Mississippi’s First Bottles of Beer

If you’re a beer lover, I imagine Mississippi must not be the best place to live. During the last thirty years, while most of the rest of the country was discovering craft beer with wild abandon, less than a half-dozen microbreweries or brewpubs have opened. Of those, only two are left. And one of those, Kershenstine Diamond, is a contract brewery that makes their beer elsewhere in the Midwest. So that leaves just one brewery currently brewing in the entire state.

That brewery, Lazy Magnolia, is located in Kiln, Mississippi, which perhaps more famous as the hometown of Brett Favre, quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. They have also recently become the first brewery in the state to produce bottled beer with the release of their Southern Pecan, a nut brown ale, in six-packs. In fact, it’s the first time since Prohibition that bottled beer has been brewed and bottled in Mississippi.

From an article in a local newspaper, the Clarion Ledger:

There’s just one issue.

“They’re having problems keeping up with demand. They’ve got people really wanting the product,” distributor Frank Drennan of Capital City Beverages said. “On the bottling, they’re in the learning process. They’re trying to make sure they’re doing it correctly.”

Lazy Magnolia brewmaster and co-founder Leslie Henderson said bigger fermentation tanks will arrive in April. They will triple the brewery’s output to more than 30,000 gallons a month. By mid year, she hopes to be bottling 5,000 cases a month, up from about 700 now.

“We knew all along if we were successful, we would have to bottle. We decided to do draft only at first to see if there was a market. By the time we started bottling, the demand for it was so crazy we could not keep up,” Henderson, a chemical engineer from the Winston County area, said.

The brewery sits alongside the airport runway in Kiln, a Hurricane Katrina-ravaged town of 2,000 on the Gulf Coast. The company’s warehouse building is nondescript to the point of invisibility, the kind of place you pass three times before realizing it’s occupied.

But two of the beers crafted there took podium finishes at the 2006 Beer World Cup. Lazy Magnolia’s brands hold cult status with shaggy young men and middle-aged lawyers in dim roadside bars throughout Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida panhandle. Henderson plans to expand to Tennessee and south Louisiana this year.

I’m sure it will be some time before we see this beer in California, but I certainly applaud their efforts in being a pioneer in their own state. Well done.