the grand-opening of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.'s giant new East Coast brewery

I’m on a rented bus in North Carolina filled with excited beer fans, looking out the window at the densely forested Blue Ridge Mountains of the Appalachian Mountain range rising in the distance. The destination: Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.’s new East Coast headquarters. The trip brings together this country’s iconic mountain ranges, an apt symbol for what awaited us at the end of the road: the final stop of Sierra Nevada’s two-weeklong, seven-city Beer Camp Across America tour. It’s a celebration of both the rosy state of craft beer in America today and the opening of the Chico-born brew pioneer’s new brewing facility in tiny Mills River, N.C., on the outskirts of the college town of Asheville.

The day’s 80-brewery festival serves as the official grand-opening celebration of the company’s now fully operational second brewery. It’s also the culmination of Sierra Nevada’s 35-year journey to become the largest independently owned craft brewery in the country.

“It’s been insane,” says Brian Grossman, son of Sierra Nevada owner Ken Grossman and the co-manager (with Stan Cooper, former logistics manager in Chico) of the new North Carolina brewery.

Grossman reflects on the recent two-week adventure while standing in front of the new facility’s copper-accented brick facade. More than 4,000 beer lovers mill about the grounds on a warm summer afternoon, enjoying some fine brews and gawking at Sierra Nevada’s new monument to the craft.

Even though there is still work to be done, the brewery is already producing many of Sierra Nevada’s products—Pale Ale, Torpedo, Flipside—with shipments starting back in January. The new brewery is now at its maximum-production pace, approximately 350,000 barrels a year, Grossman says. In fact, he points to the row of big silver caps, visible on the roof of the fermentation building where additional tanks can—and likely will soon—be dropped into existing infrastructure to expand capacity by about 400,000 barrels. Just north of Sacramento in Chico, Sierra Nevada’s flagship brewery can make up to 1 million barrels a year.

Sierra chose to build the new facility to meet demand and reduce the carbon footprint created by shipping beer across the country.

“Chico was originally designed to be 60,000 barrels of capacity. It’s now running at a million,” he explains. The Chico plant was pushed to the limit and no longer had room to grow. Plus, they didn’t have the foresight of how quickly that facility would need to grow in order to meet the demand for craft beer.

Beer-friendly western North Carolina is arguably a center of the rapidly growing craft-beer industry. In 2013, about 15 miles south of Sierra Nevada’s new location, Oskar Blues Brewery expanded east from Colorado and opened its own second facility in Brevard. And by the end of 2015, craft-beer giant New Belgium Brewing Company, also based out of Colorado, will open a second brewery in Asheville, just 10 miles north of Sierra Nevada.

“It’s a compliment to the brewers who already existed here for these incredible craft brands to want to set up shop here in North Carolina,” says Margo Knight Metzger, executive director of the North Carolina Craft Brewers Guild. “And also I think they’re a complement with an ’E,’ you know? They are complementing what’s already happening here. They are helping to drive tourism, not only to their own breweries, but to the breweries that have already existed here.”

She says this expansion would lead to North Carolina becoming “an East Coast beer mecca.”

As Metzger suggests, North Carolina, and the Asheville area in particular, was already a great beer destination before the newcomers arrived, with more than 100 craft brewers in the state and Asheville having the distinction of being voted Beer City USA several times in craft-brewing pioneer Charlie Papazian’s annual poll. And like the other expansion breweries, in addition to the draw of natural beauty and clean water, Sierra Nevada chose the region with the intention of joining its burgeoning beer culture.

“Sierra Nevada has been making a real effort to be a good neighbor, to be a good citizen to the region, to be a good citizen to the state, to be active with the guild,” Metzger says.

In addition to day-to-day brewing operations, there are many building projects to be finished on the 184-acre Mills River site, where construction thus far has taken up approximately 30 acres, according to Sierra Nevada spokesman Ryan Arnold. In September, to coincide with the opening of the new gift shop, public tours and tastings will begin, and the unfinished taproom and restaurant is scheduled to open in late 2014 or early 2015. Hiking and biking trails on the grounds should also be completed by spring of 2015.