CBB As of September 1, 2019, breweries across Texas had a new opportunity that they haven’t had in the past. How does that affect Jester King in particular?
JS Yes, deregulation just occurred in Texas, and we became the 50th state to allow production breweries to sell beer to go. Jester King has been able to sell beer to go for years because we’re licensed as a brewpub, but now, for instance, our friends at Live Oak Brewing Company will finally be able to sell up to one case per day per customer, to go. Interestingly, if we were to switch our license to a production facility, we could still sell beer to go (which we need to as it’s a big percentage of our revenue), and we could also make wine and cider as well as beer under the same license. So we’re going to begin experimenting with making wine with grapes from the 2020 harvest with the potential to release wine under the Jester King brand in 2021.
There’s going to be a legal casualty to this ability to make beer and wine together—we will lose our ability to buy and sell guest beer, which we’ve always prided ourselves on. If you look back through our blog, you’ll find a myriad of posts championing breweries such as Jolly Pumpkin, Brasserie de La Senne, The Rare Barrel, and Fonta Flora Brewery. We celebrate all of these breweries and sell a thoughtfully curated list of these breweries’ beers. But being out in the outskirts of Austin, near the bedroom community of Dripping Springs, we get a surprising number of light-beer drinkers or macro-lager drinkers. It hasn’t been a hard sell to get them to try a Live Oak Pilz or something like that, whereas convincing them to order a mixed-culture fermentation beer has been more challenging. But within the next 12 months, we’ll lose our legal right to sell guest beer because we’ve cast the die that it’s more important to us to be able to make wine (and probably cider and mead as well). So we’re planning to brew our own simple pale lagers, just for on-site consumption. The decision is part business, to fill that gap left by losing these guest beers. But also, our brewers are pretty excited to brew some pure-culture fermentations, which is something we haven’t done since 2012.