The Great American Ale Trail - Christian DeBenedetti [160]
To find that farm you drive west and a hair north out of New Orleans for about two-and-a-half hours and wend along LA-31 beside the serpentine Bayou Teche, the 125-mile waterway leading from Arnaudville to the Gulf. As Karlos puts it, the next part involves a T in the road, a Piggly Wiggly store, and “left turn at the twelfth station of the cross.” One way or another you’ll find their Bayou Teche Brewery, once a nanosized, 1 bbl project with modest ambitions, and today a vital presence in Southern craft brewing. “The local Budweiser distributor told us locals didn’t want craft beer,” recalls Karlos, who has a grey-flecked beard, dark eyes, and a genteel manner. “I said ‘well, maybe they haven’t been offered it,’ and sure enough, the beer we’d planned for three months sold out in three days.”
It has been a wild ride since then for these bayou brothers, who were hit so hard with demand that Lazy Magnolia Brewery in Kiln, Mississippi agreed to help them meet it by contracting some extra capacity. This is Cajun country, and you’ll hear some great music in the taproom, perhaps even from the musically talented brothers. In 2011, the Knotts broke ground on a new 8,000-square-foot facility to house their 15 bbl brew house, but the train car taproom will stay intact.
PHILOSOPHY
Low Country craft with a side of Southern ease. Karlos and his brothers had been home brewing batches for crawfish boils and gumbos for years when the idea took hold to step things up and invest in a pilot brewery. “We thought it would be best to brew beers to complement our low country style of cuisine, and with some hoppier flavors, too, to go with all the pork fat we use,” Knott recalls.
KEY BEER
LA 31 Bière Pâle, their Belgian-inflected pale ale named for the state highway, was intended to be the flagship, but Grenade (pronounced grah-nod), a wheat beer brewed with passion fruit juice (another local wild fruit) quickly overtook it. The most unique is Boucanée (“smoked”), a lightly smoked wheat beer. As the story goes, there’s a local species of wild cherry tree, and when the Knotts were kids, their grandparents would cut one tree down per year. The women would make a liqueur called “cherry bounce” and the men would cut up the branches for smoking andouille and tasso and sausage. This beer is their homage to that tradition. Thirsty yet?
ABITA BREWING COMPANY
21084 Hwy. 36 • Abita Springs, LA 70433 • (985) 893–3143 abita.com • Established: 1986
ABITA BREWPUB
72011 Holly St. • Abita Springs, LA 70420 (985) 892–5837 • Established: 1994
SCENE & STORY
Abita was the first southeastern craft brewery to emerge and today, with both a modern brewery and the original brewpub, has an epochal feel, like a shiny new stadium in a town with the old bleachers down the road. To get to the new 49,000-square-foot brewery from New Orleans you drive the straight 30-mile shot across Lake Pontchartrain toward St. Tammany Parrish and Covington and veer right toward Abita Springs. The brewery owners settled on their location due to the presence of the five-million year-old aquifer of soft artesian water, a celebrated font that happens to have a perfect pH for brewing and requires no spendy chemical adjustment. The local Chocktaw Indians used this water for medicinal purposes, and turn-of-the-century tourists traveled there to recover from yellow fever. You can—and should!—drink it from water fountains inside the brewery on the tour.
Visitors (minor hordes actually, with over 18,000 clocked per year at present) convene in a large, porticoed taproom with a wide mahogany bar and watch a surprisingly thorough video before taking a tour amid the brewery’s enormous 400 bbl tanks the size of school buses. It’s a sociable place, and it’s hardly surprising that one of the main tour guides is an affable brewer by the name of Sonny Day II, a well-respected veteran of Dixie Brewing Company now helping