Highland keeps its head: favoring cold logic over what's cool, Oscar Wong became the beer baron of one of America's hottest brewing towns.

• Author: Gray, Tim
• Position: COVER STORY - Cover story - Company overview

That Oscar P. Wong isn't cool might well be among the most salient assets he brings to Highland Brewing Co. A 69-year-old engineer, the Asheville brewery's owner and president spent much of his life in what many of his customers might consider a humdrum industry--electric utilities. His particular expertise was about as hip as an aging Buick: analyzing the safety of power plants and disposing of low-level radioactive waste. He wears the sort of ankle-high zip-up boots last regularly seen when Elvis played Vegas. When Highland's young workers start blasting reggae or heavy metal, drowning out conversation, he shakes his head and gives a grandfatherly shrug. This is not a guy who does air guitar.

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Yet the business he chose for his second career thrives on cool. Its leading practitioners--and often their businesses--strive to show how hip they are. Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Rehoboth Beach, Del., boasts of his surfing and brews concoctions that are as much dares as drinks. He has partnered with a University of Pennsylvania archeologist to recreate an ancient Honduran chocolate-based beverage and a 9th-century Finnish beer flavored with juniper berries and black tea. Then there's Garrett Oliver, brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery in New York. He writes op-ed pieces for The New York Times and has appeared on such cable shows as Emeril Live and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Both their breweries feature pubs where pilgrims can worship at the taps. It's routine for a craft brewery to have a home church, serving up its creations alongside cruelty-free burgers and locally grown greens. If the operation is wind-powered, like New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins, Colo., so much the better. Sponsoring a big-time bike race brings even more cachet; the link between cycling and craft brews is nearly as sturdy as that between banking and golf. Both appeal to 20-to-40-something college-educated men. Harpoon Brewery in Boston stages a 150-mile ride to Windsor, Vt., each summer.

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For 15 years, Wong did none of those things. He shuns splashy marketing, figuring a tasty, consistent product mostly sells itself. He has expanded only when confident that demand will cover the increased cost. He approaches brewing like the engineer he is, as a series of problems to be analyzed and solved. But if not cool, he has been cunning--making financially conservative calls that have enabled sales to grow to about $5 million last year. Highland is the oldest craft brewer in the state dedicated solely to production of beer. (Weeping Radish in Currituck County and Red Oak in Whitsett are older but began as brew pubs.) It's also North Carolina's largest, Wong says, based on total volume. In the Southeast, only Abita in Louisiana and Sweetwater in Georgia are bigger.

Craft brewing sprang up in reaction to the bland sameness of American lagers like Bud, Miller and Coors, crisp, smooth and with only a hint of hops. Craft brewers offer a variety of styles and flavors, and Highland's include a stout, a porter, an Oktoberfest, a wheat beer and a variety of other ales. "Craft brewing" is often used synonymously with microbrewing--making beer in far-smaller quantities than global conglomerates such as Anheuser-Busch InBev and SAB Miller. But as micro-brewers went mainstream and began distributing nationally, craft brewing got co-opted. Boston Beer Co., maker of Sam Adams, now brews 2 million barrels--62 million gallons--a year. Megabrewers have horned in, too, offering faux micros such as Molson Coors' Blue Moon and Anheuser-Busch InBev's Shock Top Belgian White.

The quest for cool, along with lust for expansion, has consigned many North Carolina craft breweries to failure. The business can slurp up money like a drunk swilling a tallboy, leaving investors little other than a hangover. Among the casualties were Johnson Beer in Charlotte, Loggerhead in Greensboro, Cottonwood in Boone and Cross Creek in Fayetteville. A site in Raleigh--lately if...