Everything is bigger in Texas. Long and flat road miles, smoked brisket, ten-gallon hats, and cowboy boots. But this middle ground between Southwestern desert and Southern drawl has always had a cultural heartbeat that’s “weirder” than one might expect. Austin, Texas, has—for decades—been the creative refuge for Texas misfits and outcasts—a place where abnormal was normal and where the rubber of the Republic of Texas’s libertarian live-and-let-live streak met the long hot asphalt road of creative college enclave.
Austin has—for the past thirty years or so—been the place where the creative underground of Texas (and much of the rest of the southern United States, for that matter) has gathered—audibly organizing a countercultural movement more in touch with flyover America’s reality than similar movements on the Coasts and inherently connected to a hands-on, roll-up-the-sleeves work ethic that one expects from a place carved from hardscrabble landscape.
The same inspiration that fueled Austin’s music and fine-art communities for decades took a bit longer to yield a similarly inspired brewing culture, but the past ten years have been particular good for Austin. Today, the metro area’s breweries are not just producing some of the best examples in the entire country of a variety of beer styles, they’re doing it in typical Austin fashion—with their own mix of humility and swagger plus ambitions as big as the state itself. 