Texan live oaks are special trees. Quercus fusiformis can be recognized for its stately, yard-wide trunks; for its dense, sprawling crowns whose layered limbs curve and twine almost back to the ground. Its thickly ridged bark contrasts with its small and shapely foliage, which provides welcome shade from the Texas sun.
These are hardy and enduring plants, capable of tolerating extremes of heat, cold, and drought to survive for centuries. The same tree I now favor on my regular visits to Live Oak Brewing Company’s beer garden may well have witnessed hundreds of years of Texan history sweeping past. It might even have sheltered early German and Czech immigrants, who began arriving in central Texas in the 19th century, as they made their way across a hostile and unyielding landscape. I bet they’d have given an arm and a leg for a few pours of Live Oak’s flagship Czech-style Pilz, or award-winning Hefeweizen.
“The live oak represents what we were trying to do—create something old, respected and beautiful,” says the brewery’s owner and co-founder, Chip McElroy.
In its earliest days some 25 years ago, Live Oak was a shoestring-budget outlier in a market unfamiliar with locally produced craft Lager. “We just had a keg crammed between two tanks,” says Dusan Kwiatkowski. He has been with Live Oak since 2007 and has been head brewer since 2012, and recalls the scrappy attitude that defined its beginning. “There was nowhere to put your beer down—it was rough.”
Since then, the brewery has hung on through all kinds of upheavals: the dissolution of its co-founders’ business partnership, the ebb and flow of market trends, a move across town to a new production facility, and the lingering effects of a global pandemic.
Today, its elder-statesman status is unarguable. It has not just survived, but thrived, even as the region’s beer market has become increasingly crowded (today, there are nearly 60 breweries in the greater Austin area). Its identity is so strong that among the 15 people I interviewed for this story, the same words came up over and over again when describing the brewery: Consistency. Quality. Camaraderie. Knowledge. Dedication. Passion. Refusal to compromise. “We like working with people who are committed to a really high level of quality, are unique as individuals, and are generally laid-back and friendly,” says Jeffrey Stuffings, co-founder of Jester King Brewery and a regular Live Oak collaborator. “I think that sums up Live Oak pretty well.”
Within Austin’s tight-knit beer community, the stories of McElroy and co-founder Brian “Swifty” Peters’ hand-conversion of an old sausage factory, their travails getting their beers into local bars and restaurants, and their famously generous brewery tours have become the stuff of local legend. With every new tale, the mythology of Live Oak comes to life, spiriting me back in time to a very different Austin—one where two homebrewers with a dream of making the kind of Pilsner they wanted to drink weren’t yet a cliché; one where those homebrewers could not only secure real estate on what is now an exceedingly expensive strip of hipster-baiting retail outlets, but could successfully hand-build their own brewery and hand-sell their own beer.
Of course, none of this would be notable if the beer weren’t also special. From Live Oak’s flagship Pilz to its range of smoked beers and lovingly revived historical recipes, the brewery’s focus on reprising European styles with exacting standards has guided it for the last two-and-a-half decades. These are beers “that you want to drink sitting in the shade and arguing about politics,” as McElroy puts it.
For Elle Thomas, founder of Austin beer tour company AirBrewNB, the quality of Live Oak’s beer and of its taproom setting ensure it is a regular stop on her brewery tours. “As one of the oldest breweries in Texas, Live Oak has repeatedly and deservedly earned ‘old guard’ status,” she says. “Since Live Oak opened in the early ’90s, the craft beer movement has expanded and transitioned—but Live Oak continues to make solid German beers without leaning on the common gimmicks and fad beers we see come and go in this industry.”
As Live Oak alumnus Drew Durish, who is now a brewer at Side Project Brewing in St. Louis, Missouri, put its, “Live Oak has had a profound impact on the state’s brewing landscape that ultimately spread across the country to an impressive degree.” Pam Catoe, Craft Beer Austin owner and PorchDrinking Southwest’s regional editor, agrees. “I think Live Oak’s influence extends beyond Texas,” she says. “When we travel, we bring local beers along with us to share, and everyone I reach out to beforehand always requests one of Live Oak’s.”
