Good Neighbor Podcast: TN-WNC-SWVA

EP# 327: From Dry County to Craft Beer Hub: The Homeplace Beer Company Story

• Skip Mauney & John Silver • Episode 327

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Craft beer aficionados and small-town charm seekers alike will find something to love in this heartfelt conversation with John Silver, founder of Homeplace Beer Company in Burnsville, North Carolina. Skip Mauney welcomes John for a refreshingly honest look at what it takes to build a successful brewery that serves as the heartbeat of a mountain community.

John shares the remarkable eight-year journey of transforming a tiny incubator space into a thriving community hub with a kitchen, music stage, and loyal following. What started as a wholesale-focused operation quickly evolved when locals embraced the taproom as their gathering spot. The conversation explores the fascinating cultural context of opening a brewery in Yancey County—a region that had only recently allowed alcohol sales after generations of prohibition.

Beyond the brews themselves, John dispels common misconceptions about the craft beer industry. Far from the perpetual party outsiders might imagine, success requires creating what he calls a "trifecta" of quality product, inviting space, and meaningful customer experience. His insights into demographic trends (primarily attracting 35-60 year olds) and the brewery's deep connection to local heritage make this episode valuable for entrepreneurs and beer enthusiasts alike.

Located near Mount Mitchell and just 45 minutes from Asheville, Homeplace Beer Company exemplifies how businesses can honor tradition while fostering positive change. Whether you're curious about their Biscuits and Gravy ESB (no, it doesn't actually contain breakfast foods) or planning a weekend getaway to the Blue Ridge Mountains, this conversation will leave you thirsting for a taste of small-town brewery culture. Ready to discover your new favorite mountain destination? Visit homeplacebeer.com and plan your trip to Burnsville today!

Speaker 1:

Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Skip Monty.

Speaker 2:

Hello everyone and welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. So I am super excited today, for a number of reasons, to have someone in our studio for the first time. And if you like beer as much as I do, I'm sure you will be just as excited because today I have the pleasure of introducing your good neighbor, mr John Silver, with the Homeplace Beer Company. John, welcome to the show.

Speaker 3:

Thanks for having me Skip. Appreciate the opportunity.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. Like I said, we're thrilled to have you and I am a major fan of beer and so very excited to learn all about you and Homeplace Beer Company. So if you don't mind, why don't you kick us off by telling us about your?

Speaker 3:

company. Well, we're Homeplace Beer Company. We're located in Burnsville, North Carolina. Yancey County is the county we reside in. It's the home of Mount Mitchell, which is the highest peak east of the Mississippi. We have been open for a little over eight years now.

Speaker 3:

Where we're currently at. We expanded into a larger facility here about five years ago. When we first opened in 2017, we started in a really tiny sort of incubator space that the town worked with us on to create a small microbrewery. When we first opened, we didn't have a kitchen or we didn't have any type of permanent food solution, so when we first opened, we really wanted to focus on wholesale getting our product, our beer, out into the different surrounding towns, we're really close to Asheville, which is a really large craft beer community, not only in this region but it's kind of known nationally as such.

Speaker 3:

So when we opened we really thought we were going to be more of a wholesale operation to different restaurants and bars, but when we opened our small taproom there we had such a demand for creating kind of a community hub space.

Speaker 3:

we ended up selling more of our product on site and so as we grew over those first three years we knew that we were going to have to have a bigger space and to really succeed long-term. We were going to have to have a kitchen and a food solution. So we moved here to this new location about five years ago, and that's what we've been doing ever since.

Speaker 2:

Awesome, so in Yancey County, huh.

Speaker 3:

Yes, yancey is in western North Carolina. It's with Mitchell and Avery County. It's kind of called the tri-county area of our little local district.

Speaker 3:

One of the interesting things about our town is that our county itself is still dry, so alcohol sales are not allowed outside of the town limits, and when we first opened in 2017, the town itself had only been a wet town for I think, just a handful of years, so I grew up here. I think just a handful of years, so I grew up here, and so one of the things I wanted to do when I moved back here was to and we can get into, like you know, my background or whatever, but I was in the craft beer industry for about 15 years before I decided to open my own business and.

