This is the first half of a story of nice things happening to nice people (who worked very, very hard to make nice things happen).
I grew up in Houston (as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before), and when I left there 30 years ago there was no craft brewing there. Around the time I was leaving, Brock Wagner was moving there from Cincinnati to attend Rice University. Somewhere along the line he noticed that Houston was the largest city in the country without a microbrewery . He decided to do something about that and started the St. Arnold Brewing Company in 1994. It’s now the oldest craft brewer in the State of Texas. They only distribute in Texas, which would be a three or four state region anywhere else.
Carla and I visited there about a year-and-a-half ago when they were preparing to move from the industrial park where they started to a new facility near downtown. We visited there again last week to see the new place. We thought it would be neat to run the pictures from the old place this week. We’ll run pictures from the new place next week.
To give you a sense of what this beer means in Houston, they release a single-batch called “Divine Reserve” once a year. Today is the day for Divine Reserve #10 to hit the stores. A liquor store downtown got 95 cases to sell. 110 people were in line a half-hour before the store opened. They had to tell people not to bother coming down because there wouldn’t be any left.







To be continued …