Wow, what a wild weekend. As I mentioned the last few days, the rally was a huge success and a ton of fun. Saturday night I did some internal rallying with some good friends of mine from Real Ale Brewing Co. in Blanco as they came to town and dragged me to a Norwegian Black Metal concert. That type of music isn’t my cup of tea, and I was afraid all the metalheads were going to steal my lunch money – but it’s always good to see my big brothers in the brewing world. For those of you who experienced the RealTail festival last year, you’ll be happy to know we are already thinking about what to do this year.
This morning I met with the owner of a very large (in fact one of the largest, if not the largest) distribution company, who is on board with HB 660 and will be actively helping us get it through. Contrary to what the paid lobbyist for the Wholesale Beer Distributors of Texas thinks, some wholesalers see the future of beer in the craft segment and recognize consumers shifting tastes towards local, artisan products. These folks (who will remain nameless for now) will eventually be deserving of as much credit as myself and my brewpub peers when HB 660 passes.
This blog post was literally just interrupted for 15 minutes as I conducted an interview for KETK, the NBC affiliate in Tyler. Look for the story tomorrow on their website (and of course I’ll have it linked here), and if you live in Tyler you can catch it tonight at 6 and 10.
Wrapping up the coverage Friday’s rally, Univision has a Spanish language piece on the bill which features my good friend Joey Villarreal of Blue Star Brewing Co. dusting off his Spanish skills.
This Week’s Fun Fact
The brewers association has announced that the number of breweries in the United States has passed 1,700. Sadly, Texas only has 43 (or 2.5%) of those. For a state that makes up almost 10% of the beer consumed in the US, that simply isn’t good enough!