Chip McElroy and Brian Peters met during an Austin Homebrewers Club event at the back of the now-shuttered Dog & Duck Pub in East Austin sometime in 1992. Peters, an electrical engineer, had recently moved to Austin from Indiana. McElroy, a biochemist, was newly returned to the city after completing his doctorate in California. Both homebrewers had, independently, developed an interest in Lagers.
Peters, who had started brewing “out of sheer boredom” while still in Indiana, had decided to up his game after hearing that Pilsner Urquell was the best beer in the world, and set out to make a copy. “If it was the best, I wanted to learn to try to make the best,” he says. “I graduated to a professional kit and ingredients and took over the garage with a cooling kit—it seems a little ambitious in hindsight.”
Fresh from San Diego, McElroy had been exposed to a more developed craft beer scene than what Austin had to offer at the time, and he began to replicate the Lagers he had seen homebrewed back on the West Coast. “Chip turned up at that meeting with a bottle of some kind of Bock, and I knew he knew what he was doing,” says Peters. When the two bumped into each other while walking their dogs in Travis Heights and discovered they were neighbors, they soon began brewing together, and the idea to start their own business followed quickly.
“We had to go into survival mode under pressure—in hindsight I wish I hadn’t invested so much mental and physical capacity into it, but it was the only way it could work. But that said, I was really proud and happy to be making the most authentic Czech-style Pilsner in America. ”
The pair initially planned to open a brewpub, but “then we realized we didn’t know anything about food or decorating,” says McElroy. Instead, they found an old sausage factory on East 5th Street, a short distance from their homes, and with money raised primarily from family and friends, set about hand-converting the property into a functioning brewery.
At this point, the stories come thick and fast. They describe buying cheap dairy equipment from an auction in Lubbock, redoing the plumbing and electrics with little experience, picking up coils of stainless steel from the scrap metal plant next door and cutting lids for their fermenters out of scavenged flower shop trailers (“They worked for 18 years,” McElroy chuckles).
With McElroy as plumber, Peters as electrician, and their friend “English Dave” Reggler as foreman, the three worked “from sunup to sundown for 11 months,” as Peters tells it. Most of the work was done without the requisite permits, a feat they make sound effortless. “We had the boiler dangling off a crane just as the building inspector showed up,” McElroy tells me with some relish. Peters recounts how he had to pay a qualified electrician to sign off as the license holder, even though he had done all the work himself in order to pass the electrical inspection. “Obviously it wasn’t the right way to do it, but it was the only way,” he says. “We were bootstrapping and underfunded the whole time.”
A rich vein of nostalgia runs through these war stories. I hear how they had to raise the leaking fermenter through a hole in the ceiling to weld underneath it; how they had to redo the entire floor to create a drainage channel; all the scrapes and close calls with city officials, the long days and late nights. “You’ve gotta pull your pants up and just do it,” says McElroy. “We had to be creative and fix things in an affordable way—you just had to do shit.”
Peters is more sanguine with the passage of time. “We had to go into survival mode under pressure—in hindsight I wish I hadn’t invested so much mental and physical capacity into it, but it was the only way it could work,” he says. “But that said, I was really proud and happy to be making the most authentic Czech-style Pilsner in America.”
“Pilsner beer tastes so good.”
When I ask McElroy why he and Peters lacked the appetite for Pale Ales that was so prevalent in the late ’90s, his response is both concise and precise. McElroy’s love for Lager in all its forms runs like an arrow through the history of the brewery, right up to its present-day output.
McElroy himself shares many traits with his brewery’s namesake. Sturdy and smiling, with an abundant gray mane and signature white mustache, his stalwart focus, perseverance, and unbending nature are repeatedly cited as key reasons for Live Oak’s success and longevity. (“I just kept asking people until I got the answer I wanted,” he says, when describing how he, Peters, and Regler built the original taproom from scratch.)
To the best of McElroy’s knowledge, no other microbrewery nationwide started out making only a Pilsner in 1997. So why knowingly buck industry norms? Because McElroy and Peters knew they could make their beer taste better than anything on the market at the time, they tell me. “We had to make our own beer ’cause there was nothing decent to drink,” Peters says. “We were fighting back against mass-produced, dumbed-down macro Lager.”
