A Year in Beer: Monastic meanderings at Thirsty Monk Biltmore Park

On Jan. 1, Christopher Arbor and his friends launched a quest to visit one Asheville brewery each week for all of 2025 in the order that they opened. They’ve run into a few snags and detours — for example, Asheville’s third brewery, French Broad River Brewing, is still rebuilding after flooding from Tropical Storm Helene. Their most recent stop was at Thirsty Monk Brewery. (To read about their previous adventure at Dirty Jack’s, click here.)

First a little pub-style trivia: Ryan Island is in Siskiwit Lake, which is on Isle Royale, which is in Lake Superior. To put it another way: It’s the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake in the U.S. On a map, it looks like a poorly drawn target. A Russian doll situation of geography. 

What am I rambling about? Hold your horses. I’m getting there. 

With the winter solstice more than a month behind us, the days are getting longer and brighter, so 5 o’clock was golden hour as we drove down Interstate 26 to Thirsty Monk Brewery’s Biltmore Park location. The original downtown taproom, which opened in 2008, should have been our next stop. But it’s still closed post-Helene, so we opted for the South Asheville outpost.

To me, Biltmore Park feels like a pocket of Charlotte within Asheville’s city limits, but then there’s Thirsty Monk, a pocket of Asheville tucked within the pocket of Charlotte. Another layered, Russian doll situation.

When we arrived, the golden rays of sunshine outside were augmented by the amber lighting inside the taproom. The aesthetic leans toward simple: wooden tables, hightops, chairs and stools. In contrast to the (dare I say) monastic vibe, tarot-inspired posters on the walls feature the beers the company has brewed over the years. 

I later contacted owner Barry Bialik for details on the décor, and he shared that the wood for the bar front was reclaimed from cattle barns that used to be on River Arts District property where New Belgium Brewing is now. Part of the bar is also decorated with an old barrel from Founders Brewing Co. in Michigan. 

We shuffled up to the bar where we met bartender Heather Crosson. She was dang good at her job — making strangers feel like friends, dropping knowledge about the brewery’s history and recipes, offering recommendations for food pairings. As an introvert, I’d be exhausted doing her job for 10 minutes, but she’s been doing it for more than 10 years. She was there when the location opened back in 2013. 

Heather walked us through the food menu. There weren’t a tremendous number of options, but everything looked amazing. A pint of bacon? Yes, please. A couple of us ended up with some tasty burgers, but the more adventurous took her advice and were delighted by the trout tacos and the fish and chips. 

There were four Belgian ales on tap: two high-gravity beers that I dodged plus the Holy Wit and Abby Blonde. Abby, Heather told us, is the name of the owner’s daughter. I asked if the beer is named for the daughter or the daughter for the beer (abbey ale is a style in the Belgian family). She assured me the beer is named for the daughter. 

There were also several Green Man beers available. Heather explained that the two breweries have a very friendly relationship — Thirsty Monk actually does all its brewing in Green Man’s facility. A few Thirsty Monk hard seltzers called “Holy Water” were also on tap. (Ha! I see what they did there.) I was curious about the religious/sacreligious theme of the place, so I poked around online. 

According to a 2019 article in The Beer Connoisseur, Bialik discovered through past-life regression work that he’s the reincarnation of a French monk from the 1500s. And in this life, he’s busy making the world a more pleasant place, not just with beer, but as former chair of Asheville’s Affordable Housing Committee and through his other business, Compact Cottages, which has built over 300 homes in the area.

Sadly, Bialik informed me that due to a decrease in downtown visitor traffic after Helene, Thirsty Monk’s iconic downtown taproom may not reopen. “I’d say about 25% of our staff has moved away from Asheville,” he told me. “We are trying to figure out what to do with the space.”

Friends, that’s heartbreaking. One of the goals of this series is to spotlight local businesses to help revitalize our community post-Helene. However, a lot of breweries haven’t reopened after the storm and may never. As you know, there’s still a lot of work to do — debris to clear, homes to reconstruct, conversations to be had, an economy to rebuild. Let’s do it together.

We meet Wednesdays around 5:30 p.m. Our next meetups are:

Feb. 12 – Oyster House Brewing on Haywood Road

Feb. 19 – Wicked Weed Downtown

Join us if you’d like. You can email me at yearinbeerasheville@gmail.com or just show up.