About a mile behind the LSU Burden Garden and Museums is the LSU Rural Life Museum, where the 20th annual Zapp’s International Beerfest took place.

Any other Saturday would be a regular day to browse the exhibits, but on March 22, visitors were greeted with tent after tent of beer vendors and potato chips, with over 200 different beers to choose from.

Zapp’s International Beerfest is a fundraiser for the LSU Rural Life Museum, the proceeds going towards bettering research, education and preservation. Director Bill Stark has been with the museum since 2018 and said there are usually 2,000 attendees each year. The guests come for familiar brands such as Abita or come to be surprised by lesser known home brewers. A committee of volunteers keeps the event running smoothly, Stark calling the team a “well-oiled machine.”

“It’s a fundraiser, f-u-n-raisier,” Stark said. “It turns out to be a friend raiser too, because we have people who come out here and experience the museum for the first time, and they like to come back and see it in the usual setting.”

Ron Zappe, founder of Zapp’s Potato Chips, started the festival 20 years ago. Alongside Stark’s predecessor, David Floyd, the two brainstormed ways to gain more support for the museum. They had previously attended a beer festival that Zapp’s was a part of and together, they came up with the idea of a beer festival on the grounds to raise money and introduce people to the museum. An event that started out with only 200 beers grew exponentially over the next two decades.

Zappe passed away in 2010, but his chips can be found on the shelves of almost every convenience store and plenty of flavors to choose from at the festival.

“It supports everything that we do here, with preservation of the collections, with the interpretation of the collections and with everything that we do with having we have LSU classes that meet out here, you know, I mean it really, it goes to support a lot of good things that we are able to do as a museum,” Stark said.

Fran Laiche has been working for Zapp’s for 39 years and has been attending the International Beerfest since it started. She said the event tells the public where and what the Rural Life Museum is, a place that Zappe called “Louisiana’s best kept secret.” Laiche spent the festival manning the Zapp’s tent, featuring many of their most popular flavors.

Around the corner from Zapp’s tent is where Huckleberry Brewing Company set up to show off some of their best beers. Based out of Alexandria, Louisiana, the business was started seven years ago by couple Brittney and Jacob Willson, who have been attending the festival for the past six years.

Huckleberry Brewing Company had many of its brews to show off, such as the Sandbar Blonde, Riverboat Razz, 3 Card Stout and Trail Dog Tangerine Wheat, with the can featuring a picture of their dog Huckleberry.

“Every day after a long, hard day, I make our Riverboat Razz,” Brittney Willson said. “That beer is made from organic raspberry puree from my home state of Oregon, so you can’t get much craftier than that.”

Campus Federal workers Christal Whittington, Chandler Martin and Belen Prestridge spent their Saturday volunteering at the festival. They said even though they are technically working, they can still enjoy the festival the same as a regular attendee. If they are not checking ID’s, they have free time to roam around and check out the vendors.

Erica and Jonathan Miley have driven from Prairieville, Louisiana for the past four years to meet up with friends at the festival. Jonathan Miley said that breweries like Huckleberry, Abita, Great Raft and other local businesses are why they keep coming back.

“The home breweries, I feel like their beers are so good,” Miley said. “It’s hard not to love all of their beers.”

The LSU Rural Life Museum was founded in 1970 by Steele Burden. Alongside his sister Ione Burden and brother Pike Burden, the siblings arranged to have the property donated to LSU. Start said it might still be the single biggest donation to the university in history.

Burden was someone that Stark called an amateur landscaper who saw the disappearing cultural landscape around Louisiana and wanted to preserve it. What originally started as a collection of objects turned into something much bigger, some of the biggest artifacts on the property being historic architectural structures such as houses and shacks.

Many of the oak trees lining the roads were planted by Burden himself, Stark said.

The museum looks at rural Louisiana from the plantation South, giving visitors a bigger picture of life behind the big house. Stark said at many plantations around the state, people are given a tour of just the house and not the story of what happened behind it. The Rural Life Museum wanted to change that. They also preserve historical pieces from the Gulf Coast South, which Stark said is known for the Acadian Triangle. Today, the museum is working on educating the community on the state’s past, even with walking tours held in French.

“We preserve the architecture, we preserve the material culture, and really, in an effort to preserve the memory and the knowledge of the life ways of these people,” Stark said.

For more information on the LSU Rural Life Museum and their upcoming events, check out their website here.