That fight became a quest for quality, and for McElroy and Peters, achieving that quality meant turning to traditional, European-style Lager-brewing processes. “Our first beer was the Pilz—it was decocted from the beginning and every time since,” says McElroy. He contends that Lagers have never been unpopular to drink, just to brew, because of the specialized equipment and labor-intensive processes required to make them to a high standard. “We don’t do it the traditional way because we’re gluttons for punishment—we do it because that’s how it tastes best. Brewing Lager well takes time and space; you need to take every step seriously, and do it how it is supposed to be done.”
“We don’t do it the traditional way because we’re gluttons for punishment—we do it because that’s how it tastes best. Brewing Lager well takes time and space; you need to take every step seriously, and do it how it is supposed to be done.”
McElroy runs me through all the ways breweries can cut corners when brewing Lager—using cheaper hops, skipping decoction or step mashing, using a regular fermentation tank instead of a horizontal fermentation tank—and how each part of the process affects the flavor of the beer.
In a separate interview, Peters echoes McElroy nearly word for word. It may be over 20 years since the two were business partners, but their dedication to the process of brewing the perfect Pilsner remains a touching constant. “Why else would we employ decoction and other traditional labor-intensive brewing processes?” he asks. “It’s interesting and fun, even if it adds four hours to the working day!”
Over the last 25 years, this philosophy has reaped rewards. Aside from Live Oak’s local popularity, its beers have gained national and international renown, despite the fact that its beer is only available in Texas. The brewery has also won numerous awards, including a bronze medal for the Hefeweizen at the 2019 Great American Beer Festival, which was also ranked the second-best Hefeweizen in the world on BeerAdvocate, and best Hefeweizen of the 2010s by Paste Magazine. The brewery has additionally expanded its portfolio to feature over 20 Pilsner variants and many historical beer styles, including a range of smoked beers like its Grodziskie and seasonals like its Kletus smoked Maibock.
Live Oak’s shift into brewing smoked beer in 2012, and the steady expansion of its range of Pilsners, both arose under the stewardship of Kwiatkowski, whose creative flair as a brewer (“an artist,” according to Peters) and interest in his Polish heritage fueled both projects. Kwiatkowski describes brewing smoked beer as “like time-traveling—capturing the spirit of the era when all beer had smoke in it,” and his passion for research and experimentation has been instrumental in shaping Live Oak as it is today.
When Live Oak opened in April 1997, it was as a draft-distribution-only facility. Having pieced together their patchwork brewery, McElroy and Peters faced their next challenge: finding a way to break into the local market. While Texas allowed microbreweries to self-distribute, most bar and restaurant owners didn’t know or particularly care to know what craft beer was. “We had to explain that it wasn’t brewed in a bathtub,” says McElroy.
Soon, the two devised a mobile sampling unit with a keg, jockey box, and cups in the back of a van. “It was all cold-calling and people were confused,” Peters says. “They always saw the same reps—not two guys in tie-dye.” The pair honed a tag-team routine, where one would get the bar manager talking while the other poured them samples before they could refuse. “We just had to get them to try the beer—then usually they would carry it,” Peters says.
McElroy concurs, describing how they would then buy pitchers of their own beer and pour samples for customers to try. “Most were initially very suspicious until they found out it was free,” he says of this early guerilla marketing campaign. The Dog & Duck Pub, where McElroy and Peters met, was their first customer: The inaugural keg sold for $90, and McElroy requested an $89 check and a $1 bill as a souvenir, which he still has.
After collecting seven accounts in its first week, Live Oak was in business. “One of the biggest reasons for our success was that we delivered beer ourselves—people loved that,” says Peters. “We were like the Ben and Jerry’s of beer.” They even attracted the attention of acclaimed beer writer Michael Jackson, who visited the brewery twice, the first time shortly after it opened. “Michael Jackson came by and knew who we were—that was a goal achieved,” says Peters. He recounts how they all “properly geeked out. He understood that we were nerds, that we were believers.”
