On Jan. 1, local middle school teacher Christopher Arbor and his friends launched a quest to visit one Asheville brewery each week throughout 2025 in the order they opened. Their first stop was the city’s first brewery, Highland Brewing. Stop No. 2: Jack of the Wood, original home of Green Man Brewery.
Driving downtown with my friends, I might as well have been in a DeLorean. I felt like we were going back in time to when Asheville was a sleepy mountain hamlet. Blame it on Tropical Storm Helene or the arctic temperatures, but downtown was a bit of a ghost town. I mean, I can’t remember the last time I was able to find ample street parking.
We parked right on Patton Avenue, and as we hurried inside Jack of the Wood, I was reminded of the iconic scene from the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy steps into Oz for the first time. Except instead of shifting from sepia to technicolor with a rising choir of munchkins, we traded the grays of urban January for the stained glass and dark wood of an Irish pub, complete with a live Celtic jam session playing at just the right volume — audible but not obnoxious.
People who know me know I’m most at home in the woods. A close second is Jack of the Wood. Everything is inviting: soft lighting, earthy colors, gentle music. Even warmer than the atmosphere are the people.
The rest of our crew of 10 arrived — by rough numbers, we were about half of the customers. We ordered our beers and food, talking in soft voices that still carried. How are the acoustics of that place so magical? Whether crowded or empty, the noise level always seems to stay at a gentle murmur.
My reverie was broken when I heard a grayhead say, “It’s so cold out there, your farts freeze before they leave your pants.” He didn’t say it with an Irish accent, but I remember it with one.
In Celtic folklore, the Green Man is a nature spirit and often something of a trickster. In Asheville lore, Green Man is the city’s second oldest brewery. Little did I know, it’s also something of a trickster — at least for me.
My Green Man porter arrived, and it tasted the way the room felt: Utterly comforting. I asked the waitress some silly question about brewing, and I was thunderstruck when she kindly told me that Jack of the Wood wasn’t connected to Green Man Brewery and hadn’t been for an incredible 15 years.
What the what? Where have I been for the past decade and a half? Lost in the woods like the legendary Green Man himself? This venture was feeling more and more like time travel, only now I’d arrived in an unfamiliar future.
I did some research, digging into the breweries’ online “about” pages, old Xpress stories and reporting from late Asheville beer writer Tony Kiss as well as other sources. As is often the case, the truth is far more complicated than the lore. Green Man isn’t technically Asheville’s second oldest brewery —it’s its third. Benefit Brewing operated out of Jack of the Wood from 1997 until 1999, when owners Jonas Rembert and Andy Dahm left to start French Broad Brewing Co.
At that time, Jack of the Wood owners Joan and Joe Eckert renamed the brewery Green Man. In 2005, they moved the operation to 23 Buxton Ave. on the South Slope, calling the locale Dirty Jack’s.
Green Man Brewery was bought in 2010 by Denis Thies, thus severing any official connection to Jack of the Wood. Thies also bought the neighboring three-story building, which he opened as the Green Mansion in 2016. French Broad Brewing was sold in 2017 to Sarah and Paul Casey, and somewhere in there, the name changed to French Broad River Brewing Co.
I tend to think of breweries in fairly static terms, but as Benefit Brewing shows, these businesses are constantly evolving — changing owners, operators, locations, equipment and even names. In that way, I suppose, they’re like you and me and this crazy city we live in: always in flux.
My fish and chips arrived. My friends and I toasted to Asheville’s past, present and future, and we discussed the philosophical thought experiment the Ship of Theseus: If you replace every piece of a boat one piece at a time, is it still the same ship?
Our next stop is Asheville Brewing Co. on Merrimon Avenue. Eventually we’ll end up at Green Man on the South Slope. Join us if you like.
