In the wake of Katrina, Dixie, its facility destroyed and looted, fled New Orleans to Monroe, Wisconsin, began contract brewing what little product it could at the Minhas Brewery, and all but disappeared from the marketplace. Meaning, Katrina didn’t put an official end to Dixie, but the devastating storm has long been assumed responsible for ultimately killing the brand.

As NPR reported in 2006, “...until Hurricane Katrina hit, the Bruno’s mom-and-pop operation was still churning out up to 50,000 barrels of beer each year.” And under Benson today, that narrative is a key part of marketing the brewery’s comeback. In a 60-second spot released this August, a disembodied voice speaking over an aerial view of flooded homes announces, “It took the unimaginable to push Dixie out of town.”

This narrative, however, has been contested, because even before the storm hit in August of 2005, the company was struggling. As The Times-Picayune in New Orleans reported in April of that same year, four months before the city was wracked by Katrina, “Dixie hangs on, its facility sorely in need of renovation, and with nowhere near the presence or production it once enjoyed.”

A former Dixie employee alludes to these past struggles today in even starker terms, telling GBH that the brewing staff was let go, bills were going unpaid, and employee payments were delayed in the months leading up to the hurricane, not after.

“That was pretty much what happened—we all got laid off,” says Peter Caddoo, Dixie’s brewmaster in the months leading up to Katrina. “The director of brewing, the chief engineer, then the bottle shop department was still there because they still had beer to bottle. But, I was trying to tell them, ‘Guys, we got laid off. We’re not making no beer. You guys are next.’”

Similar accounts were parroted independently by a pair of industry veterans speaking on background, by Jeremy Labadie and Argyle Wolf-Knapp, the co-authors of New Orleans Beer: A Hoppy History of Big Easy Brewing, and by New Orleans beer writer Nora McGunnigle. Says Wolf-Knapp: “Dixie was dying as a business just before Katrina.” Adds McGunnigle: “It’s kind of apocryphal that the storm had closed Dixie. They may have had to close their doors just before.”

Despite this timeline of events and subsequent marketing angle rubbing some the wrong way, Dixie says such concerns cherry pick and miss the overall point of its campaign. For starters, Katrina did, in fact, devastate the facility and render it uninhabitable. Which, in turn, led to the facility being turned over to the state against the Brunos’ wishes. And because of this, Hales says Katrina is no doubt an intractable part of the Dixie story. Furthermore, he says the company is trying to highlight not just one, but the myriad challenges it’s faced and overcome throughout the years, from Prohibition, both world wars, and even an infamous “bad batch” of beer from 1975 that hammered the company’s reputation.

“This brand has been a survivor,” Hales tells GBH. “To argue that we’re trying to profit off of the fact that the original brewery built in 1907 was flooded, looted, and then taken over by the government is not being factual and would be an impediment to a brand’s survival. I think it’s a little bit callous.”

That Katrina was Dixie’s death knell isn’t the only claim being made in the company’s push to make a new name for itself with which brewers take issue, however. In the years since being displaced, Dixie reportedly strayed from its original recipe, a pivot said to have hurt the brand. To correct that now, Dixie says it has returned its flagship Pale Lager to the day-one 1907 recipe that endeared the beer to generations of New Orleans drinkers: “lightly roasted two-row barley, rice and Cascade hops.”

Considering Cascade is the most popular hop variety in the country today, this bill lends Dixie a remarkable level of anachronistic credibility. This recipe is also impossible following the historic timeline of lupulin evolution. According to a 2013 hop varietal guide published by the University of Vermont in conjunction with YCH Hops, a prominent hops grower and supplier in Washington, the in-demand aroma variety was “bred in 1956 and released for cultivation in 1972,” a full 65 years after Dixie introduced its “original” recipe.

Addressing this, Dixie says its recipe is proprietary, but today’s drinkers know this is “the beer they fell in love with growing up as a New Orleanian.”

Other brewers have been less forgiving.

“How can something that was developed in the 1970s be an original recipe of something that was produced in the early 1900s?” says one brewer, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I mean, as a brewer, that’s the first thing I noticed. No way in hell.”