At this point, Live Oak was still experimenting with the rest of its range. The now-beloved Hefeweizen was the brewery’s second beer, after beginning as a summer seasonal. Its Oaktoberfest (of which there is now also a smoked version) started off as a fall seasonal that became so popular that McElroy and Peters tried to sell it year-round. When that didn’t work, they changed its name to Märzen, but “people didn’t understand the style, and they didn’t like the funny dots over the ‘a,’” McElroy says. Reducing the ABV and increasing the hopping led to Big Bark Amber Lager, now one of their bestsellers.
However, while interest in and demand for Live Oak’s beer continued to grow, Peters and McElroy found themselves moving in separate directions. Peters stepped down on September 1, 2001. He took his passion for lovingly crafted Lagers with him, moving on to the Bitter End Brewpub and then Uncle Billy’s Brew & Que (now both closed), where he won multiple awards at GABF.
Today, Peters is the co-owner and brewer at the Austin Beer Garden Brewing Co., or the ABGB. The brewery has established itself as a major player in the Austin beer scene, winning multiple awards (including Brewpub of the Year) at GABF in 2016, 2017 and 2018. It has a popular rotation of live music shows, including its packed Sunday afternoon two-step sessions, and serves some of the best pizzas in Austin, fulfilling Peters’ goal of running a Lager-focused brewpub.
“The ABGB and Live Oak are able to co-exist as successful Lager breweries in Austin,” he says. “We’re both really good at what we do and have a huge respect for what the other does.”
After Peters’ departure, McElroy brought on board Steve Anderson, long a key figure in the local beer community. Anderson, who sadly passed away from prostate cancer in November 2015, was the original brewer at Austin’s fabled Waterloo Brewing, the first brewpub in the city and an important part of Austin’s beer history. Just nine days after Waterloo Brewing closed for good on September 2, 2001, he moved to Live Oak.
Anderson brought with him a passion for beer and brewing, expertise honed at Chicago’s Siebel Institute, and a deep personal knowledge of the Austin beer scene. His first day happened to be September 11, 2001. “We had a little TV on while we brewed,” says McElroy. “Our brew sheets had a blank for writing in the beer’s name. We brewed ‘Terror Pilz’ and ‘World Pilz Center.’ That sort of thing tends to stick with you.”
Anderson would remain Live Oak’s head brewer for the next 11 years, building a working relationship and friendship with McElroy that took Live Oak out to Anderson’s West Texas home of Alpine, into local venues including Holland Hotel, Harry’s Tinaja, and Railroad Blues, as well as the famous White Buffalo Bar at the Gage Hotel in Marathon, Texas. “That was incredible and would have never happened without Steve,” says McElroy. “And I don’t mean just because of the delivery transport. He was also well-known out there and those accounts respected him a lot.”
Anderson’s skill and insights resonated within the brewery, too. “He was the biggest influence on me professionally, and a large chunk personally,” says Kwiatkowski, who picked up Anderson’s mantle in 2012 when he left Live Oak to move to Alpine full-time and become brewmaster at the newly launched Big Bend Brewing Company. Anderson retained close ties with Austin and Live Oak until his untimely death, and his influence in the Austin beer community is still felt.
“Live Oak’s influence on brewing has been felt way beyond Austin and although I never met Steve Anderson, I regularly meet brewers and brewery owners who share personal impactful stories of how he directly influenced the way they brew,” says Elle Thomas.
For McElroy, Anderson’s presence remains close at hand. “[He] was a great brewer and really understood the fundamentals of brewing. He understood what it took to make beer well and consistently,” he says, emphasizing his role in carrying forward Live Oak’s most fundamental principle. “[But] Steve’s greatest contribution to the brewery was that he was my friend. I miss that.”
When Kwiatkowski took over as Live Oak’s head brewer, he had already been with the brewery for over four years, having started out washing kegs back in 2007. An experienced homebrewer, Kwiatkowski first encountered Live Oak’s Pilz as a University of Texas undergraduate.
“I had a classmate who bartended at the [UT campus’] Cactus Café—they had Live Oak Pilz on tap and I got addicted,” he says. Kwiatkowski graduated through cellar work, filtering, and yeast handling before brewing, and his tenure began just prior to a game-changing moment in Live Oak’s history—the brewing of its first smoked beer.
