Rebuilding Beloved Asheville Brewery Together After Helene
ASHEVILLE, N.C. (FOX Carolina) - There are many features that attract tourists to the Asheville area. One of those features is the thriving brewery scene. Asheville has more breweries per capita than any other city in the United States.
Like so many other things, Helene threatened to wipe away the hard work of craft brewers. One of the breweries, Zillicoah Beer Company, has spent the last six months shuttered.
Zillicoah was founded in 2017 by brothers Jeremy and Jonathan Chassner, and their best friend Johnathan Parks, affectionately called by his last name.
The trio had a dream of opening up their own brewery since college, and spent around ten years working in different breweries in the mountains before opening Zillicoah.
The brewery sits along the French Broad River, and normally the view of the water is picturesque, but on September 27th, the usually calm water turned into a life-threatening nightmare.
“The sound of trees hitting buildings of you know, shipping containers sloshing through the water, propane tanks gurgling as they’re spinning, and spinning out gas…it was like nothing I’ve ever seen,” said Parks.
The rising water spared the basic infrastructure of their building, but left behind extensive damage that forced them to pause their dream.
“It’s really hard to walk into something that you’ve spent the better part of a decade building, and it’s all gone,” Jeremy said. “We had seven tanks in this room…chairs and tables and all kinds of other equipment that was slamming into these doors and eventually blew them out.”
“Once I got up here, being among that amount of devastation and wreckage and rubble, it’s hard to know where to start,” said Jonathan.
For many small businesses, such a long closure would be unsustainable, but the brothers say they got help from a place you wouldn’t expect: their competition.
“I can’t even tell you how many other breweries have donated a portion of their sales for an entire month to us through this process,” said Jeremy. “They’re taking money out of their own pockets in an already challenging time for our industry and they’re sending it to us.”
Zillicoah faces several more months of rebuilding, but the team behind the beer is already looking forward to serving up their favorite brews once again.
“All we can do is be resilient, and this community is resilient for sure.”
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