Speaker 3:

I really wanted to do it here in my old hometown and raise kids here in a small-town environment. But that was kind of a challenge. You know, the beginning was just sort of becoming accepted in a small southern town that's kind of got a history with. You know negative feelings about alcohol in general and I certainly understand that. But we wanted to do something fun and different and sort of dispel the taboos around alcohol and the way it is in the craft beer.

Speaker 2:

Very good. Well, I was going to ask how you got into the business and you pretty much told us the reason. I ask about Yancey Ken. I grew up in Cleveland County in Shelby and actually used to go camping and fishing on the I think it was the South Toe Was it the South Toe River or the?

Speaker 1:

North Toe, south Tech. Yeah, south Tech On Mount.

Speaker 2:

Mitchell, mount, mitchell yeah, used to love it, love it Beautiful, beautiful place For sure. So what are some myths or misconceptions in the craft beer industry that you can think of?

Speaker 3:

Probably the I mean maybe from the outside it looks like when you own and operate a brewery. It's just all kind of party all the time. It's far from that. It's a lot of hard work. It's a lot of great staff. You know, if you're successful you have to have great staff. Yeah, I'd say it's you know, if there is a misconception generally.

Speaker 1:

I guess about craft beers.

Speaker 3:

it can appear that from the outside, looking in, it's just a lot of drinking and partying, but it's you know for us, it's always been. You know, the product is sort of part of sort of the trifecta, I would say, of what makes a great brewery. Nowadays it's the space that you have to really drive people to and get people out to, and we want to sort of create a bigger picture of that and not focus exclusively on the product. Obviously, the product's what drives our revenue and what we pride ourselves on.

Speaker 3:

But it's a bigger picture type of thing, and so, yeah, the craft beer industry in general has kind of moved towards that thinking over the past 10 years, whereas, you know, maybe when craft beer first started becoming like really popular again. Like in the early 2000s, there was just a lot of tap rooms and a lot of, you know, just a lot of small breweries doing just happens, and now it's. If you really want to succeed, you have to have a great space and a great experience to get with it.

Speaker 3:

So that's that's the, the model we try to go by. It really sort of drives what we do.

Speaker 2:

Very good, now who? Who are your target customers and how do you attract them?

Speaker 3:

Well, I would say, you know, craft beer demographically is kind of a mid to older crowd. I would say at this point Our main demographic is probably 35 to 60, somewhere in there. Of course we want everyone to come and enjoy our space and our products. But you know, as the industry has changed over the past few years, that's sort of become more of the clientele we see showing up more and more. It's that age demographic we see we do a lot of events.

Speaker 3:

We have a big music stage where we host a lot of different bands, have a lot of different community events around. So I wouldn't say we necessarily target a specific demographic, but that's kind of just looking at the market. That's who we are seeing mostly, so maybe by default that's who we are seeing mostly, so maybe by default. That's kind of the turning point.

Speaker 2:

Gotcha. Well, it sounds like you're busy a lot outside of work. What do you like to do for fun?

Speaker 3:

Well. I have a family of two, a wife and two girls. They're in elementary school so they keep us quite busy, so we usually on the weekends doing things with them. Also have some friends in different parts of the state that I visit. We go and do either hiking or different sporting events with stuff like that. Yeah, just like most people, kind of a range of hobbies outside of work. But it's mainly yeah, raising a family and enjoying that.

Speaker 2:

Right, Correct answer. Family is always best for sure. So let's switch gears for a second. Can you describe a hardship or a life challenge that you've experienced and you overcame and came out stronger on the other side?

Speaker 3:

Well for our business, the business I've been in specifically sort of working my way up through the ranks of the industry as a brewer from the time I was about 25 until 40-ish. There was a lot of difficult and challenging times to get through. There was one company in particular, I worked for one of the biggest breweries I would say in the South, they were going through a lot of growth. At the time I joined their team, they were still figuring out a lot of just how to operate.

