AT THE FAIRGROUNDS — The Lions Club beer garden set a fair record this year by every measure the club keeps, and the club is very clear about the reason. “We had a local beer,” Lions president Roger Tho said. “That’s the whole story. People stood in a line to drink something made four blocks from here in a building they’ve been walking past their whole lives.”

Mud Lake Brewing Co., which has existed as a public business for eleven days, supplied two of the garden’s six taps under an arrangement the Holts and the Lions negotiated in about four minutes in July. The flagship amber ran out at 8:40 Saturday night, mid-rodeo, and was resupplied within forty minutes by Jonas Holt driving kegs over in the brewery’s pickup, an operation that was observed by a substantial portion of the fairgrounds and applauded on arrival.

The garden poured through Friday and Saturday at a rate the club has never seen, with Friday’s tractor pull and Saturday’s rodeo both emptying the grandstand directly into it. Final volume figures are not released by the club as a matter of policy — “we tell you it’s a record and you can believe us,” Tho said — but the proceeds figure is public, because the proceeds are the point: the garden nets to the Lions’ scholarship fund, which sends two graduating seniors to school every spring, and this year it netted enough to make it three.

Annika Holt, asked whether eleven days was too soon to be supplying a county fair, said that it was, that they did it anyway, and that they will do it again. “We made a beer named after a lake nobody defends,” she said. “Then the Lions asked if we’d pour it at the fair. What were we going to say?” The coffee can for the Legion’s light tower traveled from the brewery to the beer garden for the week and came back Sunday with another $310 in it.