On Thursday evening, from 5:00-7:00 p.m., Anne Fitten Glenn, a.k.a Asheville beer blogger “Brewgasm,” will be at the humble storefront signing copies of her newly-published book, “Asheville Beer: An Intoxicating History of Mountain Brewing.”
Buy the book ($17.00), get a beer!
If you’re reading this, you’re likely one of the many who already believe that the history of beer and brewing is a worthwhile pursuit. If not, perhaps this book will make you a believer.
I tackled this project for a couple of reasons. First, because interesting stories rarely start with, “I was drinking some water, and then…” Also, I’ve been writing about beer and the beer business for a number of years, and I feel that I’ve been writing Asheville’s beer history as it happens. Some of the facts and stories in this book were first published in my “Brews News” column for Asheville’s newsweekly and elsewhere, though I’ve rewritten them for these pages.
I wanted to delve more deeply into what beer means (and has meant) to Asheville and Western North Carolina (WNC) culturally, economically and socially. (Western North Carolina refers to the seventeen westernmost counties of North Carolina, of which Asheville is the largest city). Thus, this story begins with the founding of Asheville in 1798, when the site of the town was changed at the last minute due to the cunning of a tavern keeper and his home-brewed “mountain dew.” As the Blue Ridge Mountains are famous for the distillation of moonshine (we even have a legal white lightning distillery now), it was not much of a stretch for WNC to become a brewing mecca, although it did take almost two hundred years. …
(PS: If you’re not in the area, but interested in reading the book, you can buy it on Amazon.)
