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New distillery and brewery coming to San Antonio
Three guys are sliding into their 30s, thinking about changing career course, making plans over beers at the Flying Saucer in San Antonio. Let’s open a craft brewery, they say. No, how about a whiskey distillery?
And after many pints are put away, they come up with a third option: Why not both? Malt advocates and beer nerds, I give you Ranger Creek Brewing & Distilling, which calls itself the first combo brewery and distillery startup. It is for Texas, anyway. In a landscape where new breweries are popping up like bluebonnets after a wet winter, this is new.
According to Mark McDavid, one of the founders, the initial discussions between he, T.J. Miller and Dennis Rylander (all three MBAS, Rylander and McDavid from UT’s McCombs School, so if this venture fails it won’t be for lack of book learnin’) focused on why the idea wouldn’t fly.
Eventually they talked themselves into it — beer can be a great persuader — and they’re recruited Rob Landerman, an accomplished home brewer who’s currently at the Fying Saucer in Austin, as the man who’ll wear the rubber boots in the brewery. They’ve got the 30-barrel brewhouse ordered, are homing in on a location and aim to have product rolling out the door — albeit only in the San Antonio market to start — in September or perhaps late August.
So why a hybrid operation? Casual drinkers might think they’re distinct and tempermental arts but they have a number of similarities, coverting starches in grain to fermentable sugars under heat, then adding yeast to produce alcohol. Some equipment, such as the mash and lauter tuns, can be used in both operations. Just as important, whiskey and bourbon need to age before they ship — and during that time there’s no money coming in. Why not use the down time to brew beer?
“We created this really nice synergy that is going to be really exciting,” says McDavid, 31. “We can use both sides of our business. We can use our own bourbon barrels to age our own beer in it.”
As McDavid and his partners see it, San Antonio is the seventh-largest city in the country, and it has no homegrown craft brewery, although their are brew pubs such as Freetail. They think it’s time to change that.
“We’ll have a pretty good portfolio with interesting but approachable beers,” he says. “We’ll have one lager and three ales. They will go from a sort of an approachable mass market beer to the types of beers that will have beer nerds go crazy. I think Texas beer drinkers are getting more adventurous. It seems like we’re getting to the point where you can be a little more experimental, as long as you’re brewing a really good beer.”
You can track their progress and work up a powerful thirst doing it at http://www.drinkrangercreek.com/.
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