Jason Davis of Freetail Brewing

Jason Davis is producing some seriously funky beers in his hometown of San Antonio, Texas. He’s blending disparate styles to create innovative new recipes. He’s taking care of the beer geeks with wild ales and specialty bottle releases. He’s winning over Lone Star drinkers with IPAs and Belgians. Freetail Brewing is filling unmet demand in San Antonio, and advancing the ball for the craft industry. Freetail is able to pull double duty like that, Davis argues, because it cuts a wide swath, serving tasty session ales alongside its geekier offerings. “It’s nice to be able to satisfy a lot of different people,” he says. “I’m not Greg Koch. We’ll make you some yellow beer. And it will taste better.”

1. Soak it up
An old high school friend who worked at a homebrew supply store introduced Jason Davis to homebrewing. This was in the early 1990s, just before Texas legalized brewpubs, and Davis had no idea how deep the brewing culture he was stepping into ran. He could find German and English imports around Austin, maybe a few Belgians, and some Samuel Adams and Sierra Nevada, but that was it. “I didn’t realize there was this whole world [of beer] out there,” he says. Homebrewing opened that world for him. He learned about brewing styles and brewing history by reading Charlie Papazian, and any homebrewing article he could get his hands on.

2. Climb a ladder, or two
Davis worked his way up the ladder from novice to head brewer. Sometimes, the path upward was off the ladder altogether. Davis landed his first pro brewing job, at Austin’s Waterloo Brewing Company, by way of a job in Waterloo’s kitchen. And before being brought into the brewery, Davis waited tables at San Antonio’s Blue Star Brewing Company. During a two-year hiatus from professional brewing, he got more involved with the Bexar Brewers homebrew club; so when he decided to help launch Freetail, it was as much powered by the strength of his local homebrew club network as it was his commercial brewing at Blue Star.

3. Your stovetop is your R&D department
Davis met Freetail’s founder and CEO, Scott Metzger, at a Craft Brewers Conference, but their brewing partnership flourished at local homebrew club meetings. Davis sent Blue Star’s beers off in a more experimental direction, and Metzger took notice. The two men shared similar tastes in beer, and Davis’ interview for Freetail basically consisted of the two riffing on what types of beers they could create together. Freetail was Davis’ first experience launching a startup, and he leaned heavily on his homebrewing: Ten of Freetail’s regular beers, including the brewery’s standout Wit and Imperial Stout, are variations of recipes Davis brewed at home.

4. Stray from the path
Freetail was set up to take advantage of the flexibility that comes with brewing at a pub. It produces just three year-round flagship brews; there’s always an IPA on tap, but the exact recipes rotate in and out; and the rest of the lineup is up for grabs, which “often means making hard choices about what not to brew,” Davis says. “As a homebrewer, you find out that every tiny thing you do makes a huge difference, whether it’s with the yeast, the water chemistry, omitting a malt, or what time you add the hops. If you take that a step further, and change everything a little bit, suddenly you’re off the beaten path. We’re not just repeating what we know people have already done. We’re creating our own niche.”

5. Explore new terroir
At Freetail, Davis produces wild riffs on traditional styles. He ferments his Oktoberfest with Belgian yeast. He brews his Belgian Witbier with a healthy dose of rye. He spices Helles and Witbier with chili peppers. And he’s always playing around with wild barrel-aged styles, aging Belgian-inspired recipes on local fruit, and introducing familiar expressions to unconventional ingredients (aging Wit with chamomile) and cultures (introducing Freetail’s house Amber to Brettanomyces). “When I got into brewing, the thing that turned me on was terroir of beer,” Davis says. “It’s not just the terroir of the land, but of the time—the methods, what’s going on with the industry at the time.”

6. Pay tribute, then innovate
Davis brewed at Celis Brewery during the Austin institution’s final two years of operation. Celis’ Pale Bock hooked him initially, but it was Celis White that stuck with Davis, and launched a lasting love affair with Belgian Wits. “The White was stunning,” Davis recalls. “It wasn’t like anything I’d ever tasted. It’s the one beer that’s my desert-island style.” Freetail’s flagship Wit offers a restrained nod to Celis. Davis drives some spicy complexity by adding a decent charge of rye to the grist, but the rest of the recipe is simple—Hoegaarden yeast, but no added sugar or fancy spicing except for restrained additions of coriander, and sweet and bitter orange peel. Davis makes up for the simplicity by spinning Rye Wit off into its imperialized big brother, Witicus, a beer that’s the base for a number of funky, fruit-laced wild fermentations.

7. It is what it is
If Rye Wit is an homage to Celis, Davis’ flagship Freetail Ale speaks to the brewery’s unwillingness to be pinned down stylistically. It marries German malts (lots of Munich and Vienna) with American hops, but at 4.4-percent ABV, it does so on a modest scale. It’s a lot easier for Davis to talk about what the beer isn’t—it’s not an Altbier, because it’s not lagered; it’s not big or hoppy enough to be an American Amber; it’s not much of a German ale, because it’s hopped with Cluster. It’s no style but the brewery’s.

8. Get dead
Freetail reaches beyond its San Antonio base with specialty bottle releases that draw in beer geeks from across Texas. The year’s biggest bottle release drops La Muerta, a brawler of an Imperial Stout, on the Mexican Day of the Dead. The beer builds layers of chocolate, roasted and aromatic Munich malt notes around smoked malt, which Davis calls the beer’s “central pillar.” The smoke provides a unique focal point to differentiate La Muerta from other big Stouts. It also helps the beer stand up to long periods aging in the cellar. Most Texans take their smoked beer with barbecue; Davis, a pescatarian, says the beer reminds him of smoking a salmon along a riverbank.

9. Go batty
Freetail is a brewpub named after the Mexican Free-tailed bat, the official flying mammal of Texas—so it was pretty obvious that the brewery had to celebrate this, the International Year of the Bat, in a big way. Metzger, the pub’s founder, wanted to brew a beer full of ingredients that benefit when bats devour insects. The hitch, Davis says, was “the list of ingredients that fall into that category is basically all the ingredients. It’s barley, it’s wheat, it’s oats, it’s fruits, it’s flowers. It made it too easy. I wasn’t just going to brew with all beer ingredients.” With input from the Bat Conservation International, they decided on three—beets, oranges and rose water. Davis spiced, hopped and fermented the beer like it was a Belgian Wit; it ends up resembling a Wit, even though the grain bill is much closer to an American Blonde than to a Wit. Davis adds, “Hate to say it, but I like it because it’s so drinkable and appealing to a wide range of drinkers, from our hardcore fans to newbies.” ■