The experiment began when San Antonio brewery and distillery Ranger Creek procured a shipping container smoke box to smoke Texas wood for its beer and whiskey, and invited Live Oak to use it. “Chip had always talked about it, so we took the opportunity to use the smoke box,” says Kwiatkowski. “It wasn’t the traditional way but we wanted to give it a try.” The first batch of Smoaktoberfest, their now-legendary smoked Oktoberfest beer, “was a bit faint compared to the Schlenkerla-like flavor we were after,” but it was enough to start the ball rolling.
“The beers we brew all share a lot of timeline—Pilsner, Grodziskie, Lichtenhainer—for us, we are bringing them back together.”
Later, a trip to Bamberg coincided with the new availability of Weyermann Malting’s oak-smoked wheat in the U.S. in 2013. With encouragement from friends in the industry, the idea of brewing a Grodziskie at Live Oak took hold. “We were already specializing in Lagers so smoked beers felt like a natural step that we grew into,” says McElroy. Kwiatkowski agrees. “The beers we brew all share a lot of timeline—Pilsner, Grodziskie, Lichtenhainer—for us, we are bringing them back together.”
While such styles might have been a hard sell for central Texas Lager drinkers, the brewery’s stubbornness paid off. “We just kept making it,” says McElroy, with his trademark confidence. He emphasizes the need for a quality base beer, and highlights the comparative approachability of Live Oak’s lighter smoked styles compared to more heavily smoked, darker beers.
Grodziskie, the “Polish Champagne,” began as a seasonal, but became a year-round flagship after Live Oak moved to its new site in 2017. The larger space also offered Kwiatkowski the room to experiment with various small-batch beers and smoked styles, including Schwarzer Rauch, a cold-fermented, beechwood-smoked Black Lager; Weizer Rauch, a smoked German Hefeweizen; Kletus smoked Maibock; and Hell Bock, a 6.6% smoked Bock made with brimstone-smoked Pilsner malt. Beers like these are now brought together for Live Oak’s annual Rauchfest each January.
The team believes that festivals and events are an important way to share the smoky love. “People are much more open-minded at festivals and ready to try something different,” says Kwiatkowski. “One year we took five different smoked beers to GABF and they went down really well.” Live Oak’s marketing manager Myk O’Connor agrees. “We already know there is a smaller segment of the market who will enjoy the product, but events and festivals are great for encouraging learning about the smoked beers,” he says. “We started Rauchfest to give people the opportunity to try the different styles and find what they like—it’s a good way to introduce people to smoked beers.”
In 2018, Kwiatkowski and McElroy traveled to Grodzisk Wielkopolski in Poland to brew a collaboration Grodziskie with Browar Grodzisk. The brewery was established in 1880 as a way to formalize a brewing tradition that dated to the medieval period; though it was shuttered in 1993, it was later purchased and relaunched 20 years later. When the new owners found out that there was a brewery in Texas making their local beer style, they immediately invited them over to brew.
The resulting adventure is another magnificent tale. Kwiatkowski and McElroy explored the original Grodziskie brewing site, whose 19th-century smoke box and kilning tower are still in use, and discovered the Hallertau Mittefrüh-esque Nowotomyski hop, traditionally used in Grodziskie. As the story goes, the hop was saved from extinction by a single farmer whose small field was overlooked when the departing German army torched Poland’s hop fields at the close of World War II. “It was brought back from the dead,” says Kwiatkowski, who now imports Nowotomyski for Live Oak’s Grodziskie.
Live Oak moved from East 5th to its current location—22 acres of riverside greenery close to Austin-Bergstrom Airport—in 2017. McElroy bought the land back in 2008 when it was “just a piece of dirt,” but had a plan to transform it into the lush and vital site it is now. The rich presence of live oaks on the property was a significant factor, as was its proximity to the river. The space they built effectively doubled their production capacity, and in a professional, purpose-built space rather than a salvaged sausage factory.
The 22,000-square-foot facility can put out up to 4,200 cans per hour, and prior to the pandemic, the brewery’s annual output reached 16,000 barrels, a figure Live Oak hopes to exceed in 2022. With 70% of its revenue coming from self-distribution, the move to the new site—and new canning facility—was a game-changer. Prior to the pandemic, Live Oak’s sales had steadily increased year-on-year, both in revenue and volume, with an even split between cans and draft. While the brewery is still working hard to make up the loss of 98% of its draft revenue during COVID, the projections for 2022 are positive.
