Live Oak Brewery

Austin is one of those hip places in America that prides itself on fine dining aspirations, fine art and live music, and good small local breweries. One such brewery that only is seen in bars is called the Live Oak Brewery.

Live oaks, a specific kind of oak tree, are all over Austin, as the trees cascade down from the Texas Hill Country and are eventually replaced by coniferous cedars as the land turns to low prairie on its gradual slant towards swamp and Gulf.

A bar patron can instantly recognize if the particular bar carries Live Oak on tap: the taps are constructed out of actual branch cuttings of live oak. If you see a solid baton of barked oak, you just have to see what style that particular place carries.

Located on E. Fifth Street, east of I-35, the brewery give tours on random Saturdays. Free tours. The tickets are a hot commodity to say the least. Corrie snatched up the last two for a particular Saturday exactly forty days prior.

Since the brewery is so small, they only brew for kegs, and it's only sold in bars. After a potential move to a larger facility, they plan on bottling some beer, and one brewer is pushing for canning as well, mostly in light of how many outdoor spaces in Austin have rather lax alcohol laws, but are quite adamant against glass bottles.

The "tour" consisted of the whole lot of us, maybe forty or fifty people, crammed into a small unloading and wort brewing dock area (about half the brewery itself), taking turns standing in line for small samples of each of their five beers, while their Deutscher brewer would give Teutonic explanations about ze beer und ze broo-uree.

As we queued up for the last sample, our brewer-guide, Jan (or Hans), said, "...and zen vee vill take ze tour, which zounds very kuhl, but only takes sirty zeconds..."

Here is picture of Jan talking to us at the end of the tour.



This next picture is of a LCT, or liquid cooling tank, and to take it I was leaning up against a warmer LHT (liquid hot tank). Look at the stalactites hanging from the ceiling, center frame hanging from the ceiling, resembling dripping glue. Those types of stalactites were all over the place, but here you can see the drip marks on the tank. It is a good example of parallel energy source transferred onto a curved surface; this is the same way physicists talk about sunlight and the earth.



I couldn't help myself and had to take this picture of an exhaust fan. I thought it looked cool.



The beers were good, good, great, awesome, and pretty good, in that order, with "good" being logarithmically better than the Bud/Miller/Coors cabal.

Some interesting facts: Out of the nearly 1,500 breweries in America, 1,450+ are small, craft-brewers, with Samuel Adams and Sierra Nevada the two craft-brew heavy weights. That all sounds very cool, and makes a lover of excellent beer feel great.

That euphoria kinda wears off when you here that those 1,450+ breweries in America make up almost 5% of the American beer market. Five percent.

You know what fixes that, don't you?