Just when I thought I could finally say goodbye to the holiday season, I received a phone call last Friday from one of the owners of Real Ale Brewing. On Sunday, it turns out, they were having a small celebration of beer and smoked meat, a holiday party of sorts situated in the middle of January so as not to conflict with anyone else's holiday party. We drove out to Blanco, pecan tart in hand, and arrived just in time to grab a pint of beer before the meat cutting began. It should go without saying that when a group of professional brewers have a party, there is going to be a considerable amount of beer (the brewers at Real Ale are a very generous lot-I attended their annual anniversary party last summer and was pleasantly surprised to learn that each party attendee received free tickets for four glasses of beer and a plate of food.) What I was not prepared for, however, was the incredible variety of beers. I tasted everything from Real Ale's current tap selections to variations on some of their popular beers; a slew of vintage Barleywines including some aged Real Ale Sisyphus; home-brews by employees of the brewery, as well as homebrews that fans of the brewery had dropped off over the year; fabulous, fantasy beers that the brewers had picked up on travels to far-off brewing destinations; and most significantly a brew from Austin's fabled Bitter End brewery that has been closed for a number of years.

The area around Blanco is still somewhat undeveloped. It looks a lot like the outskirts of Austin looked when I was a kid. A beautiful place to drink beer.

It was awesome being in the presence of so many of Texas's brewing talents, being able to talk about beer with the people who have been making some of my favorite brews of the last ten years.
When we first arrived we drank a few pints of beers from the half dozen or so kegs that they had tapped, a mix of their standard brews and the current and upcoming seasonal beers. My clear favorite in this category was the Phoenix ESB, which will be on tap around Austin soon. I also got to try an unusual variation on Real Ale's runaway hit, the Fireman's #4 Blonde Ale. This one was a cask conditioned version, brewed w/ Summit hops. I don't know enough about hops to know why this makes a difference, but it did. Whereas I usually don't prefer the Fireman's over the other Real Ale brews that I think are more interesting, this one had a big hoppy flavor and also had a unique mouth feel since it was an unfiltered beer.

Why is Joe's glass empty? It's not like there was a shortage of beer. Oh yeah...he had to drive us back!

One of the brewers "led" (in as much as one can lead a group such as this) a tasting of Barleywines, the so-called "pallet-bruisers" of the evening:
2002 Real Ale Sisyphus
2004 Real Ale Sisyphus
2002 Sierra Nevada Bigfoot--I didn't think this one was nearly as good as the Sisyphus of the same vintage, but I felt the same way about the same beers of the 2007 vintage. (When I returned to Austin I went to Central Market and bought a half dozen bottles of 2007 Sisyphus, we'll see if they survive long enough to do such a "vintage" tasting.)
In this run we also tasted the 2005 Old Stock Ale from North Coast Brewing in Fort Bragg, CA. They are also the makers of Brother Thelonius which we tasted at another point in the evening.

In the homebrew category, we tasted a Carob Porter and an ale called "Hazel Eyes" made by one of the Real Ale brewers, and some bizarre wormwood beer dropped off at the brewery by a fan.

While the kids toasted marshmallows, I toasted the good life (and got toasted in the process)

The most exciting beer of the night for me was from the Bitter End Brewery, which was an early pioneer in the now-bustling-at-the-seams warehouse district. A few years ago, the place suffered a big fire and was shut down, never to reopen. It was a real tragedy for Austin beer drinkers, and still evokes the occasional eulogy from a sympathetic imbiber. What I did not know about the Bitter End fire is that not all of the beer was lost, that the brew crew rescued a handful of kegs from the smoldering remains of their building. When I found out last year that former Bitter End brewer Brian Peters had become the brewer at Uncle Billy's on Barton Springs, I went over quickly to try his new beers. At the time it never crossed my mind that I would have the opportunity to taste an actual Bitter End brew again, though I had heard rumors here and there that there were surviving kegs.

One of the beers they made from time to time was a Scotch ale called Prescot’s Wee Heavy; they also did a version called “Wee Woody,” which was the Wee Heavy, rested in a retired Jack Daniel's barrel. As it happens, a barrel of that beer was rescued from the fire by Tim Schwartz and Brian Peters, kegged and stashed away. On Sunday I met Ty Phelps, who is the head brewer at North By Northwest, and he had a growler of Wee Woody that he filled a couple of months ago from Peters' keg. Though the beer had lost most of its carbonation, it had not oxidized and had an incredible, subtly vanilla-infused flavor. It was such a trip tasting that beer and reminiscing about the Bitter End, really a once-in-a-lifetime experience for an old tipsy Austinite such as myself.

Though the Bitter End indeed met a bitter end, its memory lives on like the lingering taste of Wee Woody, which I droolishly hoovered up last weekend...