Prior to starting his Black Mountain distillery, where he spends his days converting regionally grown grains into an award-winning lineup of whiskeys and gins, he was a cheesemaker at WNC’s beloved Spinning Spider Creamery and Looking Glass Creamery, turning goat and cows’ milk into some of the most cherished local cheeses. 

“It’s this value-added side of agriculture that I like,” he says: grains into spirits; milk into cheese. 

Given his reliance on the yields of the land, Goldberg says he feels uniquely bound to protect it. So when he started Oak & Grist in 2015, he looked for ways to minimize and offset any impact his new business was going to make on it. The distillery is now a certified carbon-neutral operation and has become a local leader in environmental stewardship. 

“Distilling is a pretty resource-heavy process,” he says. “As a human being on the planet, this is literally the very least I can do.” 

Oak & Grist Founder William Goldberg

More recently, when he discovered that his cardboard boxes were coming from manufacturers hundreds of miles away in the northeastern U.S., which meant longer transportation times and more emissions being released into the atmosphere, he hunted down a business in nearby Tennessee that was making 100% post-consumer cardboard and quickly made a switch. 

“It’s my personal belief that this world was not made exclusively for us,” Goldberg says. “We share it and it’s our responsibility to leave it better than we found it. We can’t just take and take and take.” 

Growing up in New York, Goldberg developed an early appreciation for the health of the planet. His childhood home sat next to a valuable watershed, and he would routinely play in the nearby woods, climbing trees that grew strong roots and pushed magnificently into the sky. “My mother was an avid gardener and we ate vegetables from our backyard and purchased food locally,” he says. “My childhood was a crucial time, learning to appreciate the wild world and the environment.” 

When it came time to attend college, Goldberg enrolled in Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, earning a degree in sustainable agriculture. 

After graduation, a career in cheesemaking dovetailed into whiskey distilling, which blended his love of single-malt whiskey with his respect for regional agriculture. Oak & Grist sources its grains from the Asheville-based Riverbend Malt House, which in turn buys from farmers within 500 miles of Asheville. The milling, fermenting and distilling are all done on-site, making Oak & Grist a unique “grain-to-glass” operation. 

In 2022, Goldberg started to look for more formal ways to button up his environmental impact. So he partnered with ClimateHound—a company co-founded by Palmer Fox, former bar manager at Bull & Beggar in the River Arts District—whose mission is to help food and beverage businesses reduce their carbon footprint and become carbon neutral. 

Oak & Grist has been certified as a carbon-neutral business.

Sometimes the path toward carbon neutrality means taking steps to reduce CO2 on-site, like installing solar panels or using energy-efficient appliances; other times it means offsetting the emissions that can’t be eliminated by financing other CO2 reduction projects around the world. ClimateHound helps businesses in the food and beverage industries pursue both of those efforts. 

Oak & Grist became certified as a carbon neutral business in 2022. Goldberg believes that the solar panels alone have prevented 167,000 pounds of CO2 from entering the atmosphere—the equivalent of planting 3,500 mature trees. 

Being well-versed in the scale and scope of climate change—a global problem generated by the burning of fossil fuels for electricity generation, manufacturing and transportation—Goldberg knows that his actions alone can’t solve the problem. But he embraces a mind-set of personal accountability that he encourages others to adopt. 

“When I have that feeling of ‘Why even bother?’ I combat that feeling by reminding myself that if everyone has that mentality, then nothing is ever going to change. If we all just walk by things, then we’re never going to get anywhere.”