TAP INTO THE ISLAND
That you can find good craft beer on The Strand is no longer a surprise. Friend of Beer, TX Justin Strait made sure of that when he opened Brews Brothers several years ago on the Galveston tourist district’s main drag. The subsequent launch of Galveston Island Brewing Co. and its popular Tiki Wheat has locals and visitors alike requesting locally made beer.
But Mike Dean, an island native, a longtime bar and restaurant owner and a big promoter of his hometown, has done his share to promote Galveston’s craft-beer scene as well. On Saturday, for example, his Yaga’s franchise is hosting its ninth annual beer tasting event. It coincides with the festive Chili Quest cook-off.
If experience is any guide — tickets for the beer tasting have sold out the past three years — more than 400 people will show up to sample the wares from top local and national breweries.
In all, about 30 breweries are scheduled to bring about 100 different beers. Dean promises at least seven hard-to-find brews, including a bourbon-barrel-aged stout from the now nationally recognized Galveston Island Brewing.
The festival’s continued success seems to confirm what Dean reports he is finding at his five bars and restaurants: craft beer has long surpassed the fad stage, even in a tourist-reliant beach economy that is sensitive to shifting trends.
“It’s a growing, viable market,” Dean said. “It’s going to be around for a bit.”
That wasn’t assured a decade ago, even as Houston’s beer scene began to take off. Dean acknowledges that the beer list at his Yaga’s Cafe, was hardly adventurous.
“I guess Red Stripe would have been our exotic beer,” he said.
Today, though, Yaga’s has a much broader and more palatable lineup. Dean also boosted the number of craft offering at the beach-friendly Float to appeal to a 30-and-under crowd that seems to be drinking less than previous generations but demanding more variety. He runs a brewpub, Beerfoot Brewery, whose first brewer, Mark Dell’Osso, went on to found Galveston Island Brewing.
At BLVD, a fine-dining seafood restaurant on the Seawall where wine accounts for 80 percent of alcohol sales, Dean keeps Tiki Wheat on tap.
“Now, at the restaurant, the question is, ‘What’s local?’ ” he said.
In addition to such national favorites as Sierra Nevada, Bells and Boulevard, the Saturday beer festival will feature some two dozen Texas breweries, including 8th Wonder, Back Pew, Deep Ellum, Karbach and Saint Arnold. Galveston Island Brewing, which medaled at the Great American Beer Festival in October, will be pouring at least four of its beers.
So treat yourself to a trip to Galveston this weekend. Check out the beer festival and support the other enterprises that are committed to the continued celebration of BOI — beer on the island.
Full disclosure: I will be at the festival to sell and autograph copies of “Houston Beer: A Heady History of Brewing in the Bayou City,” which covers the early Galveston breweries as well.