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XL Cover Story: Some craft beers have had it tough in the Lone Star State (or rather, the Bud Light state), but local brewmeisters see a hoppy future By Mark Lisheron 
A malty surprise awaits Austin beer drinkers at the Texas Craft Brewers Festival this Saturday. Amy and Rob Cartwright will, for the first time, pour their pale ale, brown ale and wheat ale at the largest such tasting event in Texas. These beers will carry the name of Independence Brewing Co., the first new microbrewery in years in Central Texas. The Cartwrights chose a name they feel evokes the character of Texas. They await final licensing for their brewery at 3913 Todd Lane. At another of the festival booths, Steve Anderson will pour the beers he makes for Live Oak Brewing Co. of Austin. Before the year is out, Anderson hopes to reassemble brewing equipment that has been in storage at Callahan's General Store since 2001. His aim: to pick a spot and faithfully re-create the late and much lamented Waterloo Brewing Co. Chip McElroy, who will be at the festival, too, may not have time to miss his head brewer, scrambling as he is to keep up with demand for his Live Oak Pilz and Big Bark amber lager. McElroy is trying to brew enough draft beer to compete with Real Ale Brewing Co., which is soon to be moving to a brand new, larger brewery in Blanco, and St. Arnold Brewing Co. in Houston, one of the fastest growing breweries of its size in the country. The state's other micro, Great Grains Brewing Co. of Dallas, is expanding and soon will be joined in Fort Worth by another micro, Rahr & Sons Brewery. Knowing all of this, festival-goers might be excused for thinking they had stepped into a full-blown Texas beer renaissance at the corner of West Fourth and San Antonio streets. "I don't know that we can't have as thriving a beer culture as they have in Colorado or Oregon," McElroy says. "I think it has to do with the pride Texans have. They like their Texas stuff. They like Texas beer. Texans like full flavored beers." The rise and fall of microbrews Brock Wagner, the founder and brewmaster at St. Arnold's, as ardent a champion of good beer as there is in Texas, keeps a running tally of the state's breweries in his database. Over the past decade, 16 microbreweries -- those that brew 15,000 barrels of beer or less in a year -- opened. Four remain. All four regional and contract brewers, including the beloved, award-winning Celis Brewery, are gone. Altogether, Texas lost 31 brewpubs -- breweries that serve their beer only on their premises. Houston once had 16 brewpubs; today it has two. Of the remaining 24 brewpubs in the state, seven are in Dallas, which has lost five, and six are in Austin, where two have disappeared. San Antonio has one, Fort Worth none. Make no mistake: Texans love beer. Roughly 17 million barrels of beer are sold each year in Texas, according to the Texas Comptroller's Office. At 31 gallons to the barrel, that works out, in rough numbers, to 25 gallons or 11 cases of beer a year for every single one of the 20.9 million people in Texas. Quaffers here drank a little more than 9 percent of the 179.4 million barrels of beer sold in the United States in 2003, according to Association of Brewers statistics. Texas is second among the states behind California in total beer consumption. Texans are in the top 10 for beer consumption per capita. What these Texan per capitas drink, overwhelmingly, is industrial beer. While precise numbers for the state are hard to come by, it's a safe bet that at least half of those 17 million barrels of beer drunk in Texas were made by Anheuser-Busch, because the St. Louis brewing giant owns half of the entire American beer market, according to the 2004 report by Modern Brewery Age. Another 30 percent of the overall market is shared by Miller Brewing Co. and Coors, the report says. To give some perspective, Anheuser-Busch sold 101.5 million barrels of beer last year. Spoetzl Brewing Co., maker of local favorite Shiner Bock, sold 265,259 barrels of beer. St. Arnold sold 7,208 barrels of beer. And if an early sales surge continues throughout this year, McElroy says Live Oak might hit sales of 2,000 barrels. Taken together, the 28 micros and brewpubs in the entire state of Texas brew fewer than 30,000 barrels of beer a year. In the state of Oregon, where the trend took firm root 20 years ago, craft breweries command more than 10 percent of the overall beer market. Nationally, craft beer represented 3.3 percent of the market in 2003. In Texas it's about two-tenths of one percent. "We are always going to be a Bud Light state to a certain extent," Wagner says. "The culture here in Texas is wanting to be viewed as cowboy, a rancher, one step up from a roughneck. Drive a pickup truck and drink a long neck. Craft beer doesn't fit the image." Tailored to Texas palettes To a brewer, the choice of what craft beers to brew here has always depended on the palate of the typical Texas beer drinker. Live Oak, for instance, has devoted most of its attention to its pilsner, a light bodied, hoppy lager beer, an amber lager called Big Bark and a beer brewed with wheat, a grain that gives beer a lighter body than barley. Real Ale's flagship beers, pale, brown and rye ale are all lighter styles. St. Arnold's Amber is, by far, the brewery's biggest seller. McElroy states as a matter of fact what craft brewers in other parts of the country would be loath to suggest: "Our particular choice of beers to brew were good ones for