The Great American Ale Trail - Christian DeBenedetti [88]
KEY BEER
Jester King’s Commercial Suicide, a 3.3% ABV traditional English Mild, the sort of beer Michael Jackson (a Fuller’s Chiswick Bitter man) might have sampled, and one that will not lead too quickly to reckless, Dangerfield-style debauchery.
DRAUGHT HOUSE PUB & BREWERY
4112 Medical Pkwy., No. 100 • Austin, TX 78756 (512) 452-MALT • draughthouse.com • Established: 1968
SCENE & STORY
Austin’s most famous beer destination, The Draught House is an old Anglo-German-style bar with a Tudor half-timber exterior. Inside is a softly-lit, exposed-beamed space furnished with rough-hewn wood tables and straight-backed wood chairs, and a bar with seventy taps, eighteen bottles, and a few casks on at a time, along with pub grub like made-to-order pizza, nachos, and calzones. Outside, there’s a massive beer garden that often fills with a chilled-out crowd.
PHILOSOPHY
The Old World meets Craft Beer Nation, U.S.A. Instead of lining up along the bar for the latest Victory, Dogfish, and Green Flash brews, locals know to form an orderly single-file line, as if purchasing train tickets in Munich or Piccadilly Circus, but they’re quite happy in the process. You will be, too.
KEY BEER
There are always five or so house beers and one on cask, like a recent single hop IPA, Hop School Nugget (7% ABV), resinously grassy with a drying finish.
JESTER KING CRAFT BREWERY
13005 Fitzhugh Rd., Bld. B • Austin, TX 78736 (512) 537-5100 • jesterkingbrewery.com • Established: 2010
SCENE & STORY
Few breweries have to remind visitors to leave pets at home so as not to spook the livestock. Located fifteen miles outside of town on a ranch in the rolling Texas Hill Country, Jester King is a first for the American South: an ambitious farmhouse brewery working primarily in the rarified world of oak-barrel aging and second fermentations in the bottle. With a massive 8,000-square-foot barn next to the new stone-walled brewery, the owners opened for business with a rapid-fire release of highly rated beers including a collaboration with Dane Mikkel Borg Bjergsø of Mikkeller, the acclaimed globe-trotting gypsy brewer.
PHILOSOPHY
Belgium comes to Hill Country. By Texas standards these are wild, experimental beers, but the Belgian and French traditions at work here are time tested. The founders also espouse deep philosophical underpinnings of conservation, pledging to use organic and local raw materials at every turn, even rainwater in the brewing kettles.
KEY BEER
Boxer’s Revenge Farmhouse Provision Ale (9% ABV) is a dry, Champagne-like farmhouse ale dry hopped with spicy Hallertau and floral Cascade and Centennial hops. The beer is refermented in French oak wine barrels with wild yeast for up to a year.
Fort Worth
RAHR & SONS BREWING CO.
701 Galveston Ave. • Fort Worth, TX 76104 • (817) 810-9266 rahrbrewing.com • Established: 2004
SCENE & STORY
“Fritz” Rahr Jr.’s great-great-grandfather William opened the first lager brewery in Wisconsin in 1847, but was killed due to burns suffered in a tragic brewing kettle fall. His descendant’s brewery is already up to 6,000 bbl per year.
PHILOSOPHY
German-influenced beers with Texas twang and a sense of off-beat humor, as evidenced by beers named Ugly Pugg and Buffalo Butt.
KEY BEER
Look for the Iron Thistle, an 8.5% ABV Scotch Ale with hints of fig, raisin, chocolate, and smoke.
BEST of the REST: TEXAS
LIVE OAK BREWING COMPANY
3301-B E. 5th Street • Austin, TX 78702 • (512) 385-2299 • liveoakbrewing.com
Founded in a bare-bones two-room warehouse of a brewery in southeast Austin in 1997, Live Oak has gained a reputation for making some of Austin’s—and the entire Southwest’s—best beer, thanks to their luscious Live Oak HefeWeizen (4.1% ABV). The secret to their success? Ultratraditional old-world methods including open fermenters made from repurposed