Time to bring back the ✨Community Spotlight✨ posts!

Pouring our first beer on opening day to one of our long time regulars couldn’t have been better aligned. Chris, his wife Meredith, and his mom are here at the brewery multiple times/week.

He’s not only one of our biggest supporters, but he’s also pillar of our community. During the months we were closed, Chris organized “French Broad Regulars Meetups” at other local breweries and got our regular crowd that usually comes out on Mondays & Fridays to meet up at other spots around town. This not only helped some of our people keep their routine of weekly hangouts while their place was gone, but it also helped support other local breweries during the slowest and hardest months in the initial aftermath of the hurricane.

They also helped the community in many other ways in the aftermath, even while dealing with their own hardships losing some of Meredith’s art in the flood at the Marquee. Chris and his family are part of what make our FB community the best!

Paul snagged this video of the imperfect first pour and a moment that meant a lot to us 💚 Thanks Chris, and thanks everyone who helped celebrate our reopening!

Wow… just wow. We are absolutely speechless after this weekend. We couldn’t imagine a reopening filled with more love, support, and happiness. If you were there, you felt the magic of this moment, as everyone formed a circle and celebrated being back in our favorite place, dancing and drinking with our favorite people. A majority of our team was moved to tears watching this! Nothing can do it justice, but this 2 minute video of pure joy definitely comes close to capturing the energy of the weekend.

It was a packed weekend: Thursday with @jerrysdeadofficial, Friday with @cuberowmusic, Saturday with @sunsquabi, and Sunday with @chalwaroots. We can’t thank each and every one of you enough - family, friends, regulars, musicians, peers in the industry, neighbors, vendors, partners, those who helped us rebuild, and new friends joining our community - to everyone who came out, thank you for helping us make this new taproom feel like home. This weekend meant the world to us 💚

We’re closed this week Monday-Friday to build our permanent stage, but we’ll be spending the week posting photos from this weekend because we have a ton 💚

Thank you again, y’all are the best!

The moment we have all been waiting for… we’re finally so happy to announce that

🎉French Broad River Brewery will be open tomorrow, Thursday April 17th from 1-9pm with a show from @jerrysdeadofficial from 6-9pm🎉

We’ll try not to get too sappy, but looking back on these past 7 months leading up to this day, we’re definitely feeling emotional. Everything changed on September 26th. We were of course, heart broken when we found our brewery underwater - but we knew how lucky we were that our team and their families were safe. During the initial aftermath, so many people reached out asking if a rebuild was in the cards and how they could help. At the time, we were focused on and incredibly grateful for the opportunity to be able to connect with the community and share resources, so a lot of those questions remained unanswered for quite a while… but that was also because we didn’t actually know if a rebuild was in the cards for us.

After many ownership discussions, difficult financial decisions, team meetings, and searching for a reason, we (Paul’s wife Sarah) concluded that it was nonnegotiable - the reason to rebuild was right in front of us - our community & our team - the people who make a big old taproom actually feel like home, and the minute we decided to rebuild, we were committed. We believed in this small business and decided to make it happen no matter what it took or how many challenges we had to overcome (and there were a lot).

Words could never express how grateful we are, not only to finally reopen, but for the hard work and resilience of each person working on this project, for the outpour of love and encouragement we’ve received from the community, for the fact that we’ve been able to retain our same amazing staff and grow even more solid through this journey, and for all of the things we’ve learned, connections we’ve made, and new doors that have opened through this process. We hope our story may inspire other small businesses and our neighbors who are still chugging along. Don’t give up.

Cheers to new beginnings and F*** Hurricane Helene.

This is the very first look at our new taproom, with commentary from Paul on each aspect of our work. We realized we haven’t shown many visuals on the taproom in our updates, so Paul wanted to do a walk through giving insights as to exactly what’s been going on in here these past 6 months. It’s a bit of a long video, but if you want a sneak peek at our new home and info on our reopening date, keep watching💚

Hope everyone’s week is off to a great start. We’re up at the taproom working on making some beer and finishing up projects trying to get us to that projected opening date. Many updates to come this week! Many friends of the brewery have been looking for updates - please share this with your local friends to help this message find them. By the way, cheers to National Beer Day🍻

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#wncstrong #ashevillenc #ashevillerebuild

A little message from Paul on Thursday’s cleanup day.

We can’t express enough how much the volunteer crew helped move along our process. Our landscaper, Jim, actually said it decreased the workload by DAYS! We’re incredibly grateful for our community and that feeling continues to grow and be reinforced each and every day. Thank you to everyone who came out💚

Our longtime regular and friend, Jim, is going to begin working on landscaping today! This is a big step in that gets us even closer to being able to open the taproom.

This is very last minute, but we’d like to extend an invitation to those who are interested in lending a hand to do some dirty work tomorrow, 3/27 from 11am-2pm.

So many of you have generously offered help which we’ve been so appreciative of. Unfortunately, we haven’t had any tasks that we could involve y’all in yet, as it’s all been left to the pros, but after speaking with Jim yesterday, we realized that having a handful of folks to come out and assist with the clean up that has to take place before landscaping would not only be incredibly helpful in speeding up the project, but would also give us a chance to reconnect with a few of you!

If you’d like to come out, please sign up using the link in our bio! Thank you in advance💚 We only need a small handful of people for this, but so soon everyone will be invited back to the taproom for beer and fun!

🍻TODAY IS THE DAY🍻

It’s been 6 long months of cleaning, rebuilding, sourcing equipment, repairing equiptment, gathering ingredients, and fine-tuning every detail of getting our facility back up to standard so that we could begin brewing here at French Broad River Brewery again. This morning at 8 AM, we fired up the brewhouse and started brewing again for the first time. The journey has been challenging, but the reward is indescribable.

We’ve poured our hearts into restoring this space and getting to this point, and we can’t wait to share what’s coming next. Great beer is on the way! More updates to come…🍻

Just a peek at some of our taproom progress… Our beloved stage is on it’s way back and that’s thanks to Tim from @jerrysdeadofficial and Bentley, who is not only the sound engineer for a lot of our shows, but also a loved member of our French Broad community. This is what we mean when we say we’re coming back better than ever— because our taproom is being rebuilt by the very people who make this brewery feel like family, with the encouragement of our incredible community who make French Broad something so worth rebuilding. This time around, the space will be more special than ever, thanks to all of you. 💚