the Texas heat. Beer drinkers here aren't always interested in drinking the heaviest, thickest, hoppiest beers," he says. Unlike some parts of the country, where there were no alternatives to the major brewers before the micros, Texans have always had Shiner. No one, even among the brewers at Spoetzl consider Shiner Bock a true German bock beer. Still, craft brewers here are encouraged that as far back as the 1970s Central Texas beer drinkers embraced a dark-colored, little-advertised beer. The popularity of Shiner may also have discouraged some from going into the business of beer. Now, Texas has always been a center for homebrewing, according to Paul Gatza, director of the Association of Brewers in Boulder, Co. The annual Bluebonnet Banquet in Arlington, with 900 entries, is the biggest homebrewing competition of its kind in the country, he says. The Dixie Cup in Houston, with more than 700 entries, isn't far behind. Making the leap to commercial brewing in Texas was also hindered by liquor laws shaped by the repeal of Prohibition and by the conservative religious bent in the state. As a result, brewpubs, which were often the incubators for microbreweries elsewhere, were outlawed in Texas until just 10 years ago. Texas experienced a brewpub explosion just like the rest of the country during the 1990s, only to experience a collapse when the economy tanked in the new millennium. A year into the new decade, the first brewpub in Texas, Waterloo Brewing, closed. The funny thing was, despite the shakeout across the country, overall sales of craft beer continued to grow. Not the 20 percent and 30 percent growth of years in the 1980s and 1990s, but craft beer sales have increased for 34 consecutive years, Gatza says. This in an overall industry stagnant for a generation. The numbers that matter to Texas craft brewers are these: a 17 percent increase for St. Arnold, a 16 percent increase for Real Ale and a 10 percent increase for Live Oak in 2003 over the previous year. The key to the survival and the growth of breweries like St. Arnold was establishing an identity in their communities, without much advertising, by offering beers of quality and consistency, beers regular customers depended on and recommended. Brewers like Wagner stress the craft in craft beer. Many of his former colleagues, to their profound disappointment, stressed the wealth in brewing. "We've come to the end of the time when people chased this for all of the wrong reasons," Wagner says. "I believe the industry needed a cooling off. Right now, I think craft beer is in as a good a shape as it's been, ever, here in Texas." Live Oak is brewing as much beer as it can sell. McElroy knows that to grow he must install a bottling line so he can sell Live Oak in stores. But bottling, he says, would double his sales and Live Oak simply could not brew enough beer to fill the bottles, a pleasant dilemma for a small brewer. Real Ale secured a capital fund grant from the state Department of Agriculture to get sewer and water service to a new brewing plant off Highway 281 in Blanco, founder Brad Farbstein says. In exchange, the brewer has promised to double his workforce over the next three years from six to 12 employees. Brewing at capacity now, with prospects of selling more than the 2,400 barrels of beer they made last year, Farbstein is convinced every one of those new employees will be needed. "The potential for the Texas market is huge," Farbstein says. "I really do think people are looking for quality more than quantity." Even as he packed up the brewing equipment, Anderson says there was no question he would one day bring back Waterloo. The time is right now, he says. "You can feel it," Anderson says, pulling on a pint of beer at the Gingerman. "The economy is back. People are going out more. At the Craft Brewer's Conference I went to in San Diego not too long ago the energy was the highest I've seen in 10 years." Rob Cartwright, a homebrewer since he was 14, has been dreaming of opening his own microbrewery for a decade. After meeting Amy in 2000, they began seriously planning for it. The brewery shakeout has been good to the Cartwrights, providing at auctions brewery equipment selling at 10 cents on the dollar. "What some people saw as pessimism, we saw as opportunity," he says. As they hoarded brewing equipment, watched their budget and bided their time, the Cartwrights founded the Texas Society for Brewing. The nonprofit society and its Web page are devoted to educating people about craft beer. What better way to educate, the Cartwrights thought, than to bring brewers together in one place so people could sample many different styles of beer and talk to the brewers about them. Last year, the Cartwrights inaugurated the Texas Craft Brewers Festival. More than 2,000 people attended the first festival. Every drop of beer -- 65 half-barrels of it -- from eight different brewers was gone. This year, the festival added two more breweries, Jaxon's Restaurant & Brewing Co. all the way from El Paso and Independence Brewing Co., their own. The timing, they say, could not be better. "What the festival last year showed us was there is a huge degree of latent, untapped interest in craft beer," Amy Cartwright says. "I can't tell you what it will be like to pour our own beers there. For us, Independence embodies the spirit of Texas, the dream of going off on your own and trying something. We're finally going to do it." mlisheron@statesman.com; 445-3663 |
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