Real Ale

Next up on the Brew tour was Real Ale on 7/24. And actually, before I go on I'd like to mention that I'm not all that interested in beer, or beer styles and beer connoisseur activities. I pretty much have my favorites, which are my favorites because of various associated experiences and sheer drinking pleasure. As a matter of disposition I'm generally curious about the way that things are put together, what goes into making things that I usually only interact with at a finished product phase, and especially curious about what goes into, and how things are made that I put into my body. But comparing bouquets, varieties of grains and hops, styles of beers one has experienced are only interesting to a point, which I get to pretty quickly, and afterwhich only serve to get in the way of my drinking experience, and besides, I think those conversations should be kept the parlance of old men who, by the way, were by far the most represented demographic at the breweries.

Anyways, apropos of Real Ale I have a lot of love to give. Fireman's 4 is my drink of choice when I go out to bars. It's prices are usually reasonable, and it appeals to a sensibility of mine as a sometimes reluctant and other times proud Texan.

I left for Blanco early planning to make a day out of the trip like they suggest on their website, spending the morning swimming in the river and noticing the idiosyncrasies of the city--being a small town in Texas I imagined that I'd find a few--before getting down to business. As things worked out, that only partially happened. I'm no good at following directions, and it took me till I was a few miles north of Johnson City to realize that I'd made a mistake and had doubled my driving time. It was nice driving time though. My road took me through a solid portion of the Hill Country, and my detour took me through the home town of America's 36th president. There's an idiosyncrasy, and by the way, what was the name of LBJ's home town?

I got to Blanco and found the river, but it was a state park, and you have to pay $4 per person to get into it, so instead I drove further up the river and found a place where there was no fence. This part of the river was dry though, and just up from that was a dam where the river was full, but it appeared to be part of some agricultural business that didn't look inviting to stray swimmers. The dry part of the river looked cool, though so I walked around in it. Then I found a lady with a baby, but she was my sister who had come up from San Antonio to hang out with me in Blanco so we got some food at a restaurant by the courthouse with a standard diner menu of fried this and that with burgers on the side and creamy dressings.

After I was finished eating I bid my sister goodbye and went off to find the brewery. This proved to be a difficult task, although my credibility for making that statement might be somewhat diminished since I've already proved myself to be inept at finding things. If you do decide to go, keep in mind that San Saba road, the road to Real Ale is the last street north of the town on the east side of the road. Also, the sign for the road is a very small red sign that can be hard to see if you're going highway speeds. I drove past it three times because I thought that the road was just an alley behind two commerce centers on the side of the highway. The road itself isn't much more than a single lane, though that might change because they are putting in a housing development.

The Real Ale brewery is unimpressive, or unassuming--depending on on what you want--from the outside. They have a big grain hopper outside with their logo on it, and other than that the building looks like a medium sized warehouse. The parking is a kind of take-it-where-you-can-find-it situation on gravel around a cluster of trees. The place wasn't crowded, but there isn't a whole lot of parking either. Something that Real Ale has on the other breweries in Texas is that their tours are completely free. They don't even make you buy a pint glass to fill with drinks, and when I got into the tasting room I got a feeling that they were just happy and wanted to thank me for driving all the way out to Blanco to see them. I think this adds to my feeling of spiritual camaraderie with the beer. My only fear was having too much of their hospitality and being stuck in Blanco. Maybe that was the intention. Maybe it is some kind of modern day gingerbread house.

The tasting room was, without a doubt, my favorite part of this brewery. They open the doors at 1 pm but the tour doesn't start until 4. The room is small, and it was crowded when I got there, but there are also picnic tables under the trees outside. Real Ale offers tastes in a 5oz tasting glass, and they don't impose any limits on how much beer you can taste. And I saw a several people tasting the same beer again and again while I was there.

The server, who was friendly and helpful in answering my questions at a knowledgeable length, set me up on a tasting routine that took me from their lightest beer up to their darkest. One beer that I got to try was the relatively new, 1 year old, Dunkelroggen. This was the one that the people around me kept going back for. They had been there a while, and during the time I was there tasting beers they gradually renamed it "Drunk'N'Ragin." The D'N'R was a hefeweizen made with rye. This made the beer darker than most hefeweizens I'm used to and gave it the distinctive taste of rye. It was very good, and I couldn't resist tasting that beer a few times before the tour started, though I never referred to it, out loud, as a Drunk'N'Ragin, Drumlnargin, Drumrollhaggin, Dumbkohlhoggin, Dunkelroggen. Those Germans are so smart. Or they named their beers when they were wasted.

As I said, the server in the tasting room was helpful. And even though the room was crowded, at the late hour of my arrival people were beginning to take more time between drinks. The server was typical of what I think of Texans from the hill country. They are composed of a cool with-it-ness, or suave that seems to have found its way into the down-home country persona. This dichotomy is in every beer that Real Ale makes, and I can sure as hell taste it.

The blur of the room's psychic haziness was all over me when the server began telling me about beer. The short part of the legend of IPA is that british workers in India wanted beer, but that beer went bad on the way to India. Luckily for the brits, hops are a natural preservative. Shit loads of hops later and thanks to imperialism, we have the IPA. She explained that there were many other sides to the story. In one version the workers wouldn't work unless they had beer. This is beer apocrypha, she said.

