Blue Pants Brewery hosts first Fruit & Oak Festival

MADISON — Dozens of beer lovers young and old flocked to Blue Pants Brewery’s taproom and patio Saturday night for the brewery’s first Fruit and Oak Festival, a part of Huntsville Restaurant Week.

The festival, which Blue Pants Brewery Owner Allison Spratley said she hopes will become an annual event, featured ten new beers for guests to sample and several hors d’oeuvres to choose from, courtesy of Stray Horn Barbeque. The Steel City Jug Slammers livened up the patio atmosphere with their authentic jug music.

The idea for the festival came about as a way to feature some of the new flavors of beer with which Blue Pants Brewery had been experimenting.

“We had been aging some beer in barrels for a few months, and we were trying to figure out what to do with that beer, and so we kind of just started brainstorming some ideas and came up with this kind of summery, fruity beer type of idea,” Spratley said. “We like using local ingredients too, so this gave us an opportunity to get all the fruit from local farms, and our head brewer went and picked some of the stuff himself, so it’s given us an opportunity to really try [new types of beer].”

Guests had the chance to sample fruity beers like the Kettle Sour variety with peaches or blueberries and vanilla, French Saison with blackberries and three varieties of Berliner Weisse: watermelon, prickly pear and cantaloupe. The cantaloupe flavor was also available dry-hopped with Citra Hops. Other flavors like the Belgian Dark Strong Ale, aged in Jack Daniels barrels, and a Chocolate Oatmeal Porter with Amish peanut butter and roasted cocoa nibs were also a hit.

Hannah Carpenter, a Decatur resident who made the drive to Madison for the festival with two friends, said she enjoyed all the beers she had tried, and the Kettle Sour in particular was “really good.” Carpenter and her friends even took notes on the beers they tried.

“I’m just really proud of the beer scene in Alabama, period, because it’s awesome,” Carpenter said. “I especially like places that don’t just have a drinking option … so, if you don’t drink, you can go hang out, and it kind of breaks the stigma around people who do drink because it gives more of an art to it.”

Blue Pants’ Oktoberfest beer made its surprise debut at the festival as well.

“That actually gets its own day in September,” Spratley said. “We’re going to do an Oktoberfest night where we really feature that and some of our other German beers, so this is kind of like a sneak peek prior to the September 6 event we’re going to have.”

Attendees were also able to enjoy pretzels with beer cheese and the signature pizza from Earth and Stone Wood Fired Pizza, as well as strawberry banana pops from Frios Gourmet Pops, served by owners Stan Stinson and Tina Ford.

Stinson said they were happy to have been asked to be part of the event and to see several familiar faces.

“We have a relationship with these guys,” he said. “We used to bring our wood fired pizza oven a couple times a week out here. Since we opened our restaurants we don’t do that anymore … and we miss coming out here—good bunch of folks—so we decided to bring some pretzels and a couple pizzas and just have some fun.”

Huntsville Restaurant Week will continue through Aug. 19. A list of participating restaurants can be found at www.huntsville.org. To keep up with Blue Pants Brewery and find out about upcoming events, like and follow their pages on Facebook and Instagram.