PROLOGUE: Ayyy, Austin … Tell Me How My Craft Taste.

Feel free to let your jaw drop.  

I am firing up this old internet machine again because, well, there is something called the Blogger's Conundrum, which goes something like, 

A discrepant notion of dwindling significance 

+ 

The bellyaching of a half-dozen other projects

÷

Lack of free time  

And if the answer to all that algebra = Residual Interest in Subject at Hand, then, yeah, you go ahead and unretire the ol' blog to do some scribing, because one cannot succumb to the peaceful recreation of middle-class alcohol abuse while being the Daddest motherfucker of all time in a post-Pitchfork era all alone.  I guess I missed you too.

This site is gonna look a bit different content-wise, and what I mean is that there will no longer be those clever audits on a singular brew that everyone reads and forgets the moment they click away, but instead, analysis on individual breweries as a whole.  

Brewery profiles.  That's what you'll read here; mainly because my approach to craft beer drinking has dramatically changed in the last year or so, from whale slaying .750s to scanning the overstock catalogues of my favorite breweries, buying the shit out of all their mainstays and flagship beers.  I suppose I'm kind-of over beers brewed in batches so small, its measured with the metric system, because, that simply not the by-God American way. (Am I right, my fellow American fatties?)

I'll tell you what, being a flagship-only craft beer guy has been fucking awesome.  Its been stress free.  My dick retracts to normal lengths on Divine Reserve day.  Can you fucking imagine that buying beer used to be so stressful?

The focus will primarily be on local Austin breweries, because fuck you, Austin is awesome, and because we as a city have the economic luxury of hosting vacationing immigrants from the other 30-or-so US states all the time (if not 30, then make up your own number, genius, this is America, land of the oblivious, home of the drunk!) -- and most of those kids on holiday become transplanted hipsters who've decided that Austin was awesome and THANKFULLY moved here!  

So maybe (just maybe) there are a few of those newly-minted Austinites (and all of the holiday hipsters they'll be hosting, encouraging to move here, too!) out there who just need a brewery primer, something to let em know whats up.  Where one can be seen.   Bottles or cans and shit?  LCD Soundsystem cover band or String Cheese?  Thats EXACTLY what we'll be doing here on [AA].  We hope to hit every brewery with such an in-depth vantage point that we'll be able to tell you if they use corn starch or gold bond on their privates.

So then, what's this beer exposé gonna be called, in the inebriant sense of the word, exposé?

"Tell Me How My Craft Taste"

Yep.

Which is about the best we could come up with using a beer pun.  These ladies wanted "Hop Cock", but that just sounded gross, and the ability to use a Big Aristotle, aka, Diesel, aka, Shaq Fu, aka The Shaqtus, aka Superman, aka Shaquille O'Neal reference just sounded right given the enormity of this whole project.

The abundance of material for this series downright encouraging, as Texas is as healthy of a brewing state as there is anywhere else on the planet -- especially coming off sixteen (SIXTEEN!) medals at GABF. 

The sustainability of the small beer industry into the distant future is very palpable to both hardcore and casual beer fans, so much so, that craft beer has become the common vernacular for drinkers in Austin, and Texas as a whole.  Try to remember the last time some tanktop jerkoff was walking around flaunting his Miller Lite at you.  Maybe its not so hard to remember, but you did have to think about it a little bit.  

Some of the things we'll be examining in our brewery profiles are:

The flagship beers
Some rotational beers
Packaging
Taproom

and most importantly:

THE  OVERALL EFFUSIVE JOY THE BREWERY BRINGS ME

… which is the only thing we'll really be talking about anyway.

And finally, finally … this is a pet project to this one, and so don't be guilting us into regular articles because this shit is really cutting into our drinking time, dig?  

Okay, enough of this stupid blog post about a blog post, anyone got any suggestions for the first brewery, then?

Note: h/t to William and Chris for encouraging me to get off my ass, even though I hate em for it.