Jester King
Montmorency vs. Balaton is built on six pounds of cherries per gallon, and the Austin Chronicle's beer desk calls it
perhaps the most perfect beer in town.2
Why go
In 2010 the brothers who started this place, Jeff Stuffings and Michael Steffing, were told what a Texas brewery needs: an amber, a blond, an IPA, a wheat and a bock. They went to wild ales and spontaneously fermented beer with a stated sense of place.1 The place is the ingredient. Mineral-rich well water off the ranch shapes mashing and yeast