Field Trip! Live Oak Brewery tour.

We recently had a tour at Live Oak Brewery, the only beer we carry that’s made here in Austin. Steve Anderson, the head brewer at Live Oak, was nice enough to accommodate Jessica and and I on a weekday and dropped a staggering amount of science on us! I kept feeling like I should’ve been taking notes. In hindsight, I should have.

Before I get into the tour, a word on our beer list from one of the owners, Joseph Strickland, “The goal of the beer list is like making a great mix tape: you need some quiet/loud, some power ballads, some weird meandering shit, some ironic stuff but it all has to flow well together, woven into an overall vibe, which for our beer list means they all have to complement the pie in some way.” Nicely put, which is why we don’t have tons of beers, or many of the commonly popular beers. We aren’t trying to ruffle anyone’s feathers by not carrying their favorite beer, just as with the wines, the beers were chosen to compliment our food.

Live Oak is a small brewery located on Austin’s east side. Their year round brews are the Pilz, styled after the original Czech pilsner, Big Bark Amber Lager, a smooth Vienna style lager, and the Pale Ale. Their seasonal brews are HefeWeizen (spring/summer), Oaktoberfest (fall), and Liberation Ale (winter). You can tell by the sparkle in Mr. Anderson’s eyes as he talks about enzymes and temperatures, or, actually, any of the employees you talk to, that there is a deep passion for the craft in the folks at Live Oak. They LOVE beer. And consequently, as he points out, they have to, since they specialize in making lager beers. Lagers have a substantially longer brewing process, taking 4 to 6 weeks in most cases. A brewery could easily turn out 4 times the amount of beer in that time if they brewed ales exclusively, and make more money. But that is not the end all for these folks.

Neither of us having ever been to a brewery, or having an inkling about the beer making process, we were like kids in an alcoholic candy store.

“This one tastes like banana!” -Jessica, about the HefeWeizen

So, very very simply, this is what we learned: You start with 55 lb bags of malted barley from the Czech Republic, then you crush em up, but not too much, then they go into a big thingie called a mash tun where they get mixed in with hot water which breaks the starches in the malt down to sugary water. Right before the liquid is moved on from the mash tun, it’s heated up really hot to kill the enzymes that convert the starches to sugar. Then the sugary water gets drained through the “false bottom” which basically strains out the grains from the liquid.

Then the liquid, called “wort,” goes into the brew kettle where hops are added and they are boiled together. The hops are flowers that are used as the bittering agent in the beer. People talk a lot about the hops in beer, but water and malted barley are the biggest ingredients. Hops are just the squeaky wheel. If you’ve ever had an IPA or a true pilsner(i.e. Pilsner Urquell as opposed to Budweiser), that’s the bitter, hoppy flavor. Anyway, after that, my handle on the facts got a little fuzzy. There is only so much new science I can hold in my head at once. But, I’m pretty sure the hopped liquid gets spun inside the brew kettle so all the residual proteins and grain matter settle into a neat little pile on the bottom of the vessel, then goes through a magic cooling machine and into a big vessel where the yeast is added. In this vessel, the real fermenting action happens.

When the fermentation is done, you have beer. That doesn’t mean the beer is done, but it is technically beer. Lager, for instance, is stored for weeks at a cold temperature before it’s ready to be served.

Steve is extremely knowledgeable not only about the brewing process, but about the history of beer as well. He patiently answered all our newbie questions (is beer in green bottles supposed to taste like that?). By the end of the tour, we were ready to start our own brewery. It seems perfect; a job that combines math and science, grains and flowers, textures and smells, bubbles, no computers in sight, tall German men named Hans, and an end product you can stand behind and celebrate. A glamourous majority of the job, as Steve kindly informed us, is being on your knees and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. And then a pint of cleaning. Sterility between batches is of utmost importance to ensure quality and consistency of product. Another reason to love your craft; lots of sweat and hardwork, little glamour, but with the satisfaction that you’ve been getting people laid since since 1997.

Live Oak does tours on Saturdays at noon and they last about and hour to an hour and a half, you just have to call ahead to give them a heads up and let them know the size of your group. I highly recommend it, especially if you’ve never been to a brewery. There’s a great local brewery right in your backyard, take advantage of it and live a little!

Jenn’s Shout Out: The Daily Juice Cafe

The Daily Juice Café at 4500 Duval Street is my new jam. It’s the cream in my coffee, the chocolate chip in my cookie, the dreidle in my Jewish holiday. I want to put it on a raw, vegan, gluten-free, organic, living mixtape, blast it from my car stereo, and end world hunger. Because it could. It really could.
From juice to coconut bbq to raw chocolate, each item on the deliberately select and well-balanced menu is hand-picked with your five flavor centers in mind. The Thai Noodle Bowl is my favorite so far: organic, spiralized yam and daikon noodles with red bell pepper, sunflower sprouts, radish, coconut strips, and cilantro, all tossed in a creamy almond-ginger sauce. Yum! Not only does this dish (and everything else on the menu) satisfy every textural and temporal craving you could possibly have, it looks pretty, too. Real pretty. Daily Juice understands that eating is an experience and they have mastered the visual element with care and attention to detail. The love that goes in to each delicately placed morsel is unmistakable and is guaranteed to make your day better.
So, do something good for yourself. Go out and support your local food radicals, the rare ones who refuse to sacrifice quality for profit, and make the world a better place. One heavenly bite at a time.

