Padre Island Brewing

Unidentified old man cooling his tired feet in the soft sand surf.  

The South Padre II pictures I posted  were taken yesterday. South Padre is just over an hour from our home base and we bookended our birding yesterday with two stops at Padre Island Brewing. The first was a noon lunch where we had an opportunity to sit with the brewmaster, Markkus Haggenmiller, a transplanted third generation Minnesota brewer from St.Paul, who cut this brewing teeth at Summit Brewing. In 1995, after ten years at Summit, he was recruited by an investment group to be the brewmaster at a potential new brew pub. So he grabbed it, got a small piece of the action, a chance to put together a gorgeous state of the art facility, and he got a sweet job in a warm place - which he thinks has really gone to hell in the past 17 years with the coming of dozens of high rise hotels. He is not looking forward to the coming annual wave of Springbreakers about to hit them. He said unless it rains and drives them indoors, they just raise hell swarming over the beaches drinking cases of Bud Lite. The above lead photo was taken late in the afternoon, before we curled up and took a quick nap at the beach before heading back to the pub for a little food and one last IPA before heading back to Alamo.

I picked this off the floor on the way out. Paid for the cap. 

And guys and gals, Markkus has old lugged steel bikes! I forget all of them, but I do remember that he has two old Colnagos and a Walter Kroll. Beer and bikes - made in heaven.