Next she moved to Real Ale's beers. The Dunkelroggen, the tasting room favorite, was so new that it hadn't found its way out of many taps in Austin, and certainly wasn't sold in stores. It was made with 30% rye (the Pale Rye Ale is only 16%), and that did some interesting things to the beer. First, as I had noticed, it gave the beer an interesting rye flavor. Because a rye husk is thicker than a barley husk the yeast isn't able to consume all of the sugars, and therefore more residual sugars after fermentation, resulting in a slightly sweeter beer. Then she explained the flavor of the beer, which I never understand. I did notice it when she said that the beer is crisp off the tongue. It was like a static pop, but delicious. She went on and explained the whole process of making beers, a process that I won't bore you with here, and offered me several cups filled with some of the raw materials for making beer--pale malt and chocolate malt (made from barley kilned at higher temperatures than the pale; the name refers to the color and nothing more, I found), for comparison, and crushed and pelleted hops--most of the hops they use are pelleted--and let me chew on them while she was explaining. I asked her if they get their raw materials from local producers and she explained that unfortunately Texas isn't the greatest environment for growing beer ingredients and that they get most of their supplies from out of state: hops from the Yakima Valley, and barley from the midwest and Canada.

Soon it was time to start the tour, which we had been given tokens for upon arrival. We were told that the tour was about a half-hour long and that because this was a working brewery and because that entailed some hazards we would have to stay together as a group and that people would not be allowed to run back to the tasting room for more beer during the tour and so we should bottoms up now and fill up our glasses and that they would probably last us through our tour. The server got real busy, and I filled up my glass and went outside to start the tour.

We met our tour host, one of the head brewers at Real Ale who went by the nickname "The Tyrant." And then something weird happened. One of the tour goers was drinking a cheap beer made by Yankees. He asked if he could brink it along with him on the tour, and the tyrant replied that no he absolutely could not because it would be a violation of their license. And as the guy was walking back to the picnic tables to drink his beer the tyrant shouted after him that he shouldn't let him in anyways because what he was an insult to Real Ale's hospitality, and then he muttered about it as he greeted the rest of us Real Ale drinking tour goers and he seemed deeply offended. Some people laughed awkwardly as he made more fun of the guy with the cheap beer. After that passed he thanked all of us for coming all the way out to Blanco and for supporting Real Ale and took us inside of the brewery.

He was not a very good tour guide. He started by explaining how beer is made. This is a complicated process involving seeds and water and doing things to them inside of large steel cylinders that look pretty much the same, especially when a tyrant is talking about it really fast and pointing overhead at all of the places where this is supposedly going on at specific degrees and under specific conditions maintained and well monitored by himself and other Real Ale employees. He also got some things out of order, in the way that someone explaining something familiar to them with a lot of steps will remember something half way through explaining one step and go back to explain that and then resume the explanation where they left off, effectively leaving you (me) in the confused dust. And this process of making beer is not unique to Real Ale. Different beers use different ingredients, but the overall process is pretty much the same, has been for thousands of years, and the explanation of which is best left to TV or diagrams.

What I really wanted was facts individual to Real Ale, something of their personal story and something that I couldn't get at any other brewery in the world. The tyrant supplied a few of these. First of all, demand for Real Ale is currently exceeding supply, even in the current economic gloom, or perhaps because of, one of the tour goers quipped. Real Ale's response was interesting. They were beginning to automate some of their processes. Weighing out the grain for beers is kind of a meticulous process and certainly labor intensive. Solving that problem was a new machine nicknamed R2D2 who would weigh out and feed grains into the hopper automatically, and they go through a hopper (the big cylinder in front of the brewery) of grain about every two weeks. I don't know if this automation will offend any purists, but there you go. The next process being automated shouldn't offend anyone. As of right now boxing up bottles of Real Ale is done by hand. There's a machine that does bottles, but all of those bottles, all of them, are put into boxes by a person. Every saturday and sunday morning I grumble when I have to walk around my house picking up empties and throwing them into the recycling. That is only a fraction of what somebody at Real Ale puts in a box every day. Another automation machine is the one that cleans out kegs when they come back to the brewery (that's right, it's the brewery's job to clean out the keg--remember that you're only hurting your favorite brewery when you leave your half full keg in the sun covered in queso and whipped cream for a month before returning it) and then a separate one that fills them up again. They also have a cool suction cup device next to these machines that helps to pick up the full kegs and put them where they need to go. Some dude used to have to do this on his own before they got the machine, and he always got tired half way through the day and had to ask people around him doing other stuff for help.

Another fact: all of the fermenters at Real Ale are named after employees. Ah, and this one's important too: after the beer's finished fermenting Real Ale doesn't use any filtration or chemicals or other processes for beer clarification. Only time and gravity.

So even though I wasn't impressed with his tour, I was impressed with the way that the tyrant made me feel welcome at the brewery. It was a friday and everybody was gearing up for the weekend, and closing down the place. There was a stereo off somewhere playing classic rock hits. Every time we saw a new employee at work we got introduced and everybody had to say hi. He demonstrated the equipment, he pointed and gestured at the fermenters with an awe of realizing it's all right there, and he touched, pounded and set his beer on everything in the brewery like it was his own living room and he was inviting us in to have a seat and make ourselves at home and would we like a cold one, and this was the whole gesture of the Real Ale brewery, an overwhelming sense of gratitude for our support and for driving all the way out to Blanco just to say hello.