It’s Just Water
Mimi Cavender
Mmmm hopsy, not heavy. With a hint of orange peel! It was a tall cold glass of eight-dollar deliciousness on a sweltering spring day. At invitation of the Driftwood Heritage Conservation Society, Hays County Master Naturalist’s education outreach Wild About Nature (WAN) had an April 10, 2022, Sunday gig out at Vista Brewing Company in Driftwood, Texas. The Driftwood Heritage Festival had brought out a big family-oriented crowd—perfect for WAN’s Wet and Wild message. HCMN volunteers manned one of those long wooden beer garden tables out under the trees for the day-long event, and the exhibit theme was beer. No—sorry—water!
Top photo and this one from Vista Brewing Company
Photo from Vista Brewing Company, Driftwood, Texas
From this small craft brewer’s very hip website:
Vista Brewing Company is a 21-acre destination brewery in the beautiful Hill Country town of Driftwood, with a brewery & Tasting Room, farm-to-table restaurant, organic farm, apiary, live music, and private event spaces. We brew traditional styles which pay homage to European origins, while highlighting our own Texas Hill Country terroir. All of our beers are made with water sourced directly from the limestone-filtered water well on the property, 450 feet below the surface in the Middle Trinity aquifer. We don’t alter this water in any way and let our beers showcase this beautiful, mineral-rich natural resource. The end product is an elegant dry beer, made to be enjoyed under the shade of a Live Oak.
Their business model is part of a world-wide trend among craft brewers to locate in rural settings and feature site-grown veggies for the munchies and herbs for the beers. It’s folksy and outdoorsy, homey and healthy, “Fresh air. Fresh beer.” They often reach out to local environmental groups in loose alliances or sponsorships. They offer the venue, and HCMN brings the specifics of our shared environmental concern. Guests drink some darned good beer, confident that its water came from that crystalline aquifer 450 feet below their wooden table. Here are some thoughts from Vista and like-minded brewers about “craft conservation:”
If you have a favorite brewery, you also have a favorite watershed. A new effort from conservation groups and local breweries aims to connect those two ideas, that good craft beer must start with good clean water. “That water flows through, and it picks up minerals and nutrients, but it can also pick up pollutants. All of these things affect the quality of downstream beer,” said Thomas Waymouth, director of the new Texas Brewshed Alliance.
Downstream beer? Brewshed? (Say it five times fast.) For real? Maybe they’re onto something here. Maybe craft brewers will accomplish something with brewsheds that our high school science teacher obviously couldn’t on her blackboard with raindrops and circular arrows. Oh, the power of beer!
With voracious developers in northeastern Hays County (upstream from Driftwood!) housing over the hills at the current rate, the Middle Trinity Aquifer may not be $8-beer-worthy for long. Stark facts of surface and groundwater science predict that oily, chemical-laden runoff from all those streets, parking lots, homes, and businesses will now find its way into our Central Texas streams and aquifers. Mmmm, imagine the new craft beer flavors!
So this April day, at exhibit tables cozied up beside those of the Plateau land management consultancy folks and of Hays County Friends of the Night Sky, HCMN’s Wet and Wild exhibit was about…water!
Volunteers were Dick and Beth Barham, Jessica Mejia, Katie Simoneaux, Mimi Cavender, and Deb Bradshaw.
Volunteer Katie Simoneaux and guests simulate stream and groundwater pollution. Over and over again.
Children on their way to the playground in an oak motte and parents sipping beer at scattered tables wandered over for show and tell. Adults found their home on maps of the Hays County watershed and aquifers. They learned about the interrelationship between groundwater and surface water. There were discussions around the importance of water-friendly choices, such as converting lawns and hardscape to native grasses and forgoing chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Kids took over the watershed model. They bunched around and on top of the watershed model! They effortlessly absorbed the “messages” when WAN volunteers casually slid them into their play.
The Hydrologic Cycle, in Kidspeak
So the watershed model is a big plastic sloped landscape, with farms, stream beds, towns, streets, parking lots, gas stations, factories, homes… There are little plastic cows, chickens, pigs, pesticides, herbicides, and oil-leaking tractors on those farms (think ranches). There are leaky cars, trucks, dogs, cats, and—ugh!—people in those towns. All of them make waste. And when it rains or something leaks, all of it goes downhill. It flows through holey, cracky limestone [like this karst rock] underground and back out again, and it flows above ground down hills and streets and in creeks. It just keeps finding its way down to the lowest water—a river, and then the ocean. It evaporates and makes clouds and—sometimes in Central Texas—makes rain. And washes more stuff down…
So next time someone asks “Hey, man, what’s goin’ down?” Say “Water!”
WAN Wet and Wild organizer Deb Bradshaw: “This was climb-on-the-table interesting!” Photo: Deb Bradshaw
As new kids dropped by, the little “experts” would put ’em wise about surface and ground water interaction. “See, this is an otter—he likes clean water. Yeah, the snake too. But this cow makes a lot of poop. Watch! And here’s bad stuff coming out of the factory…” Of course a lot of it got reduced to “Watch the poop flow downhill—Eeuuww!” But as environmental messages go, it was as good as any. It all sinks in, so to speak, if you spread it around.
Once the kids got the message and saw the demo, they were just busting to “play Nature.” They set up the cars, pigs, and people. At the top of the landscape, they distributed drops of food dye to stand in for chemicals, and chocolate sprinkles for—yes, they look just like teensy-weensy animal waste! Then they grabbed big spray bottles of rain. Those chocolate sprinkles were convincingly semi-liquid by the time a Hays County’s worth had all gurgled under and channeled over the landscape and down into the river, lake, and sea. You will never eat a cupcake with chocolate sprinkles again.
The sun was slanting beer color across Driftwood ranchland as as Wet and Wild volunteers packed up spray bottles and sprinkles. On my way out, I asked one of the bustling Vista staff about herbal ingredients and the subtle flavors in their craft brews. Yes, orange peel and dandelion… He said they’re proud of their beer, but hey, “At the end of the day, it’s just water!”