Hot cider: with a new take on an ancient beverage, two Asheville friends brew up a business in North Carolina's apple country.

• Author: Williams, Allison
• Position: PICTURE THIS

Watch out beer, hard cider is coming for you. A craft-brewing craze has swept the South as North Carolina and other states lifted Prohibition-era laws that limited alcohol content, opening the door for more robust varieties. In the last decade, the number of jobs in the Tar Heel state's craft-brewing industry shot up to more than 10,000 with an estimated economic impact of $1.2 billion, according to the N.C. Craft Brewers Guild. The number of breweries rocketed to 135, many of them in Buncombe County. All of which led Asheville friends Trevor Baker, 39, and Lief Stevens, 36, to wonder: With so many thirsty folks and nearby orchards full of apples, where were the cideries?

The way they tell it, opening Noble Cider was that simple. Baker had just been laid off from his job as the account manager at an online company. His wife, Joanna, was a singer in Stevens' party band, Orange Krush. Over drinks of cider, naturally, Joanna half-jokingly suggested that they open their own ciderworks. Three years later, the pair have added two partners and moved from Fletcher to a new, 9,000-square-foot west Asheville building where they plan to press 50,000 gallons of cider this year. It's a far cry from their first 2,000-gallon batch, which sold out in three months.

All signs point to a craving for cider. Cider sales spiked 75% between November 2013 and November 2014, beating craft beer, which rose 20% in the same 12-month period. The top cider maker, Cincinnati-based Angry Orchard, had sales of $208 million last year and holds more than 50% market share of U.S. cider sales after less than five years in business. It is owned by Boston Beer Co., maker of Samuel Adams and the nation's largest craft brewer. No. 2 cider maker Woodchuck, owned by Ireland's C&C Group PLC, recently opened a new $30 million headquarters in Middlebury, Vt. A sure sign that an old drink has new life: Dominant U.S. brewers MillerCoors LLC and Anheuser-Busch InBev NV in recent years introduced their own ciders.

In North Carolina, Noble was one of the first cideries, a surprise to Baker and Stevens because the state is the seventh biggest U.S. apple producer. Their bona fides were restricted to their consumption of cider and their English ancestry. Each has a parent who emigrated from England, where the Romans found folks guzzling the ancient drink 2,000 years ago. Baker signed up for a cider-making course...