PHOTOS Construction update on New Belgium’s new Asheville brewery

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Construction continues apace at the site of New Belgium Brewing’s new East Coast brewery on Craven Street in Asheville. I shot these photos earlier this week. I recently caught up with Susanne Hackett, a spokeswoman for New Belgium in town. Here are the highlights:

Pile-driving on the site restarted this week and will go for another week to 10 days. The work further stabilizes part of the property, according to Hackett. This is the last round of noisy pile-driving, which is jarring to neighbors. New Belgium will host a potluck dinner for neighbors in the next couple of weeks to celebrate the official end of all pile-driving, Hackett said.

-The walls of the kegging and packaging hall to the north end of the site recently went up. The walls have a distinctive saw-toothed edge profile, which makes it visually interesting and could allow for the installation of solar panels later on, Hackett said.

-At New Belgium’s distribution center in Enka, the roof of the building is going on. The building should be finished by spring 2015. New Belgium originally planned to build a 100,000-square-foot distribution center, with consideration for expansion later on. But brewery leadership decided to build it all at once, so the facility is officially 141,000 square feet. That’s massive. All of the New Belgium’s packaged beer will be moved to this site, then distributed up and down the East Coast.

-Sometime early next year, the brewhouse vessels and fermentation tanks will arrive in a Charleston, S.C., port from Germany, and then moved to Asheville. Construction crews are scheduled to pourthe brewhouse foundation this weekend, Hackett said.

-There are a couple of New Belgium jobs in Asheville listed on its website – an executive assistant job and a mechanical engineering job. The bulk of public hiring will be done early next year. New Belgium will have officials at the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce’s Homecoming Job Fair on Jan. 7 to answer questions from potential employees.

-A couple of roads have been re-aligned at the site. Here’s the press release from the city of Asheville:

The Craven Street improvement project underway in west Asheville moves to the next phase this week. The stormwater culvert section of the project underway since mid-July is complete and crews will shift to the realignment of Craven Street, Emma Road and Hazel Mill Road. Work along this section is anticipated to take through the spring of 2015. During that time, Craven Street will be closed between Waynesville Avenue and Hazel Mill Road, while a new four-way stop at Craven Street, Hazel Mill Road and Emma Road will be in place by the end of the week.

The section of Craven Street between Georgia Street and Waynesville Avenue will be open beginning Tuesday November 11, allowing access to Haywood Road from Waynesville Avenue.

The Craven Street improvement project is located in the area surrounding the New Belgium Brewery construction site and is the City of Asheville’s portion of a public-private partnership with the State of North Carolina, North Carolina Golden Leaf Foundation, NCDOT, Clean Water Management Trust Fund, Buncombe County, the Economic Development Administration, and the Asheville-Buncombe Economic Development Coalition and others in support of New Belgium’s investment of $175 million in the community.