When we decided to devote our May cover to beer, we didn’t know what auspicious timing we had chosen. Not perfect, but close: it had been almost exactly a decade since June 27, 2012, when the Dallas City Council passed a new zoning law that allowed wineries, distilleries, and breweries to operate within the city limits. (How do we do it? I wish I could teach you. It’s a combination of experience, of course, and also skill so deep in our bones that all editors of D Magazine are legally prohibited from making marrow transplants.)
Anyway, because other cities in the area followed Dallas’ lead, that council vote kicked off a brewery boom in North Texas that continues—and the growth is sort of mind boggling once you see the numbers. Peticolas Brewing Co. and Deep Ellum Brewing Co. opened in the fall of 2011, just before the new law, and they were the first production breweries in Dallas since the late 1990s. In 2014, there were 24 breweries in North Texas. Two years after that, the number was over 30. And now we are up to more than 100, with at least 20 on the way.
That’s why the audacious claim we made on the cover, calling Dallas the “biggest beer city in Texas,” is absolutely defensible. (Give us one beer and two uninterrupted minutes.) The other claim we made inside the magazine, in the subhead of the story, needs no defense, because it is 100-percent true and immediately obvious to anyone paying even the barest minimum of attention: it is a great time to be a beer drinker here.
The cover story is online today. Read our coverage of the current scene to find out more.
Author
