'Austin Chronicle' Best of Austin Awards

The 2011 edition of The Austin Chronicle's Best of Austin Awards is on newsstands today (and online, of course). Here are the awards that are specifically beer-related:

Readers Picks
Best Beer/Wine Prices: Spec's
Best Local Beer: Live Oak Brewing

Critics Picks
Best New Brewery: Jester King Brewery

Click to the issue, or pick up a paper copy, to read the write-ups of those and other winners. Congratulations, winners!

Oktoberfest at Zax

I can't make it to this, which pains me greatly. I bet that cask of Oaktoberfest will be awesome. Maybe you should go and tell me how it was. Zax Pints & Plates is at 312 Barton Springs Road here in Austin.

Oktoberfest Party

Thursday October 8 from 7-10

Break out the Lederhosen and join us here at Zax for the 5th Annual Oktoberfest Party. The party kicks off at 7:00 with a traditional tapping of a cask of Live Oak Oaktoberfest. Get here early and enjoy some of this specially prepared brew while it lasts.

In addition we will feature music from the New Austin Polka Band, Live Oak Beer Brats from Austin's own Smokey Denmark, as well as some other great local and German Oktoberfest beers

Live Oak Primus Weizenbock

Remember that new winter seasonal from Live Oak I mentioned back in November?I finally tried their Primus Weizenbock last night at Scholz Garten, and it was outstanding. A rich, earthy flavor with addictive banana notes that were very similar to North by Northwest's Dunkelweizen. In fact, you can pretty much take my review of that beer and apply it to this one — their flavors are very similar. The only thing wrong was this beer was that I couldn't have a second – I was killing time at Scholz before heading off to watch the Longhorns' men's basketball team kill Appalachian State at the Erwin Center. Given how lame the game turned out to be (not unexpected, of course), I kind of wish I'd just stayed at Scholz and drank a couple more of these. Well done, Chip!

New weizenbock from Live Oak

Press release from Austin's Live Oak Brewing below. And note at the end: They're working toward eventually getting their product in bottles!

Live Oak Brewing Company, an Austin microbrewery, brewed their one-thousandth batch of beer today. This landmark brew is a batch of their new winter seasonal, Primus Weizenbock. It is a dark, rich German-style Weizen beer (beer made with wheat malt) fermented with a very particular strain of brewers' yeast that gives these beers their unique spicy and fruity character. Primus Weizenbock will extend Live Oak's family of central European-style beers by building on the foundation of their highly acclaimed and best-selling HefeWeizen.

"Our HefeWeizen was voted on the beer aficionado website, BeerAdvocate.com, to be one of the top 25 best beers on planet earth. It seemed natural to extend that brand with a Weizenbock this winter", said Chip McElroy, founder of Live Oak Brewing Company. As all of the Live Oak beers, Primus will be available only on draft in Texas bars and restaurants. It is named after the legendary, if unofficial, patron saint of beer brewing, Jan Primus (John the First), Duke of Brabant. It is also customary in Germany to end the name of a Weizenbock beer with the letters "us" thus, Primus (pronounced, "pre' moose").

The unfiltered beer will have the characteristic clove and banana flavors familiar to HefeWeizen drinkers but with a darker and richer roasty malt character that is typical of some German-style Bock beers. Contributing to that malt character is a laborious decoction mash employed at Live Oak. This old school brewing method is still used at some central European breweries and Live Oak but rarely anywhere else. The alcohol strength will be around 8% ABV and it will be available on tap in December.

Live Oak has experienced such growth over the last few years that they had to put on hold plans to get their products into bottles due to lack of space and production capacity in their current east Austin facility. In order to expand their capacity and package in bottles, the brewery has purchased 20 acres of land on the Colorado River north of the airport (ABIA) to build a new facility that will include a bottling line. The property is beautiful with very many Live Oak trees over 30" in diameter and a couple measuring over 45". McElroy warns, "Don't start holding your breath for bottles yet. Keep looking for our beers on tap. It will take us a couple of years to get the new brewery completed."

Changes at Live Oak Brewing

I just got off the phone with Chip at Live Oak Brewing, and I asked him about the impact that the current worldwide hop shortage is having on his company. He says they have enough hops to last through the year and into 2009, but the inability to get sufficient Cascade hops is causing them to downgrade their Liberation IPA from a regular brew to a seasonal, which ought to have Austin hop fans … um, crying in their beer.

And there's more bad news: their Pale Ale (which I tried for only the first time last night on my first-ever visit to Bull McCabe's after the They Might Be Giants show at Stubb's) is going away altogether.

But all is not lost: Live Oak will still make an IPA, they're just not going to call it Liberation because they can't duplicate its distinct Cascade dry-hopped taste signature. The new one will simply be called Live Oak IPA, and Chip says it tastes "fantastic."

Okay, the brewer himself isn't exactly an unbiased source, but given that I've never put a Live Oak product to my lips that I didn't love, I'm going to believe him and look forward to trying it.

