A stout with...Brian Peters

Brian Peters went to Notre Dame to be a technie. Instead, he's brewing some of the best beer in Texas at Uncle Billy's in Austin.

By Patrick Beach
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, July 23, 2009

It's midafternoon, that daylight twilight zone between coffee break and happy hour, and Brian Peters is having the perfect drink for the hour: a stout with the equivalent of a cup of coffee per pint. It's good, and he should know: He made it.

After cutting his teeth at Austin's Live Oak Brewing Co., which he opened with Chip McElroy, and the lamented, incinerated Bitter End with Tim Schwartz, who's now with Real Ale in Blanco, Peters these days is brewing beer at Uncle Billy's Brew & Que, the barbecue restaurant and brew pub on Barton Springs Road. Along the way, beers he's made or helped make have won medals at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver — including a silver last year for his Helen Keller Pils — and he's getting ready to head there again in late September. But right now, he's focusing on his stout.

"It's like a brownie drenched in espresso stout," Peters, 43, says of the pint he's sipping. Also on tap these days are an anniversary ale he brewed for Billy's second birthday a few months back, which is 9.9 percent alcohol but perilously smooth, a Belgian ale and more. He usually runs four special taps and four of the pub's stable of house beers, which include a blonde, an agave wit (wheat), a pale ale and an amber.

"There's something here for everybody," says Peters. And so there is. And that's the idea. Whatever your beer palate, Uncle Billy's can serve up something familiar and challenging.

Wearing rubber boots — a brewer's best defense against wet feet — and mucking out kettles wasn't in Peters' life plan, but these things happen. He traces the genesis of his fascination with beer to reading a book called "One Hundred Years of Brewing" at the age of 12, when his family — he's the middle of nine children — was living in California.

"I don't know whose book it was, but I liked the history and all the stories and the artwork on the labels," he says. He wanted to know, he says, what made the beer different, and what made it great.

While at Notre Dame University, where he studied electrical engineering in the mid- to late-'80s, he was your basic college imbiber: keg parties and not very good beer at that. Then around junior year he got his hands on a Boulder Porter "and I was just dumbfounded."

His fascination with good beer and home brewing took off in a serious way. "I was your typical starter, brewing out of sheer boredom in Indiana," he says.

AMD in Austin offered him a job in 1991 and he says he gave up brewing for a good long while, working in AMD's failure analysis department and waiting for his wife, Joellen, to finish her doctoral degree back in Indiana. (She's a psychologist in private practice.) Eventually he ran into McElroy, and that's where his troubles began. The two at first thought they'd open a brew pub, with one of their goals to brew the best Czech-style pilsner in America, but other joints, including the now-kaput Waterloo Brewing, got the jump on the brew pub thing in Austin. He and McElroy eventually turned their ambitions to a brewery; Live Oak is ever-expanding, and Peters still will put up that pils against any other stateside lager in its style.

Looking back, here's the advice he gives homebrewers who are thinking of turning pro:

"Pretty much every home brewer thinks, 'Could I make a living at this?' I say at that point it's time to lay down and sleep it off."

Peters is an affable guy, quick to praise his colleagues, calling Real Ale's Schwartz "the best brewer in the Southwest" and downplaying his own skills, calling himself "a solid B student."

"I don't know half the chemistry I should," he allows.

But when he gets going on yeast attenuation, the reasons he doesn't put coffee beans in the boil but waits until later and how Belgian candi sugar mellows in a beer after time, it's clear he knows more than enough and that every day he spends in the brew house is a good one.

"A lot of this is challenge-driven," Peters says. "I'm one of those kind of guys."

pbeach@statesman.com; 445-3603