Daphne’s ’99 Bottles of Beer on the Lawn’ Craft Beer Festival Returns for Second Year

The craft beer scene on Alabama’s Eastern Shore was set to get a major boost in May 2014, as Southern Napa in Daphne announced the return of its popular “99 Bottles of Beer on the Lawn” festival for a second consecutive year. The two-day event, scheduled for May 9-10, promised to be bigger and better than the inaugural edition, which drew nearly 400 attendees despite rainy weather and established the festival as one of the region’s most anticipated celebrations of independent brewing.

Organizers approached the second year with obvious confidence. The debut festival had overcome a soggy forecast to fill the lawn at Southern Napa’s Olde Towne Daphne location, and the response from attendees, breweries and the surrounding community made it clear that the Eastern Shore had an appetite for a signature craft beer event of its own.

A Weekend of Craft Beer, Music and Running

Held on the lawn at Southern Napa’s location at 2304 Main Street in Olde Towne Daphne, the festival offered attendees the chance to sample 99 different craft beers from local, regional and national breweries. The format invited guests to wander between tasting stations at their own pace, comparing styles that ranged from pale ales and India pale ales to stouts, porters, seasonal releases and harder-to-find specialty brews that rarely appear on store shelves in the Mobile Bay area.

Craft beer — typically produced in smaller batches by independent brewers — had been surging in popularity across the Gulf Coast region, and organizer Jim Cox expressed confidence that the second year would draw an even larger crowd. Across Alabama and neighboring states, small breweries and taprooms had been multiplying, and tasting festivals like this one gave drinkers a way to sample the breadth of the movement without committing to a full case of any single style.

New for 2014, the festival expanded into a full weekend experience with the addition of a Friday night concert featuring Willie Sugarcapps, the acclaimed local supergroup whose blend of folk, country and Gulf Coast songwriting had made the band a favorite across the region. Adding live music on Friday night turned what had been a single-afternoon tasting into a genuine destination weekend, giving out-of-town visitors a reason to stay overnight on the Eastern Shore.

Saturday afternoon performances by musicians Brett LaGrave and Sarah Percy rounded out the live music lineup during the beer tasting, keeping the lawn in a festival frame of mind between pours. The combination of music and sampling gave the event the feel of a neighborhood gathering as much as a commercial festival, an atmosphere organizers were eager to preserve as attendance grew.

The 5K Beer Run Returns

The weekend also featured the return of the 5K Beer Run, a noon race on Saturday that preceded the afternoon beer festival. The event put a distinctly Gulf Coast spin on the traditional road race, blending the region’s love of running events with the festival’s celebratory atmosphere and giving attendees a reason to arrive early and work up a thirst.

Runners could register for the race alone or purchase a combination ticket that included entry to both events, an option that appealed to participants who wanted the full experience without paying separately for each. The noon start meant runners finished in time to clean up, eat and settle onto the lawn as the afternoon tasting got underway.

For Southern Napa, the run reinforced the festival’s identity as a full-day affair rather than a simple tasting session. The route through the streets of Olde Towne Daphne showcased the walkable historic neighborhood that hosts the event, passing the kind of shops and storefronts that make Daphne’s old commercial core a destination in its own right.

A Festival With a Charitable Mission

Beyond the beer and entertainment, the festival served a charitable purpose as a fundraiser for the Baldwin County Humane Society. The organization planned to have a pet adoption booth on site, giving festival-goers the chance to meet animals in need of homes while enjoying the weekend’s festivities — a pairing that organizers found fit naturally with the event’s laid-back, community-minded tone.

The Humane Society connection gave local animal welfare work a wider audience than a typical adoption day might reach. Baldwin County was among the fastest-growing counties in Alabama, and demand for animal rescue and adoption services had grown along with the population. Festivals like this one helped fund that work while putting adoptable pets in front of hundreds of potential families in a single afternoon.

Tickets and What They Included

Ticket options were structured to fit different budgets and levels of enthusiasm. General admission beer festival passes were priced at $30, which included a commemorative tasting glass that attendees could carry between sampling stations and take home as a souvenir. For those who wanted the complete weekend, $75 VIP packages granted access to both the Friday night concert and the Saturday festival, folding the full musical and tasting lineup into a single purchase.

The tiered pricing reflected a lesson from the first year: the event attracted everyone from dedicated craft beer enthusiasts to casual attendees who came mainly for the music and the atmosphere. Offering a race-only entry, a general admission pass and a full weekend package meant each of those audiences had a way to participate at a comfortable price point.

Olde Towne Daphne as a Festival Setting

The choice of venue was central to the festival’s identity. Southern Napa, a specialty wine and beer retailer, sits in Daphne’s Olde Towne district, the historic heart of a city that traces its roots back centuries as one of the oldest settlements on Mobile Bay. The neighborhood’s tree-lined streets and older commercial buildings give it a scale and charm that larger, newer commercial strips along the Eastern Shore corridor cannot match, and the lawn outside the shop provided an open, casual space for tents, stages and tasting tables.

Daphne’s position on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay also made the festival accessible to a wide region. Mobile residents could cross the bay in minutes, Fairhope and Spanish Fort were neighbors, and Pensacola-area beer lovers faced only a short drive along the interstate. That catchment area helped explain how a second-year festival could already plan for crowds well beyond the nearly 400 who braved the inaugural edition’s rain.

The Regional Craft Beer Moment

The festival arrived at a moment when craft beer was reshaping drinking habits across the South. Independent breweries, once rare in Alabama, had been opening in cities across the state, and retailers like Southern Napa had built their businesses on bringing small-production beers to markets that national distributors had long overlooked. Festivals served as the movement’s showcase, letting breweries introduce their products to hundreds of drinkers at once and letting drinkers discover styles they might never have ordered on their own.

For the Gulf Coast, events like “99 Bottles of Beer on the Lawn” also carried an economic dimension. A two-day festival brings spending to local restaurants, hotels and shops, and it positions Daphne alongside larger cities that had long dominated the region’s festival calendar. The participation of a band with Willie Sugarcapps’ regional following underscored how the event had grown quickly into a legitimate stop on the area’s entertainment map, not merely a shop’s promotional event.

Looking Ahead After Year Two

As the second edition approached, the combination of good weather hopes, an expanded music lineup, the returning 5K Beer Run and the Humane Society partnership gave organizers reason to believe the festival would cement itself as an annual tradition on the Eastern Shore. The first year had proven the concept under the worst possible conditions — rain that kept many festivals from launching at all. The second year, with a full weekend format and more to offer, was designed to prove it could grow.

The scheduling also reflected practical realities of the Gulf Coast calendar. Spring on the Alabama coast offers the region’s most reliable weather, and early May sits comfortably before the summer heat and humidity settle in for good. A noon race and an afternoon tasting avoided the worst of the day’s sun while leaving evenings free, and the Friday-through-Saturday format gave travelers flexibility without consuming an entire holiday weekend.

For attendees, the essentials were simple: a Friday night of Gulf Coast music, a Saturday 5K at noon, an afternoon of 99 craft beers on a lawn in Olde Towne Daphne, and the chance to support animal welfare in Baldwin County while doing it. Tickets ranged from the $30 general admission pass with its commemorative glass to the $75 VIP weekend package, with options for runners who wanted only the race. For a young festival on a growing stretch of Alabama’s coast, it was an ambitious and unmistakably local recipe.