Wedding DJ at Highlands Brewery in Asheville, NC

The Space

Highland Brewing was founded on April 21, 1994, by Oscar Wong, a retired engineer who had immigrated from Jamaica in the 1960s to study structural and civil engineering at Notre Dame, and it started small, brewing in a downtown Asheville basement using retrofitted Sealtest dairy equipment Wong adapted himself. It was Asheville’s first legal craft brewery since Prohibition, and it is still the third oldest craft brewery operating in North Carolina today.

After thirteen years downtown, Highland relocated in 2006 to the former home of Blue Ridge Motion Picture Studios, a 40-acre property in East Asheville that has since grown into a 180,000-square-foot campus with a taproom, a meadow, a packaging hall, an Event Center, and a Rooftop Bar. We have worked a wedding here before, and the brewery is now led by Leah Wong Ashburn, Oscar’s daughter, who took over as President and CEO.

Capacity & Layout

The Event Center holds 200 guests for a seated dinner, 350 for a standing or partially seated reception, and up to 250 in a theater-style setup, which makes it the venue’s largest and most flexible room depending on the format you choose. The Barrel Room offers a smaller, more intimate option, seating 80 for dinner, 100 standing, or 64 when a ceremony and reception share the same space.

The Rooftop Bar overlooks the Blue Ridge Mountains and is open seasonally, giving couples an additional layer to the day beyond the two main event spaces, whether for cocktail hour or photos with a view. Across the Event Center, the Barrel Room, and the seasonal rooftop, Highland Brewing offers real range in both room size and atmosphere within one property.

Amenities

The Event Center comes with a stage and audio-visual equipment already built in, which is a meaningful head start for a wedding day, and the Barrel Room adds barrel racks and its own private patio for a more contained, rustic feel. The property also holds Wedding Wire’s Couples’ Choice Award for 2022, 2023, and 2024, and The Knot’s Best of Weddings for 2024 and 2025.

Beyond the event spaces themselves, the 40-acre campus includes five sand volleyball courts and an 18-hole disc golf course, giving guests something active to do if the wedding weekend stretches beyond a single evening. The property also carries the sixth largest solar array of any American craft brewery, a detail that speaks to how the campus has been built out since the 2006 move.

Location & Getting There

Highland Brewing sits in East Asheville on the 40-acre campus it has occupied since 2006, with parking available on site and the meadow and recreation areas giving the property genuine outdoor breathing room beyond the buildings themselves. It is a working brewery as well as an event venue, so the surrounding taproom and grounds carry an active, lived-in feel rather than a space set up only for private events.

Between the enclosed Event Center with its built-in stage and AV, the more intimate Barrel Room with its private patio, and the open-air, seasonal Rooftop Bar, sound needs differ room by room here: the Event Center is built to hold and project sound cleanly indoors, the Barrel Room is small enough to fill easily, and the rooftop, being open to the mountains, asks a DJ to plan for wind and open air rather than four contained walls.