E-Malt.com News article: USA, NC: Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. to move to Mills River

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. announced nearly a year ago that it was looking for a place to expand east of the Mississippi River, but that turned the search upside down. Instead of Sierra Nevada wooing cities, the opposite occurred, ChicoER.com reported on February, 19.

In the end, Sierra Nevada owner Ken Grossman found a place he especially liked, a place that reminded him of Chico. And that's how the little city of Mills River in western North Carolina won the Sierra Nevada expansion sweepstakes.

The beginning of this story was years ago, when Grossman realized Sierra Nevada would quickly outgrow his Chico location, and it made little sense to ship its product three times zones away if the beer could be replicated in the eastern half of the country.

Sierra Nevada's team started quietly looking for sites. When word slipped out, cities started offering land, tax breaks and other incentives. Chambers of commerce touted their area's benefits. Craft beer fans made their own recruiting pitches. Internet campaigns sprung up in many cities. Sierra Nevada received sometimes hundreds of emails a day.

"It was flattering," Ken Grossman said. "A lot of people did their homework, which shouldn't surprise me with the Web, but people learned a lot about us, what we liked and what we were looking for."

The oddest gift sits on Grossman's desk in Chico. It's a beer bottle made of chocolate, with a Sierra Nevada label on it that says, "Now proudly brewed in Bristol, Va., the birthplace of country music."

After Stan Cooper from the brewery visited dozens of cities, Grossman looked at the final "15 or 20," he said.

One of them was Mills River, just outside of Asheville, which is known as "Beer City USA" because of its growing craft-brewing tradition.

"We had such a warm reception from every community we went to in every state," said Grossman. "Truthfully, we had better financial offers in other communities, but our decision was we didn't want to live there, and if we didn't want to live there, our employees wouldn't want to live there either.

"If we chose a site based on logistics alone, we would have been in a more industrial area next to more freeways and rail sites. What it came down to was, this was an area where we wanted to live and so we overlooked some of those other things."


22 February, 2012