The Low Down

The bar has a fig tree out back. Its leaves went into an extraction the bartenders posted in October 2025, then into Malachite, a green gin cocktail made with East Fork Pottery for the studio’s seasonal colors. Sepia was the other half: whiskey and espresso. Drinks at The Low Down start as projects.

In September 2026 the bar was fermenting a pine-needle soda for the fall and winter menu. In 2025 it was summer green bitters, made from the herb bed before the first frost. The Blue Ghost carries the same habit into a martini: gin washed with blue cheese and olive oil, extra dry vermouth, brine, and a hand-stuffed blue cheese olive. The Aeroplane Over the Sea is the autumn drink, rotating in with bourbon, Amaro Meletti, Bauchant, Earl Grey, cinnamon, nutmeg and lemon. Two zero-proof drinks use Drømme’s adaptogen spirits, and the upstairs neighbor Hop Ice Cream once supplied salted watermelon sorbet for a float and a tequila cocktail.

Casey Campfield, who opened The Crow & Quill downtown in 2014, gutted the old Black Cloud space in October 2023 and rebuilt it. Red oak and Baltic birch frame a canopy bar modeled on an English pub. J-Krush of Shapesmith Studio cut the fretwork, Tom Gibson of Ironwood Studios did the woodwork, and Story Blowers made the signage. Four booth sections and stools seat about forty. A shuffleboard table takes the floor. Just Economics of Western North Carolina lists the bar as a certified living-wage employer.

All of that sounds fussy on paper. At the bar it mostly means the olives are stuffed by hand. Take a stool and ask what is fermenting.