Thursday, January 13, 2011

New brewery to start out working the session angle

I've been corresponding with Jeffery Stuffings at Jester King Craft Brewery in Austin, Texas, a new and ambitious craft brewery that's just opened. JK is starting up with barrel-aging, bottle-conditioned 750 ml bottles, and...two year-round session beers in their line-up. Here's what he had to say about that:
I just wanted to e-mail you to say thanks and offer our support for The Session Beer Project.  We wholeheartedly support the mission.  One of our frustrations is that our bigger beers tend to be rated higher and sell better simply because they are more "extreme". We've actually made two session beers part of our year-round lineup: a 3.3% ABV English-style dark mild and a soon to be released ~4% ABV farmhouse table beer
What Stuffings didn't tell me -- I found it on the brewery blog -- is pretty interesting, too.
Dickel barrels full of aging mild at Jester King.
  • The farmhouse table beer -- "Das Wunderkind" -- sounds like a smaller version of another farmhouse beer they're making, Boxer's Revenge, an idea I wholeheartedly applaud.
  • Some of the dark mild is being barrel-aged for blending with the regular mild to create more depth of flavor; brilliant, innovative -- dare I say...extreme? -- way of adding flavor to a session beer without overwhelming it.
  • And they clearly have a sense of humor: the dark mild is named "Commercial Suicide Dark Mild."
So I'd like to take this opportunity to invite those of you in the Austin area to go out for Jester King's grand opening on Saturday the 29th of January, 1-9:00, for food, live music (in their large beer hall, and what would an Austin opening be without live music?), and lots of session-strength beer. Mind you, they've got their 10% Black Metal imperial stout, too!

3 comments:

  1. Feel like I need to comment on this.

    The commercial suicide is wonderful. Lots of chocolate and roasty malt flavor, and great to drink. The whisky aged version (the two pints I have had so far) is fantastic. Same malt flavor but with the added touch of vanilla and oak. Brings some of the same flavors of all the strong barrel beers, without the load of alcohol. The barrel does not over power the beer.

    Their other beers are quite good too, especially the wytchmaker rye ipa. Not 'session' (maybe to the BA'ers though) but fantastic.

    Really looking forward to the other beers as well.

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  2. Jester King did one of my Brewer of the Week interviews and hopefully I will be able to wing it down to Texas sometime to do something more in depth about them for the blog.

    It is great though to see breweries committing themselves to session beers rather than just ott stuff for the vocal minority.

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  3. Now if they could only bung it into a cask...

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