“Something that we’ve always kind of strived to do is we don’t want to turn people away from the category,” she explains. “We want all of our sours to be really balanced. I don’t want you to feel like you need to eat a tongue immediately when you have one of our beers. And all of our sours are now in larger format, 750 ml bottles. I think people will also see that compared to in 2015 when there were breweries packaging 750 ml mixed culture sour beer, and they were 40 bucks, 45 bucks a bottle. And most of ours are $25. It really is kind of our duty at Wicked Weed as a brewery that is really passionate about mixed culture beer and also owned by Anheuser-Busch. Our goal should be to bring as many people into sour beer as we can and then hope they like what we’re doing enough to go out and seek other people’s mixed culture, sour beer.”
That was the case for Currier herself, who was a fan of Wicked Weed’s sours long before she was a Wicked Weed employee. (She’s also, it’s worth pointing out, a woman in a major leadership role in the traditionally male-dominated craft beer industry. Nowadays, she says, “for every reputable mixed culture brewery, there’s a woman working there,” but when she first started at Wicked Weed, there was only one other female production employee, who worked in the lab. “I was their first chick brewer — or chick wood cellarman,” she says with a laugh.) And like many Wicked Weed staffers, she went to school for brewing, graduating from Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College’s Brewing, Distillation and Fermentation program.
“If you look back at what the actual beer scene was like at that point, we probably had 30 breweries within city limits,” Currier says. “Which is a lot. But we’ve got a lot more now. And I do think that the first couple [graduating] classes, a lot of folks really did stay in this area and have been an incredible resource for all the breweries that are here. I know that we’ve gotten a ton of support — we, Wicked Weed, and also the A-B Tech Brewing program — just from that internship program. It really did kind of level up the brewing game for every brewery in this area when graduates started coming out of that program.”
It’s just one of the ways that Wicked Weed draws inspiration from and gives back to the Asheville community. When Cultura was forced to close its doors in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the kitchen remained open, with Executive Chef Eric Morris and his team preparing and donating 5,000 meals a week for those in need. And since reopening, the restaurant remains devoted to sustainability and reducing waste by honoring the area’s culinary traditions.
“We want to be sustainable in Asheville,” Morris says. “We want to reduce food waste. We want to preserve our mountain ways. All those things are important to us. We wanna support our local farmers and keep some of those traditions alive just in kind of a new light. And so the more we know about how to ferment and apply those things, the more our region is growing. It’s like carrying that Appalachian food tradition into the 21st century. We’re taking old ways, and then we’re honoring them by keeping them alive but then also building on top of what we already know to do that.”