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.
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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:
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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.