On Our Anniversary Party...

This coming January, we will not be hosting an anniversary party and market as we have the last two years. Instead, we will celebrate our next anniversary in October of 2014, marking four years since we released our first beer. This celebration will most likely take place during Austin Beer Week in combination with our annual Funk’n Sour Fest. Exactly what this celebration will look like is something that we will be discussing over the course of the next several months, but one thing that we’ve already decided is that it will not take the form of a large, single-session, ticketed event with long lines and excessive crowds. Instead, we’ll likely host a series of smaller events and/or sessions over the course of a weekend.

While large festivals can be fun at times, they don’t tend to have the type of relaxed, laid-back atmosphere that brewery visitors experience during our regular tasting room hours. We consider the laid-back atmosphere in the Hill Country to be one of the most enjoyable aspects about our brewery. We want Jester King, and Ceres Park Ranch where Jester King resides, to be a serene, tranquil, rustic place where guests can bring their families, enjoy our beers, converse with friends, and take in the beautiful scenery. Anyone who wants to have this experience can simply come to our tasting room anytime during our regular open hours.

At our tasting room, we’re now able to present a beer selection that equals, if not surpasses, what we’ve served at some of our larger events in the past. Prior to recent changes in Texas beer law, we’d only serve our most limited and sought after beers at our larger events. This was because it used to be illegal for us to sell these beers at our brewery. Texas law created an odd disincentive for us to offer our most limited beers on-site, which we could otherwise sell in the marketplace. That’s now no longer the case. We can legally offer everything we have ready at our brewery, along with guest beers, ciders, wines and sakés from some of our favorite artisan producers. The appeal of larger, special events being a time for visitors to drink our most limited beers isn’t there anymore because we now offer these beers whenever we’re open. As a result, we feel less pressure to host larger events, especially in the context of what we stated before about Jester King being a quiet, relaxed place to enjoy the Hill Country.

As we get closer to next October, we’ll put together a plan to celebrate our fourth anniversary. In the meantime, our tasting room will be open every weekend. We’ll also soon be renovating and remodeling our tasting room setup, and once that’s complete, we’ll begin offering limited weekday hours. We’ll stay open throughout the renovation/remodeling process with a complete range of our beer available, as well as beer, cider, wine and saké from other artisan producers. In the future, we’ll continue to develop smaller events at Jester King, such as new beer releases, special guest bottles and kegs, educational events, guided tastings, and fermented food pairings.