Black Mountain couple opens Nutmeg, a sourdough-focused bakery

In downtown Black Mountain, sourdough is not a side note anymore. At 102 West State Street, Adrianne Welch and Matt Holcomb have turned the former Hey Hey Cupcake shop into Nutmeg, a bakery built around naturally leavened bread and the daily grind it takes to keep it on the shelf.

Welch and Holcomb took over the space in October 2025 and rebranded it as Nutmeg in February 2026. The bakery now focuses on sourdough products and bakes loaves every day, a rhythm that matters in a town where fresh bread can sell through fast and where customers already proved there was appetite for it. The former business, Hey Hey Cupcake, had been selling sourdough loaves alongside cupcakes, cinnamon rolls and whoopie pies, and a Visit Black Mountain NC listing said those loaves sold out daily.

That kind of demand is exactly what makes daily sourdough production hard to fake. A bakery can name a starter and talk about fermentation, but it still has to keep a culture active, build dough on schedule and turn out loaves while they are still at their best. Nutmeg’s model points to the discipline behind the loaf: the starter has to be fed, the dough has to be mixed and shaped, and the bake has to land in time for customers who expect bread to be there when the doors open. For home bakers, the lesson is practical rather than mystical. A reliable sourdough routine depends on matching starter strength to bake day, planning the mix ahead of time and keeping the schedule regular enough that the culture stays lively.

The bakery also carries a bit of lineage with it. A separate Mountain Xpress sourdough story traced the local artisan-bread scene to a San Francisco-made starter named Troubles, underscoring how much identity can be wrapped into a culture of flour and water. Nutmeg leans into that same mix of old-world fermentation and modern branding, with sourdough standing as the core draw rather than a novelty.

That fits Black Mountain’s broader food and beverage scene, which has been described as booming as operators expand and new concepts open downtown. Nutmeg is stepping into that momentum with a familiar address, a known owner team and a product that only works if it is made every day. In a bakery like this, the shelf stays full because the schedule does, too.