Texas now has the 8th most Craft Breweries in the US

Maybe so, but we can get their goodies right here.

 

Pfft... not the brewery, err, creamery exclusive one-offs.

 

You can keep the creamery one offs to yourself there fella.

 

Just to be clear, we're talking about ... ice cream?

 

Stone is one of the reasons that craft beer has become so popular. At the risk of sounding unfairly impartial, they almost deserve a permanent spot on this list due to their influence and continual boundary expansion (see fresh IPA via Enjoy By and first US craft brewer to push for European expansion - Brooklyn beat them to the announcement for whatever reason).

Frankly, no TX brewery belongs on this list. Only one new-ish brewery is here (Hill Farmstead), and they deserve their spot b/c of the quality of their beers. Everyone else is established AND consistently high quality AND offers a broad range of great, if not world class, beers. What TX brewery can make that claim?

I don't think you can use one beer from a brewery (512) to put them in a list. Because Live Oak focuses primarily on one beer theme (German styles), they severely hurt their chances of ever being recognized as world-class since they are pitted against other German brewers, most of whom have better examples of German beers (possibly notwithstanding LO HefeWeizen).

 

Live Oak makes some of the best beers I have had anywhere, of coarse just my opinion. If you can't see that, and say they can't be recognized as world class just because they make German styles...well I don't think I can change your mind. There are only a few breweries in the US that can make quality German styles. Great Lakes, Stoudts, and Live Oak are it IMO. Which might be part of the problem, just because most people here seem to want "walzs bro" (gag me). Oh, and don't forget, they make a bad ass barleywine that is also among the best in the country.

Homers are everywhere, especially the anti homer. I can judge a beer on its merits, no matter what part of the country or world it comes from. Which, I think is obvious from my reviews...

 

Texas may be eighth in the total number of breweries, but if you click through the different parts of that map, you'll see that it is also 41st in the number of breweries per 500,000 people. In other words, Texas is still near the bottom, and we have a long way to go.

 

Every time I hear that argument I quickly mutter two words: Portland, Oregon. They're a smaller city than Austin yet they have more breweries than in any other city in the world (correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think they even require the pesky "per capita" qualifier to make that claim). Sure, they're up there in the middle of hop country, but I think Austin can easily match them for enthusiasm. I've described bars like the Ginger Man and Saucer to people from areas that don't have anything like that, and their response is usually "I would think with that many beers on tap they'd tend to go bad". That would be a telltale sign that we're reaching a saturation point and it's just not happening.

As for the topic at hand, I'm not sure it really means all that much for a bunch of Texans to sit around big upping Texas beers. The litmus test is what what an impartial out-of-towner thinks... when I travel, the local beers that stick out to me are the ones where I actively regret not having access to them when I get back home, which is a necessarily small fraction of the overall number of beers that I sample, fine as many of them might be. So with all due respect to (512), I'm not sure many people are drinking one of their IPAs and then going home to Oregon or Colorado and telling everyone it's one of the best they've ever had.

 

That's a good point but it doesn't really tell the whole story. Frankly I can envision West Texas and the Valley to continue to be beer wastelands indefinitely while the more populous areas continue to flourish, in which case we're always going to have large swaths of the state diluting the numbers.

It's a lot like looking at national per capita stats, where the flyover states are going to drag the numbers down enough that the resulting figures give you a pretty useless snapshot of how craft beer is doing on the coasts. A few grains of salt are clearly in order.

 

I think Live Oak gets unfairly punished for just sitting tight and not really doing anything new: they're not interested in expanding, they go years between experimenting with any new styles... then again, I guess you could just as easily spin that as rewarding the breweries that do experiment rather than punishing the ones that don't.

Everyone talks about the hefe, which really is world class, but I think their Czech pilsner is equally fantastic for that style. However, LO's amber is just too damn yeasty and their Primus tastes to me like a pale shadow of Aventinus. The rest of their lineup varies from so-so (Roggenbier, Liberation) to almost-great (Oaktoberfest). I don't think two stellar beers really vaults them into the upper echelons of breweries in toto.

 

I'm originally from the Panhandle. Don't get back there much but I still have plenty of friends up there. Their prognosis isn't that optimistic, despite the presence of a few token breweries getting in on the whole craft boom. There seems to be a sense that enthusiasm for good beer on a consumer level hasn't really improved comparable to the rest of the state/country, and there are still few outlets for these new breweries outside of the liquor stores, so most of the beer geeks up there tend to focus more on homebrewing than on acquiring commercial craft beers. Sure, lack of distribution up in those parts would seem to work in favor of local breweries (ie. less out-of-state competition) but in practice I'm not sure having bottles in stores alone is enough to convert many new beer geeks. I think you really need those tap handles to push the idea of trying new stuff, and from what I can tell the Panhandle is still sorely lacking in quality beer bars.

