While other kids were enjoying vacations to Disneyland, Brock Wagner’s family was taking him on trips to the vineyards of Burgundy in France, where his love and appreciation for food and wine began. Not too long after, while his peers at Rice University were trying to get their hands on cheap suds, he discovered the world of “interesting beer,” he says.

“One day my RA was pulling out his homebrew equipment, and I was like, ‘Oh, can I help you?’” Wagner says. “So, he taught me to homebrew, and the bug caught me—or really, I caught the bug. And after graduation I just kept brewing, and it became this real passion. I realized I wanted to do that for the rest of my life.”

Fast-forward to today: Wagner’s business, Saint Arnold Brewing Company, is celebrating its 30th anniversary and has made a name for itself as the oldest craft brewery in Texas, with more than 100 beers released since the concept was born in 1994.

The brewery will officially hit 30 years on June 8, and to celebrate, Saint Arnold is throwing a concert and festival at its Northside taproom and beer garden. Doors will open at 11am, and the entertainment will run between 2 and 10pm. For the first time, Houston musicians such as Ken Franklin, Robert Ellis, Fat Tony, Devin the Dude, and Bayou City Funk will come together as the Houston Super Group to perform for all who attend.

A stroll down memory lane

Wagner’s road to success wasn’t an easy one. When the brewery was founded 30 years ago, the world of craft beer wasn’t as robust as it is today—most people drank Miller Lite and other mass-produced beers of that sort. According to the Brewers Association, there were just over 400 breweries in the country at that time, whereas now there are nearly 10,000.

When Wagner began this work, he says he took a leap a faith. After six and a half years in the world of investment banking, he quit his job to pursue his passion. The goal was to bring a change to beer scene in Houston, which at the time was the largest city in the country without a microbrewery.

“I thought, ‘People love to drink beer in Houston, this is going to be so easy,’” Wagner says. “I quickly discovered that nobody knew what craft beer was. There were 37 craft beer drinkers here, and I knew them all on a first-name basis.”

This became the first obstacle Wagner had to overcome. With Saint Arnold, he set out to educate people about craft beer and beer culture. The mission was to show people that a brewery could become a community center that brought people together.

With that in mind, on the first Saturday the brewery—which at the time was in the Lazybrook/Timbergrove neighborhood—was open, Wagner gave a tour to 10 people. From then on, he held tours every Saturday, which became his primary educational tool.

“I would get up, stand up on bags of grain, and talk to everybody about brewing for about 30 minutes,” Wagner says. “Then, we would open the taps and people would try the beer. I would also go out and do beer tastings—I did a lot at bars in the early days.”

In those days, there’s a good chance you’d find Wagner at your local Kroger or H-E-B, promoting the Saint Arnold’s Amber Ale, which was its first beer. Wagner says the first several years were a struggle, with annual production plateauing around 5,000 barrels for more than a decade. He says it took about 12 years for the brewery to grow more and gain new customers, becoming the success it is today.

Around 2006 or 2007, Wagner began to realize Saint Arnold was going to need a bigger space. They were doing tours with an average of 500 people every Saturday, but the place had only two bathrooms, and after drinking all that beer—well, you can do the math.

After looking around for a new place but not finding anything in his price range, Wagner received a call from a friend who let him know that Houston Independent School District was set to tear down its frozen-food warehouse due to the presence of asbestos in the building. Wagner called HISD and, after much persistence with the bidding process, he sealed the deal. The facility at 2000 Lyons Ave officially became Saint Arnold’s new home.

“We were so excited because the building has so much character—and we’ve since then removed all the asbestos,” Wagner says.

New digs

Wagner bought the building in 2008, renovated it, then started brewing there on March 1, 2010. Not long after, thanks to some legislative changes, Saint Arnold was able to keep growing.

In 2013, a package of laws passed in Texas. It’s thanks to this set of sweeping reforms that craft breweries like Saint Arnold could open a taproom and begin to sell the beer produced on premise. The same law also allowed brewpubs the right to expand their production cap to retailers, allowing for wider distribution.

Before the law changed, Saint Arnold did beer tastings for free, but Wagner could now move forward with his vision to open a beer garden, which ultimately opened to the public in July 2018. Driving by Saint Arnold, you might think it’s just another industrial building—Wagner’s goal was for people to be surprised when they walked in to find that the inside looked like a church. The team worked with local architect Natalye Appel. The building has six tall seating alcoves Wagner calls “chapels,” designed by different Houston artists. The beer garden outside is expansive, with plenty of picnic tables to enjoy your beer and bites from the new kitchen, a large screen for sports games, and a great view of downtown Houston. And there’s even an area for kids to run around in, making it fun for the whole family.

“Our original mission statement, which was a lot longer, was twofold: brew the best beer in Texas, which I defined as make for a world-class beer and get it to everybody as fresh as possible,” Wagner says. “And then the other, was to create an institution that Houston and the region was proud of. I wanted to build a world-class beer yard—a place that not only people around Texas talk about [and] are proud of, but a place that people around the world want to come to visit.”

Overall, for Wagner, quality comes before anything, and he believes it’s why Saint Arnold is still standing and can hold true to being the oldest craft brewery in Texas, while others, including the 2011-founded Karbach Brewing, have been bought out by conglomerates like Anheuser-Busch InBev.

And although Wagner has been approached by larger companies—he says he would actually be offended if a month went by without a call from a major brewery—at the end of the day craft brewing is what he loves doing. If he gave it up, he wouldn’t know what to do with his life.

“I never in my wildest dreams thought that we would be where we are today,” Wagner says.

Saint Arnold’s Most Iconic Beers

We asked Brock Wagner to weigh in on the brewery’s biggest hits over the past 30 years.