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Brock Wagner is dressed for business.

Kind of.

Wearing well-worn sneakers and khaki shorts, topped off with a short-sleeve plaid button-up, he looks like he’s on his way to pick out a beach umbrella to nap beneath, or sing along to a Jimmy Buffett song in a lawn seat. But the button-up is branded with the logo for Saint Arnold Brewing Co., which Wagner founded 25 years ago this spring. So maybe this could qualify as business casual here in the brewery.

The production area smells like root beer right now, as bottles of the brewery’s only nonalcoholic option zip along the Rube-Goldbergesque bottling line. And the potent smell only adds to the effect that Wagner looks like a kid in a candy store.

Still.

He wanders to the canning line, where Citrodos IPA is being packaged into six-packs, and plucks a can from the line. He cracks it and takes a sip.

“Oh, I love that,” Wagner says. He holds it in his hand, and within seconds the can starts sweating. But he just takes another sip and keeps on walking, his long legs leaping into a near-jog a couple of times as he discusses the art of brewing, and his enthusiasm foams over.

This is his own form of luxury and leisure, compared with how things were 25 years ago, when he’d spend six or seven days a week cranking out 12-hour sessions that encompassed everything from brewing to squeegeeing the floors, in his quest to turn a dorm-room dream into what is now widely regarded as the godfather of Texas’s craft-brewing scene.

“We have sloping floors now. So they don’t even need to be squeegeed,” he beams, as though this is the peak of high-life living.

There is nothing particularly unique about the start-up story behind Saint Arnold. Wagner, 54, had been working as an investment banker when he decided to chuck the suit and tie and try to open up a brewery. It’s the same origin story repeated on what feels like a weekly basis here in Houston these days, as side-hustle brewers ditch their full-time corporate gigs to start small brew shops. This year alone has seen similar tales told at both True Anomaly Brewing and Walking Stick Brewing Co.

What sets Saint Arnold’s story apart is the fact that it’s been able to survive all these years, even through a long period during which the state of Texas had some of the nation’s most antiquated brewery laws. When Wagner sold his first keg of beer on June 9, 1994, it was illegal to sell beer on-site. Or offer tours. He had to rely on sales at bars, but he wasn’t even allowed to promote those.

“The laws in Texas made it so the chances are, you weren’t going to survive,” he says now. “And that is why we’re the oldest craft brewery in Texas. It’s not because we were first. We weren’t. It’s because we outlasted everyone else.”

And that took elbow grease.

Some of that work came in educating customers. In 1994, there were only 537 craft breweries operating across the entire United States, and 1.4 percent of the beer market went to craft beers, according to the Brewers Association. So many of Saint Arnold’s future customers didn’t even understand what the product was.

“Basically, nobody knew what craft beer was, and we had to educate and create a market for it,” Wagner says. The number of breweries began climbing in the mid-1990s, as brew pubs began dotting the city and nation. But most didn’t last long.

“There was a time, in about 1995 or 1996, that there were actually a lot of brew pubs in Houston. And every single one of them failed,” Wagner says. “We’d get together every month at our locations, and we’d share information and drink beers together. Then that went away for the longest time because if you were going to have a Houston craft brewers’ meeting, it would be me sitting at a bar by myself.”

He blames the laws, among other things. So he split his focus. Wagner began lobbying the Legislature to loosen up the arcane laws, nabbing a huge victory in 2013, when brewers won the right to sell beer on premises. At the same time, the brewery doubled down on consistency of beer and quality. Wagner pushed his brewers to make sure each new recipe met two criteria: It made you want to order a second, and it had some sort of “wow factor” — maybe extra-dry hops, a rush of citrus — that set it apart from other beers already on the market.

But what really enabled Saint Arnold to shift gears from surviving to thriving, as it now produces 70,000 barrels a year, Wagner says, is the idea that the brewery belonged to more than just him.

Hours after Wagner picked his Citrodos off the canning line for a midafternoon sipper, the sprawling new beer garden next door to the brewery was packed with people — and zoo animals. A porcupine. A screech owl. A baby alligator.

Not exactly your typical Wednesday night. But at Saint Arnold, it’s not too far off the mark. The brewery is launching a limited-release beer in partnership with the Houston Zoo to help raise awareness of the zoo’s new Texas Wetlands exhibit.

And this isn’t the first time Saint Arnold has done something like this. In 2004, the brewery launched its hoppy Elissa IPA, named after a tall ship moored in Galveston, and began donating a portion of the beer’s proceeds to the Galveston Historical District. And its citrusy blonde ale, Orange Show, has a similar partnership with the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art.

“The relationship we have with Saint Arnold is one where I feel like they want to give back to the community,” the zoo’s director of corporate partnerships, Hunter Halbert, said the morning after the event. “They don’t feel they have to. It’s a choice that they make.”

That choice goes back to 1993, when Wagner was still writing his business plan, and jotted down his original mission statement: Brew and sell the best beer in Texas, and create an institution that Houston and the region was proud of.

It wasn’t enough to be a business. “I wanted it to be a business where people felt like this is their brewery,” Wagner said. “I might have the stock, but I really want people to have that sense of ownership, and to be good businesses that are part of the community.”

And that means more than supplying baskets for nonprofits’ silent auctions — though Saint Arnold averages about 40 of those a month. It also means being an elder statesman in the area’s beer industry.

Those days of 537 craft breweries are over. By 2018, the figure had ballooned to 7,346 across the nation.

In August 2016, when former Saint Arnold brewer Casey Motes launched his Heights-based brewery, Eureka Heights, at a special event at Flying Saucer downtown, Wagner was one of the first people to walk in the bar’s door and order a beer of the new brew. And he’s regularly spotted around town at opening parties and anniversary fetes for the other nascent breweries popping up.

The reason, Wagner says, is simple: A rising tide lifts all boats. Yes, new breweries are technically competition, but with only 13.2 percent of the market going to craft-beer sales, a new 5,000-barrel start-up across town is nowhere near as looming of a threat as behemoths such as Budweiser.

Plus, he tends to know the brewers.

“We call Brock the godfather of Houston craft beer,” says former Saint Arnold brewer Dave Fougeron, who left in 2007 to launch Southern Star Brewing in Conroe. “I mean, Casey is at Eureka, (former Saint Arnold’s brewer) Vince Mandeville is the head brewer at Brash. It just branches out.”

So even when Houstonians are sipping on someone else’s suds, there’s often a touch of a lesson learned at Saint Arnold in their pint glass.

Motes still remembers his exit interview, in which Wagner offered sage advice for Eureka Heights.

“I don’t know that he was so much worried about me,” Motes says, laughing. “But he was like ‘Don’t make bad beer,’ because that was a reflection of what I learned to do there.”

maggie.gordon@chron.com

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