Roughhouse Brewing’s new cave beer, Monday, April 18, 2022, at Roughhouse Brewing.

Lovers of live music, the outdoors and craft beer will find their paradise this weekend at the Wild and Free: Kite Festival and Cave Beer Release in San Marcos.
The festival is organized by Roughhouse Brewing and will celebrate its release of a new line of beers called the Underground Series, a line of cave-aged wild ales fermented from the property’s on-site cave.
“We’ve been trying to host larger events out here that kind of entice different parts of our community,” Victoria Van de Ryt, Roughhouse’s event coordinator, said. “We love being family-friendly, kites seemed fun and then kind of the whole wild and free theme goes really nicely with cave ales and how those are made.”
Located on a 50-acre family ranch on the outskirts of San Marcos, Roughhouse Brewing opened in January 2019 and focuses on creating three types of beers: farmhouse ales, traditional lagers and spontaneous cave-aged beers.
Saturday will see the release of Two and One, the third cave-aged beer from Roughhouse with a wild, sour and funky blend. According to Nazish Pasternak, one of the owners of Roughhouse Brewing, a kite festival is a perfect accompaniment to the debut of the drink.
“We spontaneously ferment this beer down in the cave. So, we’ll brew a batch of beer, we’ll set it out outside overnight to cool down and let whatever’s in the air … naturally inoculate the beer and then we put it in these barrels and let it ferment in the cave for a year or two,” Pasternak said. “I think with the wild fermentation, we were going with a wild and free concept, and it just seems like underground and overhead kind of went hand-in-hand.”
Roughhouse’s guiding values are to be family-friendly and to spend time outdoors with one another. The combination of the kite festival with the other activities the brewery has to offer gives the event something for everyone to enjoy. On any given weekend, there is plenty to do in San Marcos but Wild and Free will help people feel the uniqueness of the community. Roughhouse also hopes it will give them an appreciation for the work that goes into the brewing process.
“We put a lot of time and effort into [the beer] and we think it’s really good. So, we hope that other people will think so too,” Pasternak said. “So, to be able to kind of highlight the beer, but also this activity that brings a lot of people together in a lot of different ways.”
To put on the kite festival, Roughhouse partnered with Synergy in Sound, a local production company. In the spirit of keeping the event local, all of the artists performing on Saturday, Aura Zora, Elephant Ears and Zach Blue, are based in San Marcos. Justin Sappington, founder and lead engineer of Synergy in Sound, is the one who booked the artists.
As a former musician himself, Sappington said he looks forward to seeing the artists get attention and hopes the event can serve as a space for creativity and artistry.
“The more I looked around, the more I realized there’s a lot of talent just in San Marcos that needs to get noticed. I’m a big local guy, I guess, and local supporter, so I don’t need to go out to Austin or New Braunfels or Wimberly to get artists. I just got to do a little bit of digging here,” Sappington said.
Sappington opened Synergy in Sound in 2013. Since then, it has specialized in premium audio solutions. Its engineers have set up sound system installations for live events such as concerts and Texas State commencement ceremonies.
One of the ventures that the Synergy in Sound team has taken on is called SYN Sessions in which they help local artists set up at their house or a local venue to then film, mix and edit songs to send back to them free of charge. Sappington said it is their way of giving back to the local music scene.
Sappington is the one who first brought the idea of a kite festival to Van de Ryt after hearing from San Marcos locals who said the city used to host a kite festival several years ago. By starting small with Wild and Free, he hopes to eventually grow the event into a bigger festival with a bigger crowd that is special to San Marcos.
“I’ve done festivals and stuff like that before, but I’ve never really got to the point where I’ve been able to start my own, and I know I can’t do it by myself,” Sappington said. “So essentially doing these smaller events like this that’ll just grow and grow and grow and technically it’s a growing pain is what I call it — but over the course of a couple of years if we’re consistent with it, let’s put it that way, we’re always going to get a bigger crowd.”
Wild and Free: Kite Festival and Cave Beer Release will take place from noon to 9 p.m. on Saturday at 680 Oakwood Loop in San Marcos. Admission is free and attendees are invited to bring their own kites or purchase a Roughhouse Brewing branded kite at the event.
As the Roughhouse Brewing owners and festival planners prepare to entertain the community this weekend, they hope that their event can give attendees a taste of all that San Marcos has to offer.
“I hope that people feel more confident in what the San Marcos community has to offer because this really is just like a highlight of local,” Van de Ryt said. “I hope they can come out and have a full day at what, for the most part in town, is a larger event and feel confident that their community has what they’re looking for, and they don’t have to go much farther for it at all.”
To learn more about Roughhouse Brewing and Wild and Free: Kite Festival and Cave Beer Release, visit https://www.roughhousebrewing.com/.