SA trip post #1 (Real Ale)

Kaley and I took a long weekend trip to San Antonio over the start of our spring break. It was a lot of fun- surprisingly SA is a pretty cool city. Ever since I've been in Dallas, everyone has plugged how great Austin is, but nobody really talks about SA. I'll put up a couple more posts about our trip over the following days, but I'll start with our first stop (not counting a crummy gas station in Waco) the Real Ale Brewery.

Real Ale is in Blanco, Texas, in the hill country. It was nice to drive through and see cherry blossoms and lavender (they grow most of the country's lavender in this area). The brewery is pretty standard looking from the outside: big ass malt silo; metal siding; etc. Their tours/tasting on Friday is free which is awesome. On tap they had their standard pale, their blonde (tastes like Bud- read "AK would like this"), their ESB (English Special Bitter- a fairly malty and inoffensive British ale. Read "AK should try this instead"), and Phoenix (the doubled or Imperial version of the ESB). Now on top of these they had the special, unreleased, never been bottled, barrel-aged Real Heavy (wee heavy, a strong scottish style), and barrel-aged Sisyphus (barleywine). It was awesome to get a chance to sample these two.

Points of note on the tour:
-As their name indicates, they heavily promote "real" or cask ale. This is a way of serving beer in a keg which is naturally carbonated from the yeast. It comes out a little warmer (cellar temp) and with more "creamy" carbonation. They have something like 150 casks at Real Ale. (Ithaca Beer also does some of this- memories of Pixel lounge).
-Their fermenters are glycol chilled, not water.
-Their bottling line is way more mechanized than at Ithaca Beer. They have a machines to fold the sixer boxes, fold the case boxes, put the sixer boxes in the case boxes, label the boxes, and put the bottles into the boxes (along with all the actual bottling of the liquids). The most annoying and labor intensive thing is making the mixed pack which they have to do by hand.
-They have a machine to clean kegs (thus rendering Fitty useless).
-Like Franconia, and a lot of craft breweries, they are rapidly expanding. They just put in a new grain silo which is three times the size of their old one.
-They're currently expanding their barrel program to include more wine barrels and some bourbon barrels (Heaven Hill I think he said?), with the ones they have, seen below. This should make for some incredible beer.



The beer:
I'll limit my thoughts to the two barrel-aged offerings.

Barrel-Aged Sisyphus



I had this one second, but I'm putting it first here because it was the lesser of the two. Don't get me wrong, it was great, and better than normal Sisyphus (which I enjoy anyway), but the barrel didn't come out as much in the taste of the beer. The smell had a nice grapiness to it. There was also a sort of smooth vanilla and oak and silky maltiness. The taste was very much like a normal Sisyphus- sweetly malty, tropical fruit hops, probably more fruitiness than normal. Overall a very delicious beer.

Barrel-Aged Real Heavy

Now this stuff was REALLY delicious. It was one of those beers that I didn't want to drink because then there wouldn't be any left to smell, and it was a real treat to smell. There was amazing complexity with the interplay of sweet malts and fruit and woodiness. Oh and I forgot to mention that this was a slightly sour beer. The barrel had clearly inoculated it with some special bugs. The smell came off with a ton of light vinegar, like white balsamic, or cider vinegar. This was present in the taste too and combined with the maltiness of the base beer was just tasty. Hats off to Real Ale for a great barrel-aged beer (or two) and a great free tour.