(by Jenn)

Shout Out: The Good Knight

It’s 10:30 on a Thursday night. You’ve come to after a 5 hour Weeds marathon when you were only going to watch a few minutes before doing laundry, cleaning the bathroom, and going to return that fan to Target. Crap. You’ve been so entranced, you’re butt is numb, and now you’re hungry and the only restaurants open past 11, you don’t wan to go to. In fact, you feel so guilty about not doing laundry and all the other stuff you had planned to have done before you go out of town on Saturday, that all you really want to do is have a delicious drink to numb the guilt.

(Or something like that.)

Do I have the place for you! I almost don’t want to tell people about my favorite places, so I can love them and hug them and squeeze them and call them George all by myself, but this place is too great for me to be selfish.

The Good Knight is located on East 6th, at the corner of Attayac, just a few blocks east of I35. They are open until 2 and serve food until 12:00. The interior has a dark taverny feel, with dark wood tables and captains chairs and old family pictures covering the walls. And they are family pictures of The Good Knight’s owners and employees. It’s the kind of place that you walk into and you feel immediately at ease. All the crapola that you feel you have to carry around and worry about is left at the door. You could sit in the upholstered chair in the corner, set your drink on the end table next to the lamp and simply be. You could meet some friends and pick at the flammekueche (rustic flatbread baked with caramelized onions, crème fraiche and applewood-smoked bacon) while you sip on a June Rose (White Seedless Grapes, Basil, Bitters and Hendricks Gin) or a Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat on draft and talk about the trips you want to take together. It’s almost as if you are transported to another era where time goes a little slower (as long as you can part with your iPhone for an hour of uninterrupted analog interaction).

The bartender is a jolly, sincere, and an amazingly talented mixologist whose laugh can be heard above the Friday night din of a packed house. He truly cares about his craft and is always up to make you a custom cocktail. The following things I have had and are stop-you-in-your-tracks-and-moan-all-gross-sounding good:

The meatloaf. Not your mom’s meatloaf. Unless you’re mom is a cook at a 4 star French bistro. Angus meatloaf bacon wrapped with whiskey gravy and mashed new potatoes. Nothing less than an epiphany.

The desserts. Oh the desserts. I don’t even like dessert! The very first thing I had there was the good knight pot de crème chocolate and earl grey custard served with chantilly. The kitchen had just closed, so they were nice enough to serve me that tea cup of wonderfulness that made me clutch it to my chest like Golem and scowl unecessarily at my friend (sorry John) just to make it clear I wasn’t sharing. I am the type of person that when I find something I like, I stick with it, so it took me many months to try the (bruleed!) crustless coconut buttermilk pie with blueberry cardamom compote. I quite literally dream about that pie.

Clearly, I love food, but the cocktails are just as good. The bloody mary is really unique and made with fresh tomato juice, it makes all the difference. I could go on, and on, but I’m pretty sure Home Slice isn’t paying me to write a dissertation on The Good Knight, a shout out will suffice.

Want to WICKED impress someone on a first date, but don’t want to put too much pressure on the date by taking them to someplace fancy and stilted, yet have the quality of service and food and drink? TAKE THEM HERE.

The Cakemaker and the history of Home Slice cheesecake.

Home Slice is well known for our pizza, but our desserts are made with just as much love and care. If you’ve ever had our cheesecake, you know how wild people go for it. I’ve heard so many people say, “I don’t even like cheesecake normally, but this is unbelievable!” There’s a lot of lore surrounding our cheesecake so I recently sat down with Phil, our kitchen manager, to get the real story behind all the mystery.

Let’s take this journey all the way back to 2005, when Home Slice was being born. The owners really wanted to serve NY style cheesecake, but without a viable recipe and someone to make it, they were considering shipping it in from NYC. Ultimately they wanted to serve things freshly made, so back to square one they went. One day, Phil brings in a homemade cheesecake and Eureka! As it so fortuitously turns out, baking is Phil’s passion, among other things. In fact, Phil once employed a drill, duct tape and a 2 dollar whisk to make a cheesecake in the common kitchen of a women’s college to impress a girl. The man does not take dessert making lightly.

Our NY style cheesecake recipe came to Phil via Chicago via Houston. Phil, as a 12 year old boy and a son of New Yorkers, asked a family friend, Nicole Baker, to show him how to make her cheesecake. She treated him with the accountability of an adult and held his cakes, even at that tender and awkward age, up to the standard of her own. And thus the cakemaker was made.

As any true cakemaker will with a recipe, Phil sweated and toiled and whipped and baked and tweaked and zested and made the cake his own. When the cake became a part of Home Slice, the crust was changed from a graham cracker crust to a ricotta cookie dough. It took a lot of trial and error to bake our cake in a pizza oven and now the cake has really come into its own. It’s light and complex on the tongue with flavors of vanilla, cream, and lemon zest. Phil recognizes that food is sentimental, the smells and flavors that remind us of a love or a place or a time in our lives can be a powerful force and he treats his cakemaking with that reverence.

And it get’s better! It was discovered after we started serving our cheesecake that, as impossible to believe that it could be improved upon, the pairing of the cake with our Moscato Di Asti is about as heavenly a dessert experience as you can get. Save room, you will not be disappointed, and you just may be transported to the 7th level of bliss. To Phil, food is entirely sentimental and this cake is meant to be shared.

P.S. If you see Phil in the restaurant, chat him up. He loves to tell stories.

The cakemaker early in his career (above left), Unloading cakes from the pizza oven (above right)

Stormtroopers of Pizza

Photo by J.D. Hancock