The Great Kansas City Beer Bloggers Summit …

[EDIT: Okay, my curiousity is killing me – why is the Number One driver of hits to my site the picture of the Kansas City skyline to the right? What are all you people looking for? Please let me know in the comments section below.]

… never quite happened. Or at least, it was less than what I hoped for.

Faithful readers will remember that back in April, I stumbled across (via the Internet) a nice young lady in Kansas City who is doing pretty much the same thing I'm doing; she calls herself A Beer Kind of Girl (or just "Beergirl" for short). Beergirl told me to drop her a line if ever I was in her neighborhood – so of course, I did, since M'Lady is from KC and we're there every six months or so like clockwork to visit the family.

Unfortunately, tentative plans to meet up somewhere – hopefully to have her expose me to a great KC beer bar – never materialized. A new job smacked her with a menacing deadline, killing the first few days. Then she got deathly ill. That killed the next few. Now I was faced with a dilemma: On a brief business visit to Austin in May, she raved over how much she loved Shiner Bock, so I decided to take her a gift 12-pack of Texas beers. And I needed to get that beer to her, because I needed the space in my car to take home my usual case of Boulevard (an excellent Kansas City beer not available in Texas; see my many previous posts). So finally, a last-ditch effort — M'Lady and I scheduled a tour of the newly expanded Boulevard Brewery, maybe she could come with us? She would be off work early that day, so it seemed like we might finally get to lift one together … but no. Those meanies at Boulevard said the tour was full and no way would they let one more person in. If their beer weren't so good, I'd hold a grudge. Thus fizzled out a great meeting of the minds and livers.

However, she met M'Lady and I in the Boulevard parking lot right before the tour, hinicetomeetyouhereissomeTexasbeer. I handed over three each of Saint Arnold Pils, Saint Arnold Elissa IPA, Shiner 98, and Shiner Kolsch, which hopefully should whet her appetite for another Austin trip. (Austin is a great place for a vacation, HINT, HINT. With all the Shiner, Saint Arnold, Live Oak, and Real Ale you can drink!)

Beergirl is lucky she gets to take that tour any time she wants – it was awesome. After roaming through the production facility we of course went to the much-anticipated drinking room for about 20 minutes of sampling. I would have been happy enough having my favorite regulars, their Pale Ale and Bully Porter, but they also had their new Lunar Ale, as well as sneak previews of stuff not on the shelves yet.

I was a little disappointed in the Lunar. I expected a bold Belgian flavor; instead, it was a strange mix of styles, sort of like a German dunkleweisen mixed with a Belgian dubbel, that ended up being less than the sum of its parts. Decent enough, but not overly impressive.

Much better were two others: A Belgian saisson farmhouse ale due for release in the fall. Golden in color, with a crisp, flowery taste. I'm looking forward to a full bottle; hopefully the mother-in-law can score one for me. After that, I tried an IPA, and oh it was glorious! The bartender told me it "a slightly different version" of it would eventually become a regular part of their year-round lineup. I can't imagine why they would want to change a thing from what they served me – unless they've figured out a way to make it even better. This makes me look forward to my KC trips even more.

I grabbed some other beers while I was in KC, as well. Beergirl had raved about a Saint Louis brand called Schlafly. I tried their Pale Ale, which was about as mediocre as a pale ale could be – seriously, they should be embarrassed to put this on the same shelves as Boulevard's version. However, I also grabbed a 750ml bottle of their 2006 Imperial Stout, which was marvelous. It was aged in oak barrels, and it was mighty strong, both in ABV and flavor. Well done, and I hope they'll make more this winter for my holiday trip.

I tried another St. Louis brew from a brewery called Lemp, which apparently has a very long history and was recently resurrected. I tried their Jurassic Dark, a "roasted German Style Wheat Ale" that was quite tasty.

As for watering holes, I never got to actually sample one with Beergirl, but M'Lady and I did follow her advice to try Grinders, a cool downtown food and brew dive/concert venue with tasty wings and an impressive beer selection. It reminded me a lot of The Parlor, a funky punk pizza place here in Austin. Margaret immediately declared it her favorite place in KC and even left me on kid-watching duty one night so she could take her girlfriends there. I started with a Boulevard Pale just out of a sense of duty, but I then moved on to something that was a Unibroue product, but I'm not sure which one. The menu said Maudite, and I was brought a beverage that was beguilingly black and so utterly glorious in taste that I think my head spun around 360 degrees. So I came home and feverishly bought a bottle, and it poured out … a rich brown. And delicious, but not quite as good as what I had at Grinders. I'm pretty sure they actually served me Trois Pistoles, by the same brewery, which I've had before at Gingerman, and which had the same revelatory effect on me. In any case, the lesson here is that you can't go wrong with Unibroue, no matter what you actually get.

Damn that was a long post. And it was a long trip. I hope it was worth it.