Since opening in late 2012, Asheville’s Wicked Weed has quickly become one of the hottest new breweries anywhere — not to mention one the fastest growing and most adept at making both sour and hoppy beers.
That was evident last month at the 2015 Great American Beer Festival in Denver, where beer geeks swamped the Wicked Weed booth, joining some of the longest lines of the weekend, as they jockeyed for a sip of Black Angel Cherry Sour or Freak of Nature Double IPA.
Until now, Wicked Weed beers haven’t been available for sale anywhere outside of North Carolina, which has added to the mystique.
But Atlanta beer bars and retailers soon will host a full compliment of the brewery’s barrel-aged sour, tart farmhouse, and hopped-up ales, including Pernicious IPA, which won a silver medal at GABF.
Walt Dickinson, Wicked Weed’s “Head Blender and Keeper of the Funk,” is one of the brewery’s co-founders and the creator and curator of its barrel-aged and sour beer program.
With the original Asheville brewpub, the Funkatorium taproom, and a new 50-barrel production brewery in West Asheville, it’s been a super busy time, Dickinson said during a recent phone call.
“We’re trying to be a big brewery, all of a sudden,” Dickinson laughed. “It’s been kind of crazy. And winning a silver medal for Pernicious spun us off into another direction. That beer has blown up and now we’re trying to decide how to deal with it.
“We never saw ourselves as a big regional brewery. We’ve made over 300 different beers since we opened this place, and a lot of what we built our brand on is kind of creative ADD. So going from being a little pub, where you could buy a few bottles, to finding a home in people’s refrigerators and cellars is a totally different thing.”
Still, Dickinson revealed that the plan is to make as many as 20 different beers at the production brewery this year, plus as many as 40 more sour and funky beers at the Funkatorium.
“The sour program is really growing,” Dickinson said. “I don’t know where we fit in as far as scale in the U.S. but we’re one of the largest sour beer programs in the country at this point. I want to fight the good fight and turn the world sour.”
Of course, a brewery cleverly named after King Henry VIII’s supposed utterance defining hops as “a wicked and pernicious weed” definitely exhibits some fascination with lupine pursuits, as well.
“As far as IPA goes, we want to keep preaching that it doesn’t need to be bitter or offensive,” Dickinson said. “IPA can be dry and delicate and floral. But the mission of our brewery is to challenge the status quo from both the sour and hoppy side.”
As far as the move to distribute beer in the Atlanta market, Dickinson said it’s been a goal for some time.
“For us, there’s a correlation between beer, food, wine and spirits, and watching how that’s been progressing in Atlanta showed us it was a great place for us,” he said. “Being only three hours away, we want Atlanta to be an extension of our home market. We’re sending some really radical beers and we’re going to do some really great events. We want Atlantans to feel like Wicked Weed is their brewery.”
