I don’t drink beer. Can’t stand the stuff and think it all tastes the same anyway. I used to like beer. But I liked it too much. Now I don’t drink any alcohol (although I can be tempted by whiskey. got a small bottle of Knob Creek here on my desk, still unopened, and in the fridge is some Buffalo Trace). But Lorna loves the stuff. She is a beer high brow. And Asheville is a good place to practice that art.
Asheville has won the Beer City USA award for several years in a row now (take that Portland!). There are a lot of microbreweries here (9?) and recently New Belgium and Sierra Nevada have decided to build breweries here. The Sierra Nevada move hasn’t been in the news much as I think it is a recent development. But, New Belgium has become a big thing.
For one, New Belgium believes in sustainability. The best demonstration of that is what they are going to do with the site here. They bought the old livestock market (the kind with live animals, not guys in suits) and will be reusing as much of the materials from the demolition as they can. And they’re making Asheville do what they should have been doing: fix the roads and improve the area. As for their own part, in addition to a few jobs, the site will have bike trails, hiking trails, a park, etcetera that will be integrated with the Asheville’s part.
They just commissioned some artwork. But the weird thing is, the artwork was painted on buildings that will be torn down. The idea is that then later, when stuff is rebuilt, planks with portions of the work will reappear scattered about the site wherever they are used. Weird but, then again, this IS Asheville.