A Year in Beer: Beneath the surface at One World Brewing’s downtown taproom

On Jan. 1, Christopher Arbor and his friends pledged to visit one Asheville brewery each week for all of 2025 in the order that they opened, then share the experience with Mountain Xpress readers. To read about their recent visit to Hi-Wire Brewing, visit avl.mx/en8.

“The night is young; so am I for a little while.” — Greg Brown

Slide down a back alley, slip through a massive vault door, descend a mysterious series of staircases and arrive in a dimly lit, windowless chamber. If you have a fog machine, run it — that’s about the only thing that could possibly make One World Brewing’s downtown location more cinematic.

With minor changes, this place could be the movie set for a speakeasy, a hobbit hole, the belly of a pirate ship, the vaults beneath Gringotts bank or the inside of a fallout shelter. Somehow all these disparate vibes come together to form something cohesive and compelling. I absolutely love it. 

On our group’s recent stop at the taproom, bartender Maria Laverde — who, I learned, used to be a professional motorcyclist — poured me the tasty Boats of Oats stout. It had lots of robust yet nuanced flavors that all complement each other beautifully. I then sidled up to my crew in the middle of the bunker around a large table, which I discovered was made from the floor of an old elevator. 

March Madness was underway, but our male-heavy crew eschews stereotypes in at least two important ways: We don’t talk about sports, and we don’t talk about women. The one time we broke the rules, we broke both at once with a heated conversation around the competing basketball skills of Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.

I ended up in a conversation with my old friend Todd Burkhalter and new friend Frank Ungert about the Germany’s purity laws for beer (reinheitsgebot), which limit beer ingredients to only water, barley, yeast and hops. That led to a discussion of the clarity, complexity and specificity of the German language and its hilariously long compound words. For example, the word for Phillips-head screwdriver is kreuzschlitzschraubenzieher (cross + slot + screw + turn); zahnärztlicheuntersuchung (tooth + doctor + medical + examination). These terms are like balanced chemical equations. The total is exactly the sum of its parts. 

When I talked with Lisa Schutz, who co-founded One World Brewing in 2014 with her husband, Jay, about their picturesque space and the brewery’s name, she spoke beautifully about the first two words evoking the concept of global unity. But what really hit me hard was why they chose “brewing” over “brewery.” 

Brace yourself. This is awesome. “What we aim to do in our business is a verb not a noun — an action word that represents how when people, talents and energy come together, they create a whole that is greater than the sum of all its individual parts,” she says. “This also parallels the brewing process, in which the individual ingredients to make a beer come together and create scientific synergy and a unique craft product.”

If you haven’t been to One World’s downtown location, check it out now, before hordes of summer visitors descend. And when things start to get crowded, you can always pivot to the West Asheville location on Haywood Road.

Come join us on another adventure. We gather at 5:30 p.m. Wednesdays. Email me at yearinbeerasheville@gmail.com or just show up.

April 2 — Twin Leaf Brewery on the South Slope
April 9 — Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. in Fletcher

Editor’s note: This story was updated on March 26 to include the correct spelling of One World co-owner Lisa Schutz’s last name.