Again, this is my perception based on what I hear from the handful of locals I happen to know, but the point is that even if the Panhandle scene is better than it used to be there's no compelling reason to believe that they'll eventually catch up to the rest of the state. I think the sheer remoteness of West Texas virtually ensures that the state will never be chock full of breweries from the Sabine all the way to the Trans-Pecos mountains... the same way Kansas and Nebraska will always seem relatively dry compared to the West Coast.

 

I don't see why the per capita claim is 'pesky'. It is a standard way to normalize. If a small town of 1000 people had four breweries, that'd be pretty darn impressive. Portland would need about 2400 breweries to have the same number per capita, right now it has 52 in the city.
On the other hand, if Tokyo were to have 1000 breweries, that's impressive too, but the number of breweries per capita would be lower than Portland. Other variables can be chosen to normalize against, but some sort of rational normalization should be done.

I totally agree with your critique on Texans hyping TX to other Texans like some sort of Homer reach around. It's nice to feel like something good is happening for TX beer, but it's important that the other 91% of the US craft drinker population realizes it (assuming craft drinkers in each state follow general population numbers).

I am a Californian, but not a hop head, and only a few TX beers have impressed me. I'll readily admit that I still have many more to try though.
Before I moved here I had no idea that there were more than ten TX breweries, let alone vibrant scenes in the larger cities (and some cool BAs I've interacted with on this forum ). I only knew about anything other than Shiner because I saw a web ad about a TX beer festival, and the only new name I can recall is Lone Star. Didn't take long to figure out that Lone star is not the Stone/Lagunitas/Sierra Nevada/FW/etc. of TX (a big craft brewery helping out some little ones).

 

That was meant as tongue-in-cheek, but it does seem remarkable that what is a mid-size city by US standards would be able to support more breweries than anywhere else in the world, regardless of size. The gist of my comment is that Portland boasts more breweries than any other city with or without the qualifier, which is damn impressive when there are cities out there with literally 10x the population.

 

I wouldn't consider myself super well-traveled - and I've never once planned a trip specifically around beer - but I usually manage to get out of the state 2-3x a year, and I make it a point to seek out local craft beer wherever I happen to go. Look, forget about another state's beers being BETTER, they only have to be JUST AS GOOD to negate any competitive advantage one of our homegrown brews has. That said, it is not terribly difficult to find beers that are just as good as the locals we enjoy; some might even say better, but all that matters is that they manage to measure up comparably.

At any rate, however much we may be sitting here drinking a (512) IPA exclaiming it the best of it's kind ever produced, there's someone in SF drinking a Cali IPA that's equally convinced of its superiority. The homer votes cancel each other out. It's the itinerant traveler with no dog in the hunt that dictate the rankings in any top 10 list, and frankly I just don't see that many people coming to Austin, sampling our wares and then talking them up when they get back home.

Why is that? What is it us Texans see in our own beers than they seem to be overlooking?

 

Last time I was in Lubbock was five years ago and Cricket's was the only game in town. Their tap selection was kind of a running joke, though, with half the wall consisting of perennially out-of-stock beers and the other half being duplicates of BMC product... you know, so the bartender didn't have to walk the three yards to the other end of the wall to pour a Guinness.

 

I guess the follow up question would be how many of those were actually available? They had tap handles for some interesting stuff back in my day, too, they just never had any of it in stock.

More important question: how much of the improvement in the Panhandle is due to long term, sustainable growth and how much of it is a temporary bubble due to craft beer being on a national upswing? You could draw a similar analogy with the foodie trend, where nice restaurants are popping up in chain-dominated towns left and right, what with "affordable gourmet" being all the rage right now, but how many of them will be left when the trend hoppers get bored and move on to the next thing?

I think Austin, Houston and DFW are big enough to maintain permanent craft scenes even when the bubble eventually bursts and the inevitable contraction occurs, but West TX is still baby stepping it's way toward craft beer respectability long after other areas have come to take it for granted. Time will tell but it wouldn't surprise me at all if the ceiling out there continued to remain much lower than what more privileged areas would consider an acceptable level. The Panhandle may just have to settle for "better than it used to be", and Midland-Odessa will most likely always be "S.O.S."