Jester King Brew Day at Live Oak Brewing Co.

On Saturday of last week, we got to experience a really special event. We brewed at one of our favorite breweries in the world — Live Oak Brewing Co. in Austin, Texas. Live Oak is the oldest brewery in Austin, and when a lot of us at Jester King were just getting into beer, we drank Live Oak. Years ago when we toured Live Oak for the first time, we never imagined that one day we would get to brew there. So this past Saturday had a lot of sentimental value for us, and we’re very grateful to Live Oak for the opportunity.

Here at Jester King, we’re particularly enamored with Live Oak Pilz. When we’re not drinking funky, tart wild ales, we’re usually drinking pale lager, and Pilz is a staple around our brewery. For our taste, the rich malt character in Live Oak Pilz is only rivaled by some of the unfiltered, cask-conditioned pale lagers from Franconia, which we’ve been lucky enough to drink over the years. Live Oak attributes the delicious malt character of their Pilz to a technique called a decoction mash, which involves removing a portion of the mash, heating it to boiling temperature, then returning it to the mash. To paraphrase Live Oak, they take some under-modified pilsner malt and work it pretty vigorously on brew day. They then take the delicious wort from the decoction mash and bitter it during the boil with some low alpha acid, herbal, spicy Czech hops. We think the finished wort is spectacular, and after fermentation and lagering, yields some of the best pale lager in the world.

Our goal in working with Live Oak is to take the outstanding quality of their wort and impart fermentation characteristics unique to our land in the Texas Hill Country. We transferred the Live Oak wort into tote tanks, loaded them onto a refrigerated truck (thanks Flood Distribution!), and drove it from east Austin to the outskirts of town where Jester King is located. We then racked the wort into a fermentation tank at Jester King and inoculated it with our mixed culture of brewers yeast, wild yeast harvested from our ranch in the Texas Hill Country, and native souring bacteria.

We’ll provide more details about our collaborative beer with Live Oak once the beer is closer to release. But for now, we wanted to share this special event for us and provide the inspiration behind it. Below are some photos from our brew day at Live Oak.


Jester King Head Brewer Garrett Crowell and Barrel Program Head Adrienne Ballou stirring the decoction


Boiling the decoction


Live Oak Head Brewer Dusan Kwiatkowski


Jester King Brewer Ismael Salas holding a Czech hop bag


Drew Durish of Live Oak guarding the Czech hops


Ron Extract of Jester King adding hops




Transporting wort from Live Oak to Jester King


Racking Live Oak wort into our fermentation tank