Imagining Asheville, North Carolina, without craft beer is like trying to picture Orlando without Walt Disney World or Las Vegas without its casinos. But there was a time just a few decades ago when Asheville was not Beer City USA. In fact, no brewery had opened in the quiet mountain town since Prohibition ended. Oscar Wong changed all that. A quarter century after he founded Highland Brewing in 1994, brewing had become the second-largest manufacturing employer in western North Carolina.
“To go from a tiny brewery in a basement of a historic building, brewing on repurposed dairy equipment, to becoming, in less than 30 years, the second-largest manufacturing sector in the area, that’s in large part due to Oscar,” says Anne Fitten Glenn, an Asheville-based journalist and the author of two books about North Carolina beer history.
[Oscar] Wong couldn’t have foreseen that he’d usher in a golden age of craft brewing in his city…
Wong couldn’t have foreseen that he’d usher in a golden age of craft brewing in his city, become a leader in the Southeast’s beer scene, and establish himself as the godfather of an entire generation of Asheville food and beverage artisans. Humble and self-effacing, he still shrugs off the enormity of his contributions to the community. “When I was about 11, my mother said to me, ‘You’re fairly bright; you’re very lazy; but by God you’re lucky.’ I’ve run that lucky thing all my life,” Wong jokes.
Now 82 years old, Wong
This Article was originally published on IMBIBE Magazine
