Beer and Wine Journal will post clone recipes and I thought that starting with my local brewpub would be appropriate. For one thing, the brewers — Ed Peters and Kevin Glenn — started as homebrewers and their brewhouse isn’t that different from a homebrew setup.
The back decks of the Bastrop Brewhouse overlook the Colorado River.
Bastrop, Texas is located about 30 miles southeast of Austin and the Bastrop Brewhouse opened here last fall. The brewpub overlooks the Colorado River and the municipal park that runs along the river. (And for horror movie fans, the old bridge you see spanning the river is the bridge from Texas Chainsaw Massacre II. Remember that one? With Dennis Hopper? Awesome.)
The new owner had two levels of decking installed for outside seating, plus the lower deck has a stage area for small bands to play. Larger acts can play in the small pavilion down in the beer garden. (Kinky Friedman and David Allen Coe have played there.) In the evening, you can sit on the deck and enjoy a beer as you watch the sun set on the Colorado. Not too shabby.
Bands play in this small pavilion.
The brewhouse is located in a separate building from the brewpub. Wort is produced on a 3.5-barrel (~110-gallon/410-L), 3-vessel brewhouse with a hot liquor tank, mash/lauter vessel and a kettle. The wort is cooled with a plate chiller and run off to one of three 7-barrel fermenters. The guys make two batches of wort, on two consecutive days, to fill each fermenter. The brewhouse has four 7-barrel bright tanks where the beer is force carbonated and served from.
One interesting thing about the arrangement is that the serving lines run from the bright tanks in the brewery, under the ground for about 40 yards, and into the brewpub — that’s a very long way to push beer. The maximum pressure on the bright tanks is not too much higher than normal serving pressure, so they needed to find a way to move the beer that distance and still have it be carbonated and pour correctly. The solution was very large ID serving lines wrapped in a glycol chill tubing to keep it cold.
The brewpub has 2 year-round beers, Alley B Pale Ale and St Camilla’s Honey Brown Ale, the latter of which Ed Peters gave a clone recipe for. They also have 2 taps that serve seasonal and one-off beers brewed there.
Kevin Glenn (brewer, left) and Ed Peters (head brewer, right) before their 3.5-barrel brewhouse.
[…] However, before writing this article, I spoke to Kevin Glenn, who not only brews professionally at Bastrop Brewhouse, but smokes small lots of malt for various breweries. Kevin’s birchwood-smoked malt went into […]