Barrel Program Head Adrienne Ballou Leaves Jester King

We have a bittersweet announcement to make. Our Barrel Program Head — Adrienne Ballou — has decided to leave Jester King to pursue a career in wine making. She’ll be spending the next several months in Australia for the southern hemisphere grape harvest. We refer to her departure as bittersweet because we’re excited for Adrienne, and commend her on having the courage to follow her passion. It’s not an easy thing for her to do having accomplished fantastic things in the beer world and developed quite a reputation for herself within the beer community.

Adrienne came to us three years ago in January of 2013 having completed a winemaking apprenticeship in France and graduated from the University of California at Davis with a degree in Viticulture and Enology. Given her background, we asked her to focus on fruit refermentation. If we may say so ourselves, given the quality of the fruit beer produced at Jester King during Adrienne’s tenure, we’d say she knocked it out of the park. On top of that, Adrienne was a wonderful person to be around day in and day out at the brewery, and acquitted herself with the utmost professionalism and grace.

Fortunately, after the harvest in Australia, Adrienne will be returning to central Texas to pursue wine making here at home. We hope that in the future she will help us grow grapes on the 58 acres we recently purchased. On Thursday, we’ll have some more public announcements to make regarding our staff. But for now, we wish to commend Adrienne on her fantastic work and wish her the very best as she pursues a new and exciting chapter of her career.