If you happen to love fine-crafted beers, then Western North Carolina, especially the Asheville area, is the place to be. As the fine old mountain saying goes, you can hardly swing a dead cat in Buncombe County without hitting a brewery.

With five operating breweries and two more on the way, the Asheville area has a per capita beer-making capacity that may well be unrivalled anywhere in the United States. "I can’t think of another city in the U.S. that has one brewery for every 10,000 people," said Oscar Wong, founder and owner of Highland Brewing Company. "And all of these breweries are making really great beers."

Other brewers in the area do admit that Highland Brewing set the precedent for what has become a thriving industry in the Asheville area. In 1994, Highland became the first commercial microbrewery in Asheville when they began making beer in the basement of Barley’s Taproom on Biltmore Avenue using mostly retrofitted dairy equipment.

Highland’s beers were well received and within a couple years, a fair number of bars and restaurants in Asheville had Highland beer on tap. Now sold in four states, Highland has become one of the largest breweries in North Carolina. To meet the demand, Highland recently moved out of its cramped quarters beneath Barley’s and into a much larger and more modern production facility in East Asheville. The new brewery has a bottling line that allows Highland to bottle and package its beers in six-packs of 12-ounce bottles — a production capacity unequalled in the area.

Through the growth, Wong has maintained his commitment to brewing the best beers possible, and Highland’s two top-selling beers, Gaelic Ale and St. Terese’s Pale Ale, have developed a loyal and devoted base of beer drinkers. Wong says that the brewery receives calls from people all over the United States wondering where they can buy Highland beers.

"Since Asheville is a tourist area, people come here from all over, try our beer and then go back home and can’t find it in the stores," Wong says with a chuckle. "They’re pretty disappointed when I tell them that Highland beers are only distributed in North and South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee."

Wong is obviously proud that Highland’s beers make such an impression; People, he says, like them enough to call looking for his brewery’s beer. As he talked about it, the phone in his office rang. A woman from Indiana called to ask about a particular variety of pale ale.

The ale, Kashmir Imperial Pale Ale, was a special run and won’t be brewed again. "It was just a one-time thing," Wong says. But the strong interest in the ale from around the country certainly showed that Highland is doing something right. In fact, Asheville breweries seem to have a penchant for brewing excellent English-style ales.

Pisgah Brewing in Black Mountain brews very fine organic pale ale that has the bright, bitter hops taste that ale drinkers crave. While French Broad Brewing Co., the area’s second largest brewery, doesn’t make any English Pale Ales, they do concoct a very nice English Extra Special Bitter (ESB).

Ales are much easier to produce than the popular and more familiar German-style lagers and pilsners. The top-selling beers in the U.S., such as Budweiser, Coors and Miller, are all lagers, as are most popular imports such as Beck’s, Fosters, Heineken, Corona and St. Pauli Girl.

Lager beers are bottom-fermented beers; the yeast has to sink to the bottom of the fermentation tank before getting down to work. Bottom-fermenting yeast likes cooler temperatures, somewhere between 45 and 50 degrees, and takes its own sweet time fermenting malt — usually around six weeks. Ales, on the other hand, use top-fermenting yeast that gets to work quickly. Compared to lagers, ales are fermented at the hyper speed of 10 days to two weeks.

The shorter production time makes ales more popular for most microbreweries, and among the three largest breweries in the Asheville area, Highland and Pisgah make primarily ales, stouts and porters — which all use top-fermenting yeast. French Broad Brewing alone consistently makes lager-style beers. And while head brewer Drew Barton hasn’t ruled out making pale ale, he doesn’t have any immediate plans to add one to the brewery’s repertoire.

"We like to try different things and make beers that differentiate us from the other breweries in town," Barton says.

While the competition in Asheville’s brewing scene is strong, it is also a very friendly rivalry. "Of course, we want to make the best beers and be successful, but we also like to see the other breweries do well," Barton observes. "If all the breweries are doing well, it just continues to strengthen the reputation of Asheville’s beer scene. I think that Asheville’s arts community, music scene and beer making are all interconnected. And the more breweries we have making good beer just make this a better place to be."

Local offerings can be found at many a tavern and restaurant throughout the mountains and the Upstate, but if you are a true devotee and want to make a pilgrimage, all three breweries offer tours and tastings. French Broad’s tasting room has live music Tuesday through Saturday evenings. Pisgah Brewing is currently developing a tasting room and has an informal open house tasting every Thursday from 4 to 8pm.