12 Bones Smokehouse to open new restaurant, brewery in South Asheville

ASHEVILLE — You could say 12 Bones Smokehouse has been unlucky. But that would be to ignore the presidential visits and the unlikely rise to relative stardom from an unassuming start in a cinder block shack.

That River Arts District shack was leveled last year to make way for road construction, forcing the move of 12 Bones flagship store to 5 Foundy St.

Now, it looks like it's happening again.

A planned widening of Sweeten Creek Road will force a change for the popular barbecue restaurant's South Asheville store. It's located at 3578 Sweeten Creek Road, putting it directly in the path of oncoming construction.

How much of a headache construction will cause for property owners on the road is still unclear, but 12 Bones owners Bryan and Angela King, who took over the restaurant in 2013, have decided to be proactive.

"When we looked at this and started thinking about things, it made sense to jump on it," Bryan King said.

After the South Asheville store serves its last meal Dec. 29, the Kings will move its operations to a brick warehouse at 2350 Hendersonville Road, where they will bring barbecue to the edge of Arden and, for the first time, launch a line of 12 Bones-branded beer with a new in-restaurant brewery.

The Foundy Street location will continue to operate as usual, with the typical short winter closure. The new 12 Bones Smokehouse and Brewery is slated to open in early 2019.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation projects construction on the $50 million Sweeten Creek Road project will begin in 2022. The project calls for widening a 5.4-mile stretch of the busy throughway from Hendersonville Road to Rock Hill Road and adding sidewalks and bike lanes.

Property acquisition, which DOT estimates will cost $7.2 million, won't happen until 2020. (Learn more about the project here.)

But 12 Bones' lease expires in 2019, and the Kings have chosen to not renew their contract with sympathetic landlords: the founders of 12 Bones, Tom Montgomery and Sabra Kelley.

"Tom and Sabra certainly would have let us do month-to-month as long as we needed, but the problem was, we didn't want to get caught in a situation," said Bryan King during a January tour through the new 12 Bones property at 2350 Hendersonville Road.

"We know construction is going to affect us, we don't know how, and we didn't want to get caught behind the eight ball, like we were a little bit with (the river) location, though it all worked out."

The new location will launch in a sprawling, brick 12,000-square-foot warehouse, built in 1940 and perched rather close to the train tracks, but with just enough room to squeeze in a beer garden.

Appropriately gritty, there's plenty of room to sprawl in the concrete-floored space, which has triple the footprint of the current South Asheville store. There's room for 100 in the proposed dining area, another 50 in a flexible space, another 60 outside. The north side of the building has room for brewing equipment and another 75 seats.

A brewery seemed a natural fit for Bryan King, who's also a hobby home brewer. "I've always been interested in beer. Suffice it to say, this has always been somewhat of a dream, but we were never in the position to do it."

The brewery vision will solidify with the assistance of Angela King's brother Dominic Koh, co-founder and head brewer at Manitou Brewing Company in Manitou Springs, Colorado.

Koh will assist in the logistics of setting up the brewery and its 10 or 15 barrel system. He'll help scout for a head brewer.

The Kings will work with Koh and the new head brewer to develop a menu of barbecue-friendly brews. Bryan King said the restaurant sells mostly lighter beers, like IPAs, Kolsch and pilsners, but they'll brew some porters and stouts, too.

Besides draft brews, there will likely be cans and bottles to buy onsite, but there is almost no distribution planned outside of the brewery, beyond the occasional guest tap at a neighborhood restaurant.

The Kings hope to implement a small barrel-aging program down the line, a task made easier by a new partner in the venture, Taylor Howard. Howard is an Asheville native and co-founder of Fairview's H&H Distillery with his father, Wendell Howard, a friend of the King family for decades.

Also partnering on the venture is Darren Green, who owns the Hendersonville Road property where 12 Bones is moving. He also owns a sustainable woodworking business, The Old Wood Co., and his work is likely to show up in the new restaurant.

Green said he joined the venture with the notion that the synergy between the partners should be as strong as that between barbecue and beer.

"We’re working on a brand that’s already been established and grown, matured and developed. The same principle that these guys are putting into their barbecue is going to transfer over to the beer. I would not have invested in a brewery outside of this scenario."

“I think we’ve assembled a great team to try to take the 12 Bones name into the brewing space,” Bryan King said. "If it was just Angela and I, we couldn't have done this. And knowing we have Dominic is a huge resource."

The team and space have coalesced at just the right time, said King. Launching a brewery in that area is a sooner-than-later situation. Wait two more years, he reasoned, and the south side of Asheville could be saturated with breweries.

There are signs, after all, of an impending southward creep: The new 12 Bones is less than three miles from Blue Ghost Brewing Company, and Wicked Weed's production facility is practically across the street.

Two and a half miles away is The Mills River Brewery, and Sweeten Creek Brewing, Hillman Beer and Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.'s gargantuan Mills River facility are all within about a five-mile drive of the coming barbecue restaurant.

Still, with this plunge even farther south from the center of Asheville, 12 Bones is setting up in an area not otherwise dense with food and entertainment options.

But 12 Bones and its owners have had plenty of experience as pioneers.

Kelley and Montgomery founded the restaurant in 2005 the still-gritty River Arts District, after floodwaters had swept through the building, but before floods of tourists would "discover" the area. The South Asheville location opened three years later, in what felt at the time like an underdeveloped area.

The Kings bought the restaurant in 2013 and in short order knew they'd have to move the RAD spot, signing on with local developers who sought to transform a warren of graffiti-covered buildings right down the road into a unique center for Asheville industry.

Here they go again.

"When we purchased the building, I recognized that this was this weird little dead zone," said Green on Wednesday. "They use the word 'activate' a lot in planning, and what these guys are doing is activating that corridor. It will be interesting to see what happens next, because there is quite a bit of land available."

But if history is any indication, what happens next is likely to happen fast.

"It's clear that there's a lot of growth coming this way," King said in January, watching traffic speed by the location of his future brewery, traffic he hoped to soon harness.

"It's not like we're revitalizing this area as much as we were at the river location — but staking claim to a new area? For sure."