Catawba Brewing Co. Brings WNC Collaboration To Life

North Carolina heavyweights Gaining Ground Farm, Rhubarb, Green Opportunities, Catawba Brewing and Yesterday Spaces come together for an outstanding culinary experience  

Asheville, N.C., brewery Catawba Brewing is spearheading another one of their monthly culinary events in the food and craft beer movement in Western North Carolina on Tuesday, May 31. The partnership between host businesses is another in a long list of gatherings dedicated to improving their communities in Western North Carolina.

Collaborators including Gaining Ground Farm, Rhubarb, Green Opportunities, Catawba Brewing and Yesterday Spaces will be preparing a five-course beer dinner at Gaining Ground Farm in Leicester, N.C., about 20 minutes from Asheville’s center city.  At 5 p.m., guests will congregate at the 100-year-old renovated dairy barn on the campus of Yesterday Spaces, one of Asheville’s most beautiful farm venues, for a beer-infused cocktail and appetizer assortment. A stroll across the road to “Camp Kitchen” with Gaining Ground’s summer farm interns will delight guests with an intimate look at their expansive organic garden. Following the grounds tours, guests will take their seats at the long feasting table set in the middle of a historical stagecoach path. Chef Fleer (Rhubarb), Chef Luttrell (Kitchen Ready) and their teams will prepare a five-course meal, fresh from the day’s harvest, paired with five of Catawba Brewing’s finest beverages.  Dining and conversation will continue long past sunset on the farm, as the donkeys wander up to the barn and the birds twitter into the trees for the night.

A portion of the proceeds from the evening will benefit Green Opportunities an organization dedicated to connecting low income youth and adults with employment opportunities to sustain families and improve community and environmental health. Tickets can be purchased here. Early bird pricing is $89 per ticket and lasts through Tuesday, May 24, regular pricing will be $99 after that.

The partnerships between these Asheville businesses are helping to grow the food movement in Asheville, N.C., and can be seen through several initiatives. In one particular instance, Anne and Aaron Grier from Gaining Ground Farm’s surplus of tomatoes in the summer 2015 season were offered to Chef Fleer and Rhubarb, who then took the tomatoes to Chef Liam Luttrell-Rowland from Green Opportunities to be made into ketchup through a project with Kitchen Ready. This process not only created Rhubarb’s in-house, organic ketchup, but it trained low-income adults on food production skills inside the Green Opportunities’ kitchen on Livingston Street.