The beer garden as the Austin taproom.

A brewery here is a yard with a bar at one end. St. Elmo Brewing Company runs picnic tables under shade with live music and a dog policy. 6 The Austin Beer Garden Brewing Co. pours onto a large patio and plays music most nights. 7 The Austin Chronicle ranks twenty-five of them out of 100 every October and prints the weights it used, which is more than most city lists will do. 1

The drinking moved back into the neighborhoods. Eric Puga wrote at the end of 2024 that "we couldn't help but notice fewer folks drinking in the Hill Country than there used to be, preferring their friendly neighborhood beer maker down the road making clean, simple, low ABV lagers". 1 Puga ranks Jester King, out on its Hill Country farm, eleventh, and puts Meanwhile Brewing and its neighborhood lager bench first.

Meanwhile Brewing anchors a seasonal lager bench on a Great American Beer Festival medalist pilsner, with a Vienna-style Texas Blue Corn beside it and Fore!, an Arnold Palmer style Kolsch that took silver at the 2023 World Beer Cup. 4 Puga calls The Austin Beer Garden Brewing Co.'s "some of the best lagers available in the entire country". 1 Oddwood Brewing takes the other road: "The beer runs to saisons and lagers rather than the hop-forward beers most of the city's taprooms default to." 5 So does Jester King, which by 2019 had dropped lab yeast across the whole range for a mixed culture of brewer's yeast, native yeast and native bacteria. 3

Puga has ranked Meanwhile Brewing first two years running, with Oddwood Brewing and Hold Out Brewing second and third in 2024. 1 Meanwhile's brewing team came out of Breakside in Portland, which is why the hoppy half of its list is the older half. 4 Jeffrey Stuffings and Michael Steffing started Jester King in 2010 and now farm 165 acres with a hop field and a designated farmer, Sean Peppy Meyers. 2

Walk in and drink it on the lot, because almost none of this beer leaves the yard it was brewed in. Settle the food question first. Hold Out Brewing brews the entire folio to match a menu made behind its own bar, and The Austin Beer Garden Brewing Co. runs a full kitchen doing pizzas, salads and sandwiches. 1 7 Everywhere else the answer is whichever trailer is parked on the lot that week.

In 2010 Jeffrey Stuffings and Michael Steffing were told what a Texas brewery needs: an amber, a blond, an IPA, a wheat and a bock. They opened Jester King and made spontaneously fermented beer instead. 2 Ron Extract put the refusal plainly: "We can make a perfectly good IPA using American ale yeast or British ale yeast and using whatever the new trendy hops are, but it's going to be a lot like other IPAs out there." 2 Stuffings is less grand about the method. "Science isn't really our strong suit, it's really more of a sensory-based thing." 2 Fourteen years later the Chronicle put the farm eleventh and a neighborhood lager house first. 1