As I tour the site, McElroy and Kwiatkowski talk me through the move. What was it like not just scaling up production, but going from using the same homemade equipment that they had used for 18 years to a shiny new, custom-built brew kit? “We were all a bit nervous, but it was reassuring keeping the same fermentation style,” says Kwiatkowski.
The new equipment has improved the quality and yield of the wort, making the beer brighter and the yeast cleaner. Using a bespoke system has made scaling up relatively simple, and features like automated temperature and pH checks have freed up Kwiatkowski’s time, enabling him to experiment with pilot recipes brewed in the tanks from the original brewery. Both old and new fermentation tanks remain horizontal, as they were in the original site.
“Probably the biggest difference between Live Oak and other breweries is using horizontal tanks,” says Kwiatkowski. “There’s something magical about horizontal fermentation—the greater surface area makes a difference,” McElroy concurs.
The bells and whistles of Live Oak’s new brew kit have enhanced but never diverted from its focus on quality and consistency, and while both the brewing and visitor experience are miles away from how they originated, the beer is not. “Whether it’s your first or your hundredth sip of Live Oak, it will be the same,” Kwiatkowski assures me.
If the brewery has changed locations, however, it has also nurtured consistency in many forms. Its history of low staff turnover is just one example.
“Our staffing on the production side is very tight and consistent,” says Kwiatkowski. “Our shortest-term brewer has been here for eight years.” Of those who have moved on, many Live Oak alumni have continued their careers at other respected breweries, including Troëgs in Pennsylvania, Sixpoint Brewery in New York, and Fair State Brewing Cooperative in Minnesota.
Jeremy Inzer began his beer career at Live Oak in 2013, and is now head of brewing operations at Fonta Flora Brewery in North Carolina. “It was an amazing place to cut my teeth, and a lot of what I know today came from the first introductory lessons and foundation I built for myself at Live Oak,” he says.
Teresa Ueltschey—Live Oak’s office manager, traffic controller, and HR manager from 2008 to 2021—affirms the brewery’s feeling of community and camaraderie was her favorite thing about her role. During COVID, Ueltschey and McElroy utilized Texas’ shared work program to keep staff on by reducing their hours, enabling them to collect state unemployment and COVID benefits for the hours they lost, and insulating staff from the impact of the pandemic as best they could. “Employees are the backbone of this business,” says Ellie Levine, Live Oak’s former bookkeeper, who retired in 2021.
O’Connor, whose first role at the brewery was cleaning lines, was given the opportunity to create his role as marketing manager from scratch. “A lot of trust was placed in me,” he says. “And there was pressure to perform well and quickly, but it’s been really good to see a tangible response to the work I’ve put in.” Live Oak’s social media presence may seem muted compared to a lot of breweries, but this is a conscious decision reflecting the brewery’s down-to-earth, do-it-our-way philosophy. “I don’t want to do a hard sell,” says O’Connor, who has a background in film production and podcasting. “If you put out unpretentious content, you’ll attract unpretentious people.”
“It was an amazing place to cut my teeth, and a lot of what I know today came from the first introductory lessons and foundation I built for myself at Live Oak.”
This philosophy is very much reflected in Live Oak’s attitude towards collaborations, the best known of which is its long-running Kollaborationsbier and Foudreweizen with Jester King Brewery. These beers are made using the wort from Live Oak’s Pilz and Hefeweizen, respectively, which are transported to Jester King and fermented with its house wild yeast. “I was fascinated by doing a mixed fermentation of Pilz, as the beer presents pretty crisp and clean when young but then develops funk and acidity with time, as virtually all beers would have before the advent of modern pure-culture fermentation practice,” says Stuffings.
“It’s kind of a nice, even split of our traditional mashing and cooking, and they get their hands on it and take it the rest of the way—it’s cool that it goes through both facilities,” adds Kwiatkowski. For McElroy, this is the gold standard of collaboration. “These are the most collaboratively brewed beers I’ve ever heard of,” he says. “Most collaborations seem to involve one brewery going to the other and drinking beer while the others brew.”
