Devil's Foot Beverage Co: The Asheville Craft Soda Story

In 2015, Ben Colvin's wife Vashti found out she was pregnant. To celebrate, they went where anyone in Asheville goes to celebrate. A brewery.

The only thing on the menu she could drink was tap water.

That is the whole origin story, and it is worth sitting with for a second. A city with more breweries per capita than almost anywhere in America had built an entire hospitality culture with exactly one option for the person not drinking. Water. Not a bad option. Just the only one.

Colvin and his friend Jacob Baumann had already been brewing ginger beer in a backyard, mostly as a bourbon mixer. Colvin was working for a conservation nonprofit. Baumann was a professional drummer. Neither of them was a beverage executive, and neither of them, by Colvin's own admission, had any special insight into where the market was going. They just noticed a hole and walked into it.

Nine years later, the hole they walked into is a billion-dollar category.

Why it's called that

The kitchen filled up with ginger root during test batches. Knobby, gnarled, forked, piled on every counter. Vashti finally looked at the mess and said it looked like a whole bunch of devil's feet.

The name stuck. It is a better name than anything a branding agency would have produced, and it does the one thing a beverage name has to do: it tells you what is in the can before you read the label. Fresh ginger root, and a lot of it.

There is also a Sherlock Holmes story called "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot," built around a fictional root poison. Colvin knows about it. It was not the inspiration. The inspiration was a countertop.

Farm-to-can is not a slogan

Every soda brand says "real ingredients." Devil's Foot trademarked a process and then published the farms.

Their Farm-to-Can page names the suppliers. Bell Honey, a South Carolina beekeeper who started with two colonies and now runs over a thousand. Perry's Berry's, who have planted more than three thousand blueberry bushes since 2013. Bush-N-Vine, a York County farm that has been in the Hall family for over 150 years. Cedar Grove. Rhodes Berry Farm in Hendersonville. The organic ginger is washed and processed the day after it comes out of the ground in Peru.

Sweetening is organic cane sugar and regional honey. No high-fructose corn syrup. No artificial flavors.

Here is the number that matters, and it is the number Baumann leads with when he talks to buyers.

Break that down by SKU and the spread is real:

The Root Beer is the ceiling, at 20 grams, and Devil's Foot markets it as running roughly half the sugar of a conventional root beer. If you are writing a menu claim or a shelf tag, "20 grams or less" is the defensible line. Not 18.

Then there is the byproduct program, which is the part most people miss. Devil's Foot zests hundreds of pounds of organic citrus every month before juicing it, and instead of composting the zest, ginger pulp, and pressed blueberries, they vacuum-seal it and sell it to other makers. The program is called Full Fruit Life. Current partners include Asheville Tea Company, Archetype Brewing, Burial Beer, Eda Rhyne Distillery, Green Man Brewing, and Well Seasoned Table.

A soda company that turned its waste stream into a revenue line, and then handed that revenue line to its competitors' neighbors. That is not a sustainability page. That is an operating decision.

The Zero Proof Series is the real product

The ginger beers built the company. Sparkling Lemonade, added third, became the best seller after Colvin watched festival-goers pour San Pellegrino into 35-gram lemonade to get bubbles and figured he could do better.

But the Zero Proof Series is what makes Devil's Foot a bar account rather than a grocery account. These are ready-to-drink non-alcoholic cocktails, and almost every one is a collaboration with a brewery or a maker:

Note the pattern. Devil's Foot does not build these alone. Nearly every zero-proof SKU carries a partner's name, which means it arrives at a bar with a second brand vouching for it. Hi-Wire put the Paloma on tap in its North Carolina and Tennessee taprooms. Head brewer Hank Marshall's framing was that it gave guests skipping alcohol something festive rather than something apologetic.

That is a distribution strategy disguised as a recipe.

Then the river came

On September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene put a thousand-year flood into Western North Carolina. The state's death toll reached 107. Asheville lost water, power, and communications. Breweries went 54 days without clean water.

Devil's Foot's Sweeten Creek Road facility became a distribution hub. Not for soda. For pallets of canned water and food, stacked higher than anything they had ever run through the building. Staff whose own homes were damaged showed up and worked anyway.

NoDa Brewing, out of Charlotte, sent trucks of water.

A year later, Devil's Foot released its first-ever sparkling water in collaboration with NoDa. Blackberry Sparkling Water, one gram of sugar, made with North Carolina blackberries. The tagline on the can is "Stronger Through Water," and proceeds support Asheville GreenWorks. Two more recovery SKUs followed: a Blackberry Blueberry Lemonade with Bear's Smokehouse funding mental health support for food and beverage workers, and a Chai Tea & Lemon with Asheville Tea Company, born in the weeks after the storm.

You can be cynical about cause marketing. This is not that. This is a nine-person company that turned three of its production runs into a ledger of who showed up.

The category caught up

Here is where the story stops being charming and starts being commercial. The Brewers Association, working from NIQ scan data, reports the move from 2021 through 2025, and NIQ's own 2025 year-in-review put the non-alcohol category past $1 billion in sales.

NA went from 1.1 percent of beer volume to 2.5 percent in half a decade. But that 92 percent figure is the one to sit with. This is not a sober market. It is an occasion market. The same customer orders a mezcal cocktail at nine and a Negroni with no gin at eleven, or drinks Fuego Ginger Beer at a Tuesday lunch because they have three more meetings. The industry calls it zebra striping. What it means for an operator is that a non-alcoholic program does not cannibalize the bar. It extends the check.

Devil's Foot did not chase this wave. They started brewing in 2017, before Dry January was a marketing calendar item, and they scaled by adding flavors instead of adding claims. They now run more than twenty SKUs, brewed over 4,000 barrels in 2023, and hold statewide distribution across the Carolinas, Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, and Colorado. They still have nine employees.

Where to find them

The Mule is Devil's Foot's tasting room in Biltmore Village, a 305-capacity full-service bar and private event space. Draft soda, beer, wine, cocktails, mocktails, house-made tonic. It opened in October 2022, two months after the company brewed its first batch on Sweeten Creek Road.

It is, in a real sense, the answer to the question Vashti Colvin asked without meaning to in 2015. A room where every drinking choice is a choice, and none of them is tap water by default.