One of the South’s oldest craft breweries is Saint Arnold Brewing Company in Houston. Brock Wagner and Kevin Bartol founded it in 1994 with $500,000 of their own money and $400,000 raised from others. The friends visited as many other craft breweries as they could—there were perhaps 520 altogether, a fraction of the 10,000 or so now—and did a lot of hands-on research.
They would release their first beer, Saint Arnold Amber Ale, that June. But the brewery would become best known for what it called Fancy Lawnmower, which it released at the tail end of summer 2000. The name was a play on the slang “lawnmower beer,” as in a lighter beer you might drink to quench a thirst built up from mowing the lawn.