McElroy admits he has “softened” more towards collaborations in recent years. In 2021, Kwiatkowski collaborated on four Grodziskies, including one with Inzer at Fonta Flora. “After leaving Live Oak, it was always a dream to go back and work with them in a different capacity, and kind of bring things full circle,” says Inzer. “To connect our two brands and techniques, we used Live Oak’s brewing practices and yeast strain, while using locally malted and smoked wheat, which is something we feel very passionately about at Fonta Flora.” Kwiatkowski emphasizes that a shared level of passion and professionalism remains key when Live Oak chooses whom to work with. “We look for breweries with a similar style wheelhouse, and who really give a shit about the stuff a lot of people write off as not necessary but we think you must do,” he says.
A perfect example of the way in which Live Oak displays its commitment to quality and heritage through collaboration is its recent brew with fellow member of Austin’s craft beer old guard, Black Star Co-op. The collaboration was brewed for the Bluff Schuetzenfest at the historic Kreische Brewery in La Grange, Texas.
The Schuetzenfest originally ran from the 1870s until Prohibition, and acted as a social hub for the growing German population in central Texas, featuring music, dancing, food, and a shooting contest, as well as beer sold by the brewery. Revived by the Friends of Kreische Brewery for the first time this year, the event invited local breweries to create their own versions of historical beers as Texas History on Tap. The two breweries researched a recipe that would have been brewed during Kreische’s operational years in the 1880s, and from the literature available came up with a 4.5% Amber Lager, to which they added beechwood-smoked malt. “The brewery malted their own grains and most likely this would have been done with a wood fire, therefore adding a smoke character,” says Black Star’s beer team manager Andy Martinec.
Live Oak’s commitment to community includes environmental awareness, beyond the careful preservation of its semi-wild property. The brewery supports local environmental charities like urban forestry nonprofit Treefolks; has a recycled taproom interior whose furniture was made from repurposed wooden pallets; and even made a gorgeous, 60-foot bar from a live oak that died on the site in 2011. Every Live Oak tap handle is also made from local live oak wood, either sourced on site or nearby, and their simple but distinctive lacquered design has become an instantly recognizable symbol of the brewery.
Live Oak’s disc golf course ambles across the sprawling property, and picnic tables are dotted at scenic spots, encouraging visitors to explore. With careful land management, Live Oak supports a colorful array of Texas wildflowers, low-lying cacti, small fern trees, and seeding grasses, and is home to scores of crickets, grasshoppers and butterflies. Walk for less than 10 minutes and the brewery is out of sight; but for the disruption of the odd aircraft you could be roaming the Hill Country far from the city.
The site even has its own apiary. The bees not only contribute to the natural environment as pollinators, but produce honey which is sold in the taproom when available. As an experiment last year, the bees were given wort mash from different beers, resulting in honey with a range of flavor and color profiles, and a special link to the brewery. “You could see and taste the difference, for example, between the bees fed on Hefeweizen and Primus [Weizenbock] wort,” says O’Connor, adding that McElroy has beekeeper gear and often attends to the hives himself.
Trek far enough and the Colorado River comes into sight. This really is Bamberg on the Colorado, and a far cry from the cramped, repurposed sausage factory where Kwiatkowski had to slouch to prevent his head from hitting the ceiling. From the highest point at the edge of the site, the vista of the meandering river blends into the faraway horizon, a view reaching out for miles, best absorbed in all its glory with a tall, cold glass of Live Oak Pilz in hand.
It’s easy to imagine the relief that those early immigrants would have felt on spying fresh water from this same cliff-top, never knowing that hundreds of years later, the brewing traditions they carried across the Atlantic would be kept alive on the very same spot.
“Polish, Czech and German brewing traditions are tied together, and Austin is a natural spot for the reviving of these styles,” says Kwiatkowski. At 25 years old, Live Oak Brewing might be centuries younger than the trees that surround it and the beer styles it brews. But it has carved out its own piece of land, history and culture in central Texas.
Words by Ruvani de SilvaPhotos by JoMando Cruz
