BREWING FUN
Special events and games return to taprooms but for how long?
Drag queen Dessie Love-Blake yelled out bingo numbers over the brouhaha of the crowd and the loud humming sound of fans on a particularly sweaty August evening at Eureka Heights Brewing in Houston.
The mood was jovial but focused as attendees studiously scanned their bingo cards. Groups of friends, celebrating birthdays or just the end of a workday, gathered around the communal tables in the warehouselike taproom.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Eureka Heights mostly engaged with its customers via a makeshift drive-thru tent outside the brewery. Now, its regular activities are back in full swing.
Evan Camp, Eureka Heights’ event manager, says drag bingo is a new addition to its roster of events. They hosted one for Pride Month and decided to make it a monthly feature throughout the year. Pre-COVID, the brewery was known for its widely popular happenings, such as themed trivia.
During the brief period of hope after vaccines became available and before the arrival of the delta variant, Houston brewery operators made the decision to scale up their reopenings with events — and they hope these can stick around.
East Downtown’s 8th Wonder Brewery is hosting local bands and DJs on a weekly basis, as well as art shows and food events. Looking to the fall, the team is planning Achtoberfest and their rescheduled 8th annual Celebr8ion. B52 Brewing in Conroe has weekly beer release parties and special beer pairing dinners. Ingenious Brewing offers yoga classes, painting classes, monthly art and food markets, board game nights and crafts for the kids. Nearly every taproom in the Houston area has something going on on a weekly or monthly basis.
Events such as bingo and trivia are almost as important to a brewery as the beer itself. They
provide entertainment for the local community in a laid-back, often kid- and pet-friendy setting. Sometimes, they also help other businesses in town.
After a long hiatus, Saint Arnold Brewing’s famous pub crawl returned in July. Chief marketing officer Lennie Ambrose says the event, which the brewery has run since the mid-1990s, is a way to give back to the accounts that support them throughout the year by carrying their beers.
The first pub crawl since the pandemic brought 1,500 people to downtown Houston, a neighborhood that went through a particularly challenging time during lockdown.
“I don’t know another brewery that can bring that amount of people out to spend money at places that need it as bad as us,” says Asa Hanrahan, the national beer director for Flying Saucer, a bar on the pub crawl route.
Some days during the pandemic, Flying Saucer didn’t see a single customer for six or seven hours, and its daily revenue could be as low as $200. Saint Arnold’s event brought in $14,000 in sales, the bar’s best day since COVID-19.
“The vibe was fantastic,” says Hanrahan. “To go a whole year so slow was heartbreaking. To get back to that level again was everything to me.”
At No Label Brewing in Katy, events have returned, and so have members of the community who use the brewery as a meeting spot for celebrations, church groups and clubs of all kinds.
One of them is Katy 4F Bass Club, a fishing club founded in the early 1990s that has more than 20 members today. President Tom Rieger and web administrator David Huezo say meeting at No Label has changed their group for the better.
The club holds fishing tournaments on the second Saturday of every month at various lakes in southeast Texas. But on the first Thursday of the month, they have meetings to go over administrative issues and other details. For years they hosted these in a conference room before deciding to meet at No Label; shortly after, the pandemic forced them to gather virtually on Zoom.
When members were comfortable venturing out again, Katy 4F returned to the No Label taproom, planting a fishing pole with the club flag by a table.
What used to be a somewhat formal meeting that felt like another life obligation, turned into a more social occasion. The meeting portion now lasts only 15 or 20 minutes, figuring out where they’re fishing and who is fishing. Then they hang out and have guy talk — or rather, fish talk.
“It’s easier to socialize and say: ‘Hey Tom, how’s it going, that was a really nice fish you caught last time,’ ” says Huezo.
Members are free to come and go as they please, stop by briefly or stay a while, grab a beer and some food, or not. Rieger and Huezo noticed it helped new members feel more welcome and created bonds within the team that carried over on the water.
“It’s just a more inviting atmosphere than 10-15 guys sitting in a conference room somewhere,” says Rieger. “It creates more camaraderie.”
Jodi and Arthur Vasquez were at a Eureka Heights trivia night very shortly before businesses shut down in March 2020. Avid Houston beer enthusiasts, they supported breweries as much as they could during the pandemic by ordering to-go and participating in events like the Houston Beer Run. Since reopening, the couple has been doing the rounds of brewery events.
“I love drag queens,” says Jodi, delighted to be back at Eureka Heights for the first time since the pandemic.
Dessie Love-Blake, clad in a glittery silver dress and matching top hat, worked the crowd between bingo rounds and performed “What’s Up” by 4 Non Blondes as people swayed their arms with every “hey-ey-ey-ey.”
Drag bingo and other events happening at breweries around Houston right now are just a taste of the “normal” everyone is craving so desperately as we slog through year two of the pandemic. A new surge in COVID-19 cases, due to the highly contagious delta variant, makes the future of these newly returned events uncertain.
At Saint Arnold, Ambrose is not particularly optimistic.
“If you had asked me right after that pub crawl if we would be doing another one, I would have instantly said yes,” he says. “But I can’t say that for sure right now.”