Once again, Asheville has managed to climb to the top of the charts for beer production. It just seems that no one else can seem to catch up as far as the Beer City title is concerned. This is the third year that Asheville has won this coveted award, taking it with over seven thousand votes and blowing away the competition. Cities like Portland and St. Louis were in the running, but no one could come close to Asheville. It really is the very best place to go if you want to find great beer and a town with under one hundred thousand people that has gathered around the beer industry.
Now, it is important to note that winning the Beer City award is not something that a city can do just by producing a lot of product. If that were the case, St. Louis, with the main Budweiser plant, would be much farther up the list. This is about producing the best product, the beer that people actually want to buy. It is about small-town brewers who want nothing but to craft top-notch styles of beer that perhaps only sell to a few thousand people. They are not looking to make it big; they are looking at their brewing efforts as a form of art.
This is an idea that Asheville has embraced on all fronts, not just that of beer. The downtown district is full of little shops that are locally owned. The money that goes into the city’s economy tends to stay in the city’s economy. Everything is done in Asheville with a distinct sense of identity and pride. The people who live and work in the city want to show the world who they are, but they want to be true to who they are without absorbing everything from the rest of the world. This is true in their restaurants, their produce markets, and their breweries.
In Asheville, there are many different kinds of beer to be had. Those who are used to drinking the same generic lagers day after day will be shocked to find how many choices they have. The beauty of this is that no two Asheville beers are quite the same. A brown ale made by one company is going to be different than a brown ale made by another. Everyone wants to put their own spin on the beer that they are making. They know that this creates small niches for different beers, but they love this individualism.
What this has led to in Asheville is a town that rallies around itself. The people of Asheville are proud of what they have accomplished. They are proud of what they have and what they have done. They all seem to support this small-town mentality, this close-knit tightness that is not often found in a town with eighty thousand people. The beer is just an offshoot of this mentality, one more way that they can come together and create, and what a wonderful offshoot it is.
