New Meaning for "Bigger in Texas" and a New Hop Variety from a New Hop Breeder

Just Tapped 

It's hard to define the word big when talking about craft beer. In the USA, a craft brewer that produces 100,000 barrels per year is considered big. Less than 30 of the nation's approximately 10,000 craft breweries produce that much beer. At the same time, the nation's three biggest craft brewers each produces over 2 million barrels per year. The majority of craft brewers probably produce less than 2,000 barrels per year, so a brewery that produces 20,000 barrels per year must seem big to them. It's hard to define the word big when you're talking about craft beer unless you're talking about a four-acre beer garden. By any reckoning, that's a big-ass beer garden. Read on.

An Ambitious Plan for a Bigger Beer Playground

They say that everything is bigger in Texas. One of the largest players on the local beer scene in Austin, Texas is living up to that hackneyed old saying. Austin Beerworks recently announced its intention to open a new taproom in Northeast Austin, but that ain't all. The stated goal is to build “the greatest beer playground in town.”

The brewery's new taproom project involves a 20,000-square-foot building overlooking 64 acres of undeveloped land, where the company envisions what it is calling a beer playground.

There's no firm date yet, but the company hopes to open the new location this spring. Along with an array of Austin Beer Works beers on tap, the beer playground will offer hiking and biking trails as well as a “competition-level” disc golf course. The 20,000-square-foot taproom will sprawl out to a four-acre beer garden. Beyond that, the 64-acre beer playground. 

Dang me! Maybe that hackneyed old saying is true. Maybe everything really is bigger in Texas.

It's More Than a New Hop Variety

Brewers are familiar with the process of hop breeding and the development of new hop varieties, but McKenzie is more than that. It is the first proprietary hop variety introduced by West Coast Hop Breeding Company, a network of six Oregon hop farmers that teamed up in 2016 to start developing new hop varieties: McKenzie is a new hop from a new hop breeder, which is pretty exciting for us hop nerds.

The goal of West Coast Hop Breeding is to develop competitive hop cultivars that are agronomically suitable to Western Oregon, one of the nation's leading hop-growing regions. The new hop variety takes its name from the McKenzie River, which flows from the Cascade Mountains into Western Oregon's fertile Willamette Valley. Learn all about this new hop variety and get all the geeky details. Or check out this slick video on YouTube. 

Until recently, McKenzie was known as C-148 (or McKenzie C-148). Although it is newly available on the wider market, over the past couple of years at least two breweries used McKenzie in commercially available beers, Ninkasi Brewing of Eugene, Oregon and Crux Fermentation Project of Bend, Oregon. 

Around the Web 

• Brewbound announces 2022 Award Winners and Rising Stars.

• Take a look at the 25 worst beers in the world. No real surprises here, but its kind of fun.

Beer by the Numbers 

On Tuesday, Bart Watson, the Chief Economist for the Brewers Association, delivered a presentation at Brewbound Live. Among his many observations and insights, Bart noted that the number of new brewery openings has slowed, as the chart below illustrates. Meanwhile, the number of brewery closings remains fairly flat. I'm not exactly sure what it means, or what happens next, but it is interesting. 

Geek Speak 

Amarillo - Just about every one of the hop varieties you know and love was conceived and developed in a laboratory before making its way to the hop field. Amarillo is an exception to that rule. It was not developed by hop breeders but spontaneously popped into existence. Workers at Virgil Gamache Farms near Yakima found a stray hop plant growing alongside a field of Liberty hops in 1990. They studied it and determined that it was a new, unique hop variety, one that had some desirable qualities. They eventually named it Amarillo and patented it as a new variety in 2003. Gamache Farms owns a trademark for the word Amarillo as applied to hops. (Talking about hop breeding and Texas made me think of Amarillo.)

As A Matter of Fact

In last week's Taster Tray I referred to Josef Groll as a German. I also referred to him as a Bavarian. The fact is, Germany didn't exist in 1842 when Josef Groll brewed "the first pilsner." He was Bavarian, and the style of beer he set out to brew was a Bavarian-style lager. Facts matter. 

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This week's Taster Tray was composed by Kendall Jones.