Speaker 3:

Everybody's just kind of swimming as best they could, and there were so many times I really wanted to just go do something else and I stuck with it and I'm really glad that I did because a lot of the experiences that came, the challenges and frustrations that came with going through an experience like that gave me the I would say the fortitude and the confidence to be able to open my own business, because I knew that it was just kind of one of those things like I knew if I could go through that I could kind of do anything and I've talked to other friends in the business who've experienced similar things.

Speaker 3:

I'd say you should stay in a bad job or anything like that. But I'm glad that for me in my situation I stuck through those situations and learned and grew and kind of gained confidence through hardship in order to be able to do what I do now.

Speaker 2:

Very good. Well, John, if you could think of one thing that you'd like our listeners and viewers to remember about you and about Homeplace Beer Company, what would that be?

Speaker 3:

Well, we're a small town, family owned and operated, very local, very local staff. Even our name, homeplace, comes from kind of a colloquial term that locals have for their old home place they grew up in, and that's just a word. I kept hearing a lot as I was thinking about what to name the business. A lot of our products have names that are tied to specific things locally. So we try to reflect the local culture and the local history through our products and our advertising and kind of just the home-filled vibe of what we have here with our staff and the customer service, stuff like that.

Speaker 3:

That's really what we, I think has led us to have. The success we've had is is not trying to do anything, but what we are, which is a really good hometown hub it's a community space for everybody.

Speaker 2:

So for those of us who are large fans of beer and would like to come check you guys out, how can we learn more?

Speaker 3:

You can go to homeplacebeercom. It's our website. It has all our current events that we have planned. It has our rolling list of different draft beers and packaged beers. We don't only do draft beer, we have cans and growlers to go, of course, and stuff like that. Our webpage, sort of shows you the basic stuff that we have and different events that we do.

Speaker 1:

We're located right in downtown Burnsville.

Speaker 3:

North Carolina.

Speaker 1:

It's about 45 minutes north-ish of Asheville.

Speaker 3:

So if you're in, the Asheville area want to get out and do something fun outdoors. Like Skip said, south Two Rivers awesome place to come visit. Carolyn Hemlocks is a great camping area and there's so much hiking and fishing. There's mountain biking. There's all sorts of fun stuff to do here. There's a great new hotel on the town square. There's mountain biking. There's all sorts of fun stuff to do here. There's a great new hotel on the town square. It's not new, it's like hundreds of years old, but it just got renovated. It's called the New Ray Inn. It's driving a lot of people to our area to experience what we have here while they stay in town.

Speaker 2:

Very cool. Now last question. I'll check it out on your website, but do you have an Amber?

Speaker 3:

We do. We have an Amber lager. Right now it's our Oktoberfest. We have a year-round ESB that we loosely describe as an Amber. It's called Biscuits and Gravy ESB. A lot of people ask is there really biscuits and gravy in this? No, it's just part of our branding and part of our style of how we name things. It's a classic British style ESB. Like I said, we currently have the Oktoberfest on it seems like more and more people are releasing the Oktoberfest earlier and earlier in the year.

Speaker 3:

I think we finally released ours Zip Top this year in September. So those are our two amber offerings at the moment.

Speaker 2:

Awesome, awesome. Well, you sold me. I'm an amber guy.

Speaker 3:

Great.

Speaker 2:

You got me Well, john. I can't tell you how much I appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to spend some time with me and with our listeners and viewers, and I appreciate you doing what you do as a massive beer fan, and I want to encourage our listeners to come to Burnsville, check it out and I can attest to all the wonderful things there are in that part of the country. Love the fishing, trout fishing there, and just the views are amazing, beautiful, mount mitchell's gorgeous and uh. Anyway, I want to welcome everybody to come and again, john, thank you so much and we wish you and uh home place beer company and your family, uh, all the best moving forward thanks, so much.

Speaker 2:

Appreciate it maybe we can have you back sometime. I would All right, Sounds great man Talk soon.

Speaker 1:

This is the Good Neighbor Podcast. Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnptry-citiescom. That's gnptry-citiescom, or call 423-719-5873.