12 Dec GOATS and Buffaloes – Five fun facts about The Bearded Fox Brewing Company

GOATS and Buffaloes

Five fun facts about The Bearded Fox Brewing Company

Two of several taps in the Bearded Fox Brewing Company tap room

1. The name Bearded Fox comes from a marketing idea, but that’s not the story they’ll tell you.

“The story we like to tell is that we all have beards, and our wives are foxes,” says co-founder Mike Sturm. But the real answer isn’t nearly as simple. “We said, ‘let’s try foxes, there aren’t any fox beers. We looked around and we all had beards. That was easy. But as we played around with the design, we couldn’t find anything we really liked. One day we caught sight of a hop sticker, just a plain hop cone, and realized that could be the beard.”

2. Bearded Fox Brewing Company is technically the first brewery in Tomball.

I say technically because they are now a brewpub–they made the switch to sell beers to go–and Fire Ant Brewing Company beat them to that title. But they were the first to get the brewery permit. So there.

3. They take local to a whole new level

Like most breweries, Bearded Fox tries to stick to local ingredients for their beers, from coffee to honey. But they also say they don’t want to do food so they can support local food trucks. “Never say never,” says Sturm, “but probably not. The way I look at it, we bring a truck in, have something different every night, and all these guys are local. It gives someone else the opportunity to make some money, and at the end of the night, they do all the clean up and give us high fives.” Bonus fact: their spent grain supports a local farmer’s buffalo.

4. Their second most popular beer, GOAT Imperial IPA, has nothing to do with goats.

It’s an acronym for Greatest Of All Time, and it’s the recipe Sturm has been working on since he started home brewing at 34. “A lot of people say that’s Tom Brady,” says Sturm. “But everyone has their own personal GOAT. This beer is ours.”

Chalkboard art in the Bearded Fox Brewing Company tap room

5. They might secretly be the most Texan brewery we have.

Several of the founders met by joining the same barbeque cook off team, called Throwdown Cookers. And when I say cook off team, I mean a 40-foot-long commercial kitchen they drove across the country for ten years. “There is a cookoff in any city on any given weekend in the United States,” says Sturm. Now they just focus on the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and the Pasadena Livestock Show and Rodeo, but they still bring some serious heat to both. And did I mentioned they feed a buffalo?

Beers to you, Houston!