BOCK 'N' ALE YA

Breweries, bars go to your head on beer lover's tour of San Antonio

By Patrick Beach
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Much as I like to drink beer in Austin, sometimes a change of scenery is just what the bartender ordered. Which is why a couple weeks back I took a San Antonio beer tour with Travis Poling, the guy who knows more about beer in the Alamo City than anybody. What a prince - he even drove.

Poling used to write about beer for the San Antonio Express-News until he took a buyout earlier this year , and he blogs at beeracross texas.com and is co-author, with Paul W. Hightower of Fort Worth, of "Beer Across Texas: A Guide to the Brews and Brewmasters of the Lone Star State."

We started at the old Pearl Brewery, which is now the third campus of the Culinary Institute of America, focusing on Latin American cuisine. It's also the hub of an ongoing development that will eventually include shops, dining, lofts and, rumor has it, a brew pub.

Like Pearl, lot of San Antonio's beer history is just that - history. The former St. Mary's Brewing Co. is now a male strip club. The old Frio Brewery is now owned by Gambrinus, Spoetzl's parent in Shiner. The Liberty Bar ("over 100 years old and looks every minute of it") is having to move, and the original Lone Star brewery is now home to the San Antonio Museum of Art.

Next we headed to the King William District, which is home to lots of groovy shops and galleries and which has a First Friday art walk once a month. It's also home to Beethoven Maennerchor (422 Pereida St. 210-222-1521), one of the oldest German singing societies in Texas, dating to 1867. It hasn't been open to the public all that long but, as Poling said, since the average age of members is now about 180, they decided to open it up. And they have good German beer in the bar and biergarten. Alas, it wasn't yet open when we stopped by, but keep it in mind for Oktoberfest if you happen to be in San Antonio Oct. 2, 3, 9 and 10.

We drove a few blocks to Blue Star Brewing Co. (1414 South Alamo St., Suite 105. 210-212-5506), where Joey Villarreal has been brewing since 1996. (He started making home brew at Joey's, his old place at 2417 N. St. Mary's St. that's still going.)

"I was born with a beer bottle in my hand," said Villarreal.

It's a cool space, with the tanks directly behind the bar. We sampled a pleasantly nutty amber, a very pleasant pale with about 25 International Bittering Units - not much hoppage on the nose but a good bite once you took a sip thanks to Cascade, Mount Hood and Columbus hops. The brewery's known for having its King William Barley Wine going pretty much all the time. And they've usually got something in a cask, hand-pulled with a genuine English firkin. (a tapping mechanism for casks).

Next we stopped at the La Tuna Bar, which is next to La Tuna Grill (100 Probandt St. 210-212-6723), which Poling told me was a genuine San Antonio icehouse: a freestanding building with bottled beer only, and cheap. You stand in line at the window - and you'd better know what you want when it's your turn - then you grab a seat at a picnic table outside. Approximately eleventy billion bottlecaps have been thrown on the ground that separates the bar and grill, so many that it sounds like you're wearing spurs when you walk.

Then we were off to Hills & Dales (15403 White Fawn Drive. 210-695-2307), conveniently located next to not much of anything except the University of Texas-San Antonio campus off Loop 1604. It began life 45 or so years ago as a convenience store and still looks like it, although eventually the gas pumps went out and the taps went in. Today they have 54, "marked ingeniously from -3 to 50," as general manager Dave May put it.

If you're looking for ambience or a good place to go on a first date, forget about it - unless you know for a fact that your prospective date likes to drink beer in a smoky joint and watch "Gunsmoke" in the middle of the afternoon. But did I mention the 54 taps, including, when we stopped by, everything from Guinness 250 to Anchor's Old Foghorn? They have no glasses, only plastic cups, although you can bring a mug of your own and they'll hang it on a hook for you. Then there's the Hills & Dales Hall of Foam Club: Run through all 54 taps and you get a small plaque on the tap wall. Do it five times and you get a star plaque on the ceiling. And from all that metal on the ceiling, a lot of people have done it.

Then what?

"At 100 it's not a plaque," May said. "We give you a free liver."

We wrapped up at Freetail Brewing Co. (4035 N. Loop 1604 W., Suite 105. 210-395-4974), where founder Scott Metzger and his capable crew have been known to brew some pretty nutty stuff since they opened on Black Friday last fall. For instance: Hypothetical Doubly Imperious IPA , which they offered late last year, had a staggering 120 International Bittering Units. That's a lot of hops, folks. Then there's Nacho Sancho Ancho, in which ancho chiles are added to the brewery's Bat Outta Helles German-style lager dry-hopped with Simcoe hops. The beer won the funkiest-of-show award at the 2008 Alamo City Cerveza Fest, and the Freetail guys are taking it to the Great American Beer Festival Pro-Am in Denver late next month.

Brewer Jason Davis, who used to work at Celis and Waterloo Brewing in Austin, brought out a sample of that work in progress. Unlike some chile pepper beers, the heat was far from overwhelming, more of an intriguing, smoky element to the crisp lager. The Interloper Stout is outstanding, too, nice and dry. And they loves them some Real Ale Sisyphus barley wine - they had the 2006-2008 versions on tap when we were there.

I can also report the food's great, at least the green chile, artichoke and goat cheese dip and buffalo chicken pizza.

Other fun facts: If you stop by, be sure to ask Metzger, 29, how he feels about being picked one of the Alamo City's most eligble bachelors because he loves to talk about that. Also check out his Dia-de-los-Muertos-in-the-brewhouse tattoo work, which is simply 10 tons of awesomeness. In terms of attitude, I like to think of Freetail as on its way to being the rough Texas equivalent of Delaware's Dogfish Head.

Dreams are brewing

If fundraising and everything else goes as planned, we'll soon have two new small breweries that call Austin home. First up: Jeffrey Stuffing's Jester King Craft Brewery. The former attorney and home brewer since 2003 hung up his barrister's cap in June to work on the project full-time.

I sampled Stuffings' India Pale Ale and it's really, really good. More encouraging is his fondness for crazy stuff - barley wines, smoked beers, big Belgian and chocolate stouts - as well as sessionable beers.

Stuffings has raised some $100,000 of the $800,000 he says he needs to get going. His vice president is Joseph V. Maida, who left a career in medicine to make beer. See jesterkingbrewery.com.

Then there's Nashville natives Ben Sabel and Judson Mulherin, who are starting Circle Brewing Co. These two have professional backgrounds almost as surprising as lawyer and doctor - Sabel was a talent agent in L.A. while Mulherin worked as an aviation mechanic and contractor in Denver and San Diego.

They've raised about $185,000 of an estimated $425,000 they say they need to get going. To start, they're aiming to brew an amber, a blonde bock and a Texas wheat.

More at circlebrewing.com.

pbeach@statesman.com; 445-3603