E-Malt.com News article: USA, TX: Zilker Brewing opens as an urban brewery with a Belgian flair in Austin

Zilker Brewing has finally opened on East Sixth Street in Austin after a few years of planning and permitting delays — and it’s exactly the sort of neighbourhood brewery that brothers Forrest and Patrick Clark and their longtime friend Marco Rodriguez had been envisioning, ever since one of their beers, the Marco IPA, took home a gold medal at their first homebrew competition, Austin360 reports on April 15th.

Zilker Brewing is in the thick of East Sixth’s bar scene, but it’s not the kind of place that packs in party-goers looking to slurp down beer after beer, making it a natural fit within the several blocks of the east side’s easygoing nightlife district.

The trio has emulated Zilker Brewing after many of the hundreds of other breweries they’ve visited around the country and Europe, an intentional move that will help to push Austin ever closer to the status of a big beer city like Portland, where every five or six blocks is a small urban brewery serving the immediate area around it.

“What we want to be, what we’ve seen on our travels to all these other places, what Austin doesn’t have a lot of is a neighbourhood brewery,” Forrest Clark said. “That’s what we want to be. That’s our focus initially; we’ll distribute to our neighbours on the east side first. We want to be part of the neighbourhood. People can ride their bikes here, walk here. We’ll get to know them.”

So far, the only way to try Zilker Brewing beers is through the brewery taproom, but that will change in May when the Clarks and Rodriguez start distributing kegs to mainly East Austin establishments.

Their beers might not sound like they have been influenced much by Belgian flair, other than the saison, but they approach brewing with an American-Belgian twist, Forrest Clark said. All the core beers use Trappist ale yeast for complexity, he said, while still being bright and clean and sessionable, with most of their full portfolio clocking in under 6 percent ABV.

“The Belgian yeast adds something you can’t really pinpoint,” Rodriguez said. “You don’t know what it is; you just know it’s different, it’s good.”

The Clarks and Rodriguez have known each other for 20 years, ever since attending high school together in Lago Vista. Forrest Clark and Rodriguez went on to join the same University of Texas fraternity, while Patrick Clark, the youngest of the trio, attended St. Edward’s University. He first fell in love with craft beer by tasting Real Ale’s Full Moon Rye Pale Ale and decided to homebrew because back then, there weren’t enough Austin breweries serving good local beer.

“I think the city is promoting this area to be a pedestrian-friendly zone, and it’s something we were attracted to long-term as well,” Forrest Clark said. “We just want to become part of the neighbourhood.”


17 April, 2015