No two breweries are alike, and at every one you visit, the brewer will have his or her own story to tell. So listen carefully—the messages come from practical, hands-on experience. You can take courses, you can study books, but the lesson learned best is the one learned from the school of life.

John McDermott, partner and brewmaster at the Highland Brewing Co., has the kind of experience you can’t get from a textbook. McDermott worked at several breweries before he and partner Oscar Wong started their own in Asheville, North Carolina. Everything he learned before pales in comparison to the knowledge he gained from building his own brewery from used dairy equipment. McDermott is now sharing his valuable knowledge through a brewery consulting service.

The long journey toward owning and operating his own brewery began modestly in southern California in the 1980s. There, he brewed his first batch of beer from a homebrew kit. After that, he was hooked.

Next came a trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he discovered Triple Rock Brewing in Berkeley. McDermott, like so many other homebrewers, said, “Hey, I can do this.” He began to research commercial brewing and decided the first thing he needed was practical experience.

So he pulled up stakes and headed to Vermont, where he worked for six months at Catamount Brewing. His plan was to start a brewpub in Boston. While looking for investors and a location, McDermott spent much time reading books and taking courses on starting a small business.

When he couldn’t pull the Boston project together, McDermott moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he became the assistant brewer at the Mill, part of a chain of brewpubs. From there he headed to Charlotte, North Carolina, working as brewmaster at the Mill location there. He also brewed at a nearby brewpub, Dillworth Brewing Co.

While working in Charlotte, McDermott continued to explore the possibilities of opening his own brewery. Because his budget was very tight, he looked into purchasing second-hand equipment.

That’s when he found an ad for used dairy equipment in a state agricultural periodical. On the positive side, the equipment was very inexpensive; on the negative, it would have to be re-engineered. With a background in mechanical engineering, McDermott thought he could modify the equipment to his own purposes.Truth was, he admits, it was just too inexpensive to pass up.

At the same time a friendship formed between McDermott and Wong, a civil engineer who enjoyed craft beers and was looking for a good business investment. The pair decided to join forces and start their own brewery. Thus, the Highland Brewing Co. was born.

At that time Charlotte already had two brewpubs and one microbrewery (it now has three brewpubs and two microbreweries). The pair decided Asheville would be a better market.         

Asheville is located in the western end of the state, in the Appalachian Mountains. It is a prosperous city, attracting many tourists during the summer, and it had no breweries at the time. One advantage they discovered later was that the tap water in Asheville was 10 to 20 degrees colder than in Charlotte, depending on the season. This meant it would take less electrical power to chill their water. Little things like this can make a difference.

They found a location in the basement of an old building in downtown Asheville. The rent was low, but the basement, with stone walls, needed extensive refurbishing and refitting. Also, re-engineering the dairy equipment proved to be a task that required a lot of ingenuity and patience. Every day seemed to bring a new crop of unpleasant surprises and problems.

The mash tun was made from a 35-barrel Sealtest pasteurizer for ice cream. In a unique design change not only did they make a false bottom, but the screen extends part way up the side to allow for horizontal run-off.

A base of six-row pale malt was originally used, but they have since switched to two-row in order to reduce the height of the mash bed. McDermott says he uses a multiple-step infusion mash, and it works very efficiently. He can mash in 1,800 pounds of grain in 15 minutes.

The brew kettle is roughly the same size as the mash tun but is relatively shallow. Large pipes run horizontally through the kettle. During the brew, the pipes are filled with superheated gasses to heat the wort.

The fermenters are made from dairy tanks with a 2,000-gallon capacity—approximately twice the size of the brewhouse. On brew day, two batches are made to fill up a fermenter. For the first brew, the fermenter doubles as a hot liquor tank. Until recently, the beer has
been cold-conditioned for clarity rather than filtered. Now that demand has picked up, tankage is at a premium. Instead of purchasing more tanks, they decided to begin filtering the beer. They had two reasons for filtering: A filter is cheaper than another tank, and Southerners like their beer clear.

Looking back, McDermott says they did things the hard way in order to save money. “When you put it all together, we didn’t save that much; there were costs we never anticipated,” he says.     

By December 1994 Wong and McDermott released their first beer, Celtic Ale. The well-received effort is an American amber style, with plenty of hop bitterness. They have since released an Oatmeal Porter—a chewy, almost black beer with a very tasty, bitter-sweet palate. Because of the great expense of acquiring a bottling line, Wong and McDermott opted to package their beer in kegs, even though the American beer market, and especially the South, is bottle oriented. They released their first 22-oz. (hand-bottled) bottles this summer.    

Highland Brewing is producing two very good beers, and they now have a system that functions very well. McDermott and Wong look
forward to a bright future for their brewery in the mountains of North Carolina.

Steve Johnson, a resident of Clemson, South Carolina, is author of two brewery guidebooks: On Tap: a Field Guide to North American Brewpubs and Craft Breweries, and On Tap New England.