Craft beer lovers along the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay have a date circled on their calendars this weekend as 99 Bottles of Beer on the Lawn returns to Southern Napa in Daphne. The annual festival, widely regarded as the only beer festival of its kind on the Eastern Shore, runs Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m. on the grounds of the shop, which has grown into one of the area’s best-known destinations for craft beer, wine and specialty bottles. For four hours, the lawn behind the store turns into an open-air tasting ground where attendees can sample dozens of styles poured by brewery representatives and shop staff.
Organizers say the event has grown steadily since it began, fueled by a rising local appetite for craft beer across Baldwin County and the broader Gulf Coast. Jim Cox of Southern Napa, which hosts the festival, said the crowd and the beer selection keep expanding each year as more people discover what small and independent breweries have to offer. What started as a modest tasting event has become a fixture of the Eastern Shore’s spring calendar, drawing attendees from Daphne, Fairhope, Spanish Fort, Mobile and beyond who want to try beers that rarely show up on local tap lists in one sitting.
Two brewery debuts headline this year’s lineup
This year’s lineup includes two brewery debuts in South Alabama, giving festivalgoers first tastes of beers that have never been poured in the market before. Band of Brothers Brewing Co., a newcomer out of Tuscaloosa, will pour four beers exclusively on draft: Voodoo Mild, Monk on the Radio, White Widow IPA and Station One Saison. Because the brewery’s offerings are not yet available in bottles or cans locally, the festival represents a rare chance to sample them on tap, and it gives the young Tuscaloosa brewery an early foothold in the growing Baldwin County market at a moment when word of mouth still travels best face to face.
Band of Brothers joins a Tuscaloosa brewing scene that has expanded alongside the city’s growth as a college town and regional hub, and its arrival on the Eastern Shore reflects how Alabama breweries are increasingly looking beyond their home markets to build audiences. Also making its debut in the Lower Alabama market is Heretic Brewing Co., based in Fairfield, California. The brewery is led by Jamil Zainasheff, a well-known figure among homebrewers thanks to his books and podcasts on brewing technique, and that reputation gives Heretic a built-in following among the kind of enthusiasts who plan their festival afternoons around what they have read and heard about a brewery long before they taste its beer.
Heretic will bring three beers to the festival: Evil Cousin Double IPA, Petit Rouge and Chocolate Hazelnut Porter. The selection spans the range that has made West Coast breweries popular with Alabama drinkers, from a bold, hop-forward double IPA to a darker porter built on chocolate and hazelnut flavors. For attendees who have followed Zainasheff’s writing and podcasts over the years, the pours offer a chance to connect a familiar name with the beers themselves, and for everyone else the debut lineup simply adds two more breweries to an afternoon built around variety.
Local media personalities join the pouring lineup
Beyond the out-of-state and out-of-town newcomers, the festival will also feature a trio of special collaborative brews from local media personalities working with Fairhope Brewing Company, the Baldwin County brewery that has made collaboration beers a recurring part of its identity. A local morning news anchor created KJ’s White Hot Chocolate Mocha Stout, a rich dark beer built around chocolate and coffee flavors that mirror the morning-show mug it is named for. 95KSJ Breakfast Club host Dan Brennan contributed Peachy’s Pale Ale, a nod to Alabama’s state fruit and to the country radio audience that wakes up with his show, and FM Talk 1065’s Sean Sullivan will pour his Delta Rat IPA, a hoppy beer that carries the personality of Mobile’s talk radio airwaves into a pint glass.
Collaborations like these have become a staple of the Gulf Coast craft scene because they do double duty: they give breweries fresh recipes to pour, and they give radio and television audiences a reason to try something they might otherwise overlook. At a festival that is already the Eastern Shore’s only event of its kind, the local-media taps add a homegrown layer to a bill that stretches from Tuscaloosa to Northern California, and they tend to draw their own crowds of listeners who want to taste what their favorite hosts brewed up.
Why the festival keeps growing
Festival organizers also rewarded early ticket buyers this year as an incentive to purchase in advance, a move Cox said was meant to recognize the people who commit to the event ahead of time rather than waiting to see how the weather looks. Advance-sales incentives have become standard practice for outdoor festivals along the Gulf Coast, where a spring forecast can shift quickly and organizers live and die by early attendance numbers. Rewarding early buyers helps organizers plan everything from ice and glassware to brewery shipping schedules, and it spreads out the arrival crowd so the four-hour session runs smoothly.
The growth of 99 Bottles mirrors the broader trajectory of craft beer in Alabama. Over the past decade and a half, the state’s brewing landscape has expanded dramatically as laws changed to allow breweries and brewpubs to operate and sell directly to the public, and Baldwin County in particular has developed its own cluster of breweries and craft-focused retailers. Southern Napa, which opened in Daphne in 2012, rode that same wave, building a customer base among Eastern Shore drinkers who want access to specialty bottles and kegs that grocery and convenience stores do not carry. An annual festival is a natural extension of that retail mission, turning the shop’s buying relationships with distributors and breweries into a public tasting event.
Music, food and a cause on the lawn
Attendees can expect live music from Brett LaGrave throughout the afternoon, along with food from Will’s Farm Fresh Food Truck. An acoustic soundtrack and a food truck on site are what turn a tasting event into a genuine festival afternoon, and both have become fixtures of the 99 Bottles format. Attendees can move between the pouring stations, settle onto the lawn with a plate, and sample at their own pace, which is part of why the event has built such a loyal repeat crowd on the Eastern Shore.
A portion of the festival’s proceeds will benefit the Baldwin County Humane Society, a charity partner of Southern Napa since the shop opened in 2012. The partnership gives the afternoon a charitable purpose beyond the taps, and it fits a long tradition of Baldwin County businesses folding animal welfare fundraising into public events. For attendees, that means the admission and the beer samples they enjoy translate directly into support for an organization that has worked across the county on animal welfare for decades.
The event is scheduled to go on rain or shine. Despite past years when weather threatened outdoor plans, organizers expressed confidence heading into the weekend that conditions would cooperate for what has become one of the Eastern Shore’s signature spring gatherings. Spring is festival season along the Eastern Shore, when Daphne, Fairhope and Spanish Fort fill their calendars with outdoor events before the heat and humidity of the Gulf Coast summer set in, and 99 Bottles has carved out a place on that calendar that no other event can claim.
What attendees should know before they go
The festival runs from 1 to 4 p.m. on Saturday at Southern Napa in Daphne, and the four-hour format is deliberate. Rather than an all-day event that stretches attention and stamina, 99 Bottles compresses the tasting into a single afternoon session, which keeps lines moving and lets breweries pour through their full lineups while attendees are still fresh. Experienced festivalgoers typically arrive early, work from the debut breweries first, and circle back to the collaboration taps once the afternoon crowd settles in.
With two brewery debuts, three local-media collaboration beers, live music, food on site and a charitable beneficiary, this year’s edition offers one of the fullest lineups the festival has assembled. For Cox and the Southern Napa team, the continued growth of the event is proof of a simple proposition that the Eastern Shore’s beer drinkers have embraced: that a community the size of Baldwin County can sustain a festival of its own, built around local businesses and local partnerships, without needing to drive into Mobile or Birmingham for a serious craft beer event. The lawn at Southern Napa, at least for one Saturday afternoon each spring, becomes the center of the Gulf Coast beer world, rain or shine.