Tony Kiss

tkiss@gannett.com

ASHEVILLE - Green Man Brewery has raised the curtain on a $5 million expansion in the brewing district of Asheville’s South Slope.

The space will include tasting rooms on top and bottom floors of the three-story building, with a packaging area in between. Green Man also will install a faster bottling line and will wash and fill kegs there.

The space gets its first use Saturday when it hosts a gala benefit for Open Doors of Asheville, an event to include food from area restaurants, live entertainment and an art auction.

Green Man will officially open for business in the space at 27 Buxton Ave. on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, with a rollicking party to include food trucks and a lineup of the brewery's ales. Visitors to the top floor can enjoy a patio with views of Asheville's McCormick Field baseball park in one direction and Mount Pisgah in another. There is also a view of the packaging area.

The inside top floor space has artist-crafted tables, seats and hanging lamps and room for 400, Green Man owner Dennis Thies said. There's also a shiny bar top with a copper and turquoise patina.

"This is like jumping from high school to the NBA," Thies said of the expansion.

Stairwells leading between the floors have landings covered with shiny pennies. The ground floor has another tasting area, along with retail space selling refillable growler bottles and other take-home beer and brewery merchandise.

Each tasting area has 18 taps, Thies said. Bathrooms have increased from just one (at the original Dirty Jacks tasting room) to 10.

The packaging space will eventually include a 10-barrel specialty brewery. Adding a new brewery will let Green Man brew sour beers on its original system in Dirty Jacks while making other specialties in the new space, head brewer John Stuart said.

Green Man has also built a distribution center on Tunnel Road.

The project, in the works for several years, is only the latest brewery expansion and construction in Asheville.

Highland Brewing has completed its new packaging area and rooftop space which will begin hosting events when weather allows.

Hi-Wire and Wicked Weed have opened new breweries. New Belgium will open its $140 million brewery and Liquid Center tasting room this month in West Asheville along the French Broad River. Burial Beer is building a second brewery near Biltmore Village.

Green Man's expansion aims to "get us more efficient." Thies said. He said he was determined to remain downtown on the South Slope, where Green Man was the first brewery in that now busy district.

"We would have spent much less money to build (near the Asheville Regional Airport). But Green Man is near and dear to this area, so we went for it."

Tickets for Saturday Green Man gala are available at opendoorsasheville.ejoinme.org/artaffairtickets

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