OVER A PINT
Bryan and Tim of St. Elmo Brewery ON A MAGNIFICENT SPRING EVENING IN SOUTH AUSTIN, WE BEER GUIDES SAT AND PARTOOK IN SAMPLE BATCHES AND CONVERSATION WITH THE LADS OF ST. ELMO IN THEIR WAREHOUSE/SOON TO BE BREWERY. OVER PILSNERS, SAISONS, AND BARRELAGED SOURS, WE WERE INTRODUCED TO ST. ELMO. ABG: We are here at St. Elmo, sitting with Tim Bullock and Bryan Winslow and we are drinking your Belgian-style Saison. Bryan: You are, Evangeline. Tell me a little about it. Mostly pils malt, little bit of Munich. And our Wyeast 3711. With a lot of Belgian-styles they say “we ferment this up to 80, 85, 90 degrees,” this one was fermented at like 68, 70, nice and mellow. Took a while, slow and low. I think it came out well. Tim: SLAB-Slow low and bangin’. It’s good, fruity, kind of dry, complex. It’s nice. What is the St. Elmo portfolio going to be comprised of? Tim and I really love all of the beer. We are not prejudice towards any style. We really like it all: lagers, farmhouse, hefeweizen... We really do like it all and we want people to be able to get that when they come to St. Elmo. The main focus of the brewery is to be a great brew pub for our neighborhood, the St. Elmo and South Austin area. If you really want light American lager or if you really want a German pils or a hoppy pale ale or a stout you can get all that here and we are really gonna try to work our hardest to make the best versions of all those that we can.
We’ve got three beers that we’re gonna be having year round. Carl, the kölsch, which we kind of perfected on a homebrew scale and then perfected on a bigger brewery scale at Austin Beerworks. We are gonna have Chico, which is a pale ale, mind you not a session IPA. It is a classic pale ale. And then we will have Angus, which is a dry stout. These beers are actually going to be mostly sub-5%. Year round beers are supposed to be, as Bryan said, for our neighborhood. We are going to be hanging out. It’s something we’re supposed to have a bunch of. These should be satisfying—everything that people are looking for, at least to start. But as Bryan was saying, we are open to great beer, generally, whether it’s crazy stuff, wild fermentation, barrel-aged stuff, or whatever. We plan on doing a little bit of everything. How many beers do you plan to have out at once? At first it will be tough. For time restrictions we will probably only be able to start with five or six. But I would really like to have at least 10 on a regular basis, most of them easy drinking as Tim said. Most of the beers that I really like to