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Thursday, February 11, 2010
St. Arnold Austin pub crawl
No valentine? No problem! Drag your broken heart on St. Arnold’s Feb. 19 pub crawl downtown. Details from St. Arnold via Craft Austin here.
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Still another Austin brewery starting up
Say hello to South Austin Brewing Co. Disclosure: Jordan Weeks is a pal I know through a mutual friend, a good guy and a very accomplished brewer whose commercial experience goes back to Balcones in the late ’90s.
Now he’s the newest player in a field that’s filling up in very promising ways. He’s got the keys to an 8,000 square-foot space at 451 St. Elmo Rd. This comes after approximately eleventy billion other breweries announced plans to get going this year. (Weeks was hoping to keep his plan under wraps but it turns out the Twitters keep no secrets. And if you’re his friend on Facebook this is not news to you.)
“I think there’s a new requirement: If you want to be a resident you have to open a brewery,” Weeks says.
He’s aiming to have beer ready in a year. “It’s an aggressive schedule but I’ve worked in a production brewery like this before so i know how to do it,” Weeks says.
Most promising: He’ll be making “aggressive beers that appeal to the already sophisicated craft beer drinker, people who drink Stone and Avery and Lost Abbey. They’re going to be style-challenging. I’m not going to stick to Belgians but I have the greatest respect for Belgians. That’s where everything I know about beer started from.”
Production plans call for an 80 to 20 percent split between 750-ml bottles with wire corks and kegs. This is Weeks’ identified niche: Lots of people will take a chance on a 750 but not a six-pack. The single bottles make nice gifts, and people seem more likely to take a chance on something they haven’t tried before if they’ve only got a single to finish.
As I said, I can’t say I’m impartial on this one. But Weeks has the experience and the brewing chops to do great things for the Austin craft beer scene.
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Exciting news from Sierra Nevada
Jody Hunt, Sierra’s guy in our neck of the woods, pointed me to this site, promoting the Chico, Calif., breweries 30th anniversary brews. And WOW, is this going to be a great year for them.
Ken Grossman’s fledgling brewery actually goes back to 1979, just three years after Jack McAuliffe’s New Albion’s, the nation’s first micro, got going in Sonoma. With Fritz Maytag at Anchor, these three and others launched the American craft beer revolution.
Sierrra already has stuff on the shelves to commemorate its modest beginnings, but there’s a quartet of offerings coming through the year that are really special. Maytag and Grossman have a stout coming in March; McAuliffe and Grossman have a barley wine coming in July (!); homebrewering pioneer Charlie Papazian, beer authority Fred Eckhardt and Grossman have an imperial Helles. And here’s the one that’s going to make this a very long year. In mid-October they’re rolling out an oak-aged marriage of Bigfoot barley wine, Celebration and and Sierra’s pale ale.
Shop early and cellar. They’ll be released in limited quantities in bottles and on draft in our area.
