Show creator, Kenneth Michael Daniels, was prompted to try his hand at television writing when a fellow graduate placed a classified in the UNC School of Journalism career services mailing list looking for pilots to produce. Agreeing to give him a week to produce a sample, he began to conceptualize a series (initially called BEER NUTS) in April of 2016, a first for the aspiring screenwriter.

Wanting a dramatic premise with legs, the notion of following small business owners through their trials and triumphs took hold. Ideally, whatever story was told, the show would open a window into a world that people were interested in, even passionate about, but which was largely unknown to them. This idea, combined with the notion that the setting should play a central role in the storytelling, made the general concept to become obvious….

The vibrant, artist-friendly “little city, big town” of Asheville, NC is an idyllic and uber-popular mountain enclave unofficially known as Beer City, U.S.A. It is nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains near the Tennessee border, along the Eastern Continental Divide. Its other nickname, The Land of the Sky, in a happy coincidence made it official: LOTS BREWING it was.

With the ever-growing popularity of craft beer in the Western North Carolina region (Asheville itself has the most breweries per capita in the US), the idea of a brewery being at the heart of the show was locked in. LOTS BREWING is the resulting 1-hour drama with comedic elements. Many will refer to it as a dramedy, which is fair since at its heart it’s a show about a bunch of funny people dealing with some serious shit.