News

BIG FOREST: The courtship of Sierra Nevada

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. in Mills River. [PHOTO BY PAULA ROBERTS]

By Bill Moss, Published: April 7, 2014

PART  8: Clean abundant water

In the fall of 2011, Cooper and the Grossmans had narrowed the list to Christiansburg, Va., Alcoa, Tenn., just outside Knoxville, and Mills River.
It turned out the decision was about more than money.
On site selection trips, Cooper sent water samples home from prospective sites, from Winston-Salem to Mills River.
"As we got closer to this area, the water just got better and better," he said. "That kind of turned a light on, too."
The first test well reached water at 525 feet and produced 8 gallons a minute. "At the time it was bad news," Tate recalled. A month later, on Dec. 12, a drill struck water at 300 feet and got a flow of 100-plus gallons a minute.
"I'll never forget sharing that news with them, and of course we didn't know at the time but once water samples were sent off to Sierra Nevada, they came back as very high quality," he said.
Ken Grossman and his son had said from the start that he would not locate his east coast brewery in a town that didn't want it.
"Asheville was bounced off the list because one of the line items was we didn't want to be within 50 miles of another small craft brewer," Brian said. "We didn't want to be the 800-pound gorilla. We would feel awkward if someone our size came into Chico. We probably pulled out of a half dozen prime locations because of that. They didn't give us a good feeling that they would want us in the area."
Instead of giving the Grossmans the cold shoulder, the Asheville Beer Alliance made contact with them and invited them to the mountains.
Brian Grossman and Kelly McCubbin, of Southern Appalachian Brewery. The Asheville Brewers Association enthusiasm for Sierra Nevada was 'huge,' Grossman said."We sat down and had an open dialogue conversation," Brian said, "and they gave us overwhelming support."
"That was huge," Cooper said.
"Huge," Grossman added.
"We cut our teeth just like they are," he said. "We have a brand called Life and Limb because brewers risk life and limb" to survive from barrel to barrel. "These startup brewers, they pour everything into it and a lot of them don't make it. My dad started on a shoestring just trying to get it working, he was working a million hours, he was retrofitting dairy tanks, and he came from nothing and he built a very successful business."
The Grossmans flew craft brewers from the area to Chico and treated them to a beer camp experience where they brewed a product from start to finish.
"We were all blown away by the facility in Chico," said Andy Cubbin, the owner of Southern Appalachian Brewery in Hendersonville. "It's an incredible undertaking and I think the most incredible thing to all of us was it seemed to be the happiest place to work."

Bonds that developed between the pursued and pursuer also helped tip the scales toward Mills River.
On a trip in mid-November, Ken brought his wife, Katie, and their daughter, Sierra, who had a baby about a year old. Brian and his fiancée, Gina, were there. The Grossmans joined mayor Roger Snyder and Jaime Laughtertown manager Jaime Laughter on a long hike through the property.
"You had three generations of the family right there that were coming to see a wooded site, and see the possibilities of that brewery," Laughter said. "It made an impression on me that they were family oriented — to bring three generations on a site-visit hike. We didn't see a corporate feel there. And the other piece was sincere questions about the community. They really wanted to know were they going to fit in, live here and enjoy it."
When Sierra stopped to nurse her daughter, Laughter stayed with her.
"I stayed behind, having breastfed two children myself, and understanding that need to respond to the child," she said. "So we found a log and sat down and she nursed her child, which is always a beautiful thing, and we hiked on from there."
By mid-December of 2011, everything sped up, as if the Grossmans had set a New Year's Eve deadline to seal the deal.
On Dec. 12, the Board of Commissioners approved incentives of up to $3.75 million over five years, through property tax refunds based on investment targets and jobs created. Mills River approved a property tax break of $86,800 over seven years. The Partnership team helped get grants from the Rural Center, the DOT, the Golden Leaf Foundation, the One North Carolina fund, and other state sources. A Community Development Block Grant is paying for water and sewer lines. The decision by the Board of Commissioners to support the company was a financial tipping point, Tate said, because startup costs are critical.
"When you have to close a deal somebody has to do that," he said.
A week and half before Christmas, Wyckoff, the state commerce recruiter, flew to Asheville on the state plane and picked up Tate and Grossman for a trip to the governor's mansion. A host ushered the visitors through the house, decorated for Christmas, into a library with a large roundtable.
"She did great," Wyckoff said of Gov. Bev Perdue. "Anytime we had her in front of clients she was great. She was a great salesperson for the state. A lot of these big companies — the CEOs and C-level executives — they expect to get called by the governor of the state. Ken Grossman said he got calls from the governor of Virginia on a weekly basis or at least biweekly."
In 2012 Sierra Nevada bought 105.6 acres from Ferncliff Industrial Park (owned by the Fitzpatrick family) for $6.24 million, according to deed records. The brewery paid $1.15 million for another 78.8 acres owned by the Shuford family and adjoining Ferncliff. And it paid $1.375 million for 17 acres for the Norfolk-Southern spur and transload facility at Fletcher Business Park — a total of $8.7 million. In January 2013, the county finance director wired an order for $1.375 million to Chico, which matched the amount Sierra Nevada had paid for the rail access property in Fletcher.
The company's investment will far surpass the $107.5 million it committed to as part of the county incentive agreement, county officials say.
"I guarantee it wasn't entirely financial," Brian Grossman said of the decision to choose Mills River. "We wanted to make sure it was right. We accepted it was worth the cost for us. I love it out here. Pisgah's my friend."
Not that he has much time to enjoy the view.
With a new marriage and a new baby — two new babies if you count the brewery — Grossman helps conduct a construction symphony that includes 300 workers and 25 contractors and subcontractors. The company says it expects to make beer by early 2014.
"All of our mental capacity right now is just to get the brewery designed and built on a very aggressive timeline," Grossman said. "All the fun stuff will come later, when later we don't know yet. We'll have something (for visitors). We don't know what yet."

