Excerpt for Chapter 11, “Blowin’ Dixie.”

        Because it didn’t happen on their watch, Joe and Kendra didn’t try to keep secret an incident that nearly spelled Dixie’s extinction around 1975. The brew house underwent a total overhaul with the unfortunate result that chemicals seeped into their water supply and they had to recall all the tainted beer. That alone should’ve spelled the end, but it kept chugging along for a decade, foolishly maintaining a feeble pulse. In 1983, the brewery slipped out of the hands of Valentine Merz’s grandson Cyril Mainegra and into the hands of Neal Kaye (pronounced “coy”), who tried to reshuffle the brand as Coy International Private Reserve Beer. Paraphrasing how Kendra described Neal, he was a jinx, and Dixie was “fifteen minutes from Chapter Seven.”

        Enter the Brunos. Sometime around their  twenty- second wedding anniversary, Joe approached his wife with an excited yet uninformed glimmer in his eye.

        Kendra told me how Joe “ascertained that the brewery was in trouble. We had no idea. It was staggering. When we ended up taking it over, we had over fourteen million in debt. It was basically an impossible venture. There  wasn’t one person standing in line.”

        “Dixie is the little brewery that  couldn’t,” added Joe.

        It’s a frightening enough venture to start a business from scratch, starting at the ground level, but to enter into one like this, fourteen mil in the hole, and have no brewing background? Well, that’s just nuts. Still, the appeal was too great and the challenge proved irresistible. Dixie only garnered 2 percent of the local market. Within four years of purchasing it, they filed for Chapter 11 in an attempt to reorganize the business to stave off bankruptcy. That could have hammered the final nail in the coffin, but this being New Orleans, land of voodoo, just because something dies  doesn’t mean it has to stay dead.