Western NC cousins and brewery owners buy back business from Anheuser-Busch

But a pair of Asheville natives have earned themselves a tall one with a decade-long run of success that's put them among the industry's tastemakers.

Nathan Kelischek and Chris Zieber have turned a love for home brewing into a career, creative outlet and way of life for two cousins who would talk shop among beer-loving family members at the holidays.

"The water in western North Carolina is excellent," Zieber said. "More than that, it's the culture that got started 25, 30 years ago that has continued to evolve and success begets success. You have a couple of breweries that are established and they bring in some beer tourism and another one opens and another one and it kind of snowballs into what Asheville is today."

Recently, AMB became the first craft brewers to ever buy themselves back from Anheuser-Busch in a move that signals a win for the little guy in the beer circuit and another step forward for the state's beer scene. Asheville has one of the highest amounts of breweries per capita in the U.S.

The two couldn't disclose the terms of the deal, but took pride in the purchase. AMB's story still has many chapters left and this move gives the guys more reign over what happens next.

"I think that we want to be able to control our legacy and what we leave behind," Kelischek said. "We want to continue to improve western North Carolina."

Kelischek was the resident school brewer at Appalachian State. Zieber attended UNC-Chapel Hill. Both were environmental science majors, so elements of the process came naturally to them. Kelischek wears a shirt labeled with the brewery's core tenets of sustainability, community and philanthropy as an indicator of the sense of responsibility they harbor in running their business.

"This state means a lot to us," he said. "We felt we would do A-B a better service by our own leadership vs. A-B and InBev."

Their products are distributed in North Carolina and South Carolina. One of the more celebrated beverages, Bojangles Hard Sweet Tea, launched in 2022 to much fanfare and social media acclaim. Kelischek said the process was a labor of love and looked like it wasn't going to happen at some points.

"We definitely approached Bojangles and it took almost two years to come to fruition," Kelischek said. "So it was a long project with some pretty key conversations with the leadership at Bojangles to make happen. The recipe development is the thing that took the longest. We had to make sure we had an absolute authentic product to Bojangles and to North Carolina. That was the massive hurdle."

The duo are getting ready to open a new Mills River taproom on June 19. For now, AMB has about 30 employees and will hire more for the new taproom.