Tate recalled walking to the Historic Courthouse with Ken and Brian Grossman, Cooper and Schjeldahl to sign the economic incentive agreement on Jan. 25, 2012, the day of the announcement.
"Everybody was tired but happy, relieved," he said.
There was no congratulatory call. No high fives. No email that said, You won! No fireworks in the sky.
"The reality of it was everybody involved knew, everybody was exhausted with the process that was going to lead to the announcement, and the announcement was an opportunity to kind of pause and celebrate."
The two teams that had spent so much time together since August met at a smaller house at the Ferncliff property before driving to the green house.
Cooper carried in a case of Sierra Nevada.
"We cracked open the beers and toasted each other, and then we went over to make the announcement," Leonard said.
Tate and the Partnership for Economic Development had landed a big prize, to be sure, but one of many, they hoped, and one that still needed nurture and feeding.
"The next day we had meetings starting at 8 a.m. to talk about, 'All right, now we gotta do this,'" he said. "Great, we had a public announcement. Now the real work starts."

In the end the hunt for the perfect site hadn't been about money.
But it hadn't not been about money either.
Who's to say that in the end the Mills River acquisition, which grew from Ken Grossman's original 20-acre order to 184 acres, won't bring a greater return than Alcoa, Tenn., or Christianburg, Va., ever would have?
"The thing that sticks in my mind that is remarkable," Cooper said, "is Brian's dad being able to walk these woods — when you can't see two feet in front of you —and he would start creating this vision of how this was going to lay out," he said. "That was truly amazing. Especially when we got the first team of contractors to look at it."
Brian quoted the contractors, "What the hell you want us to do?"
Ken Grossman sees in the Big Forest more than a brewery churning out 600,000 barrels of beer a year. He sees a destination that capitalizes on without unnaturally exploiting the assets — the undulating land, the clean water, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the deep woods. He sees, as Cooper put it, a showcase for the world.
The Grossmans started out wanting to double their capacity.'No, just Roger,' Snyder said when someone introduced him as Mayor Snyder.
"We love our breweries to death, and we spend a lot of time here," Brian said. "Having just a production brewery doesn't really fit us. We wanted to make it simple and it just didn't happen. It'll be nice."
The hunt for Big Forest came down to a thousand factors.
The Sierra Nevada team, sitting on the porch of the green house, wondered who was that cowboy-looking fellow leaning against a rail. Someone introduced him as Mills River Mayor Roger Snyder.
"The first thing out of his mouth is, 'No, I'm Roger,'" Cooper recalled.
The cliché about business — that it's about relationships — happens to be true in this case.
Kelly Leonard said he didn't know what his role was in the courtship of Sierra Nevada. But the rest of the Partnership did. When Tate called, Leonard said "what time and where?" When announcement day finally came, Leonard was the only North Carolina representative to speak besides the governor. Leonard had grown to like and admire Ken Grossman.
"That to me is the story here," he said, "just how fortunate Henderson County was and the region was to have a man of that caliber and a family of that caliber with a company of that caliber decide to pick us as their east coast home."
In the end, an emotional connection clicked into place.
"I think the most interesting part of the whole Sierra Nevada story," said Mills River Town Manager Jaime Laughter, "is they invested a lot in site selection, they went through a lot of process, when they got to the end, they stopped, and they looked at the two sites, and for whatever reason it didn't feel right, and that's a huge thing to say, after investing all that money as a business person. 'It doesn't feel right. So we're going to go back to the drawing board, and we're going to invest more money into looking somewhere that feels right.'"
It felt right.
Setting out three years ago, the Grossmans had never heard of a river named the French Broad or a town called Mills River or an adroit quarterback named Andrew Tate. They thought they knew what they wanted. But sometimes you don't know what you really want until you see it. They met in the woods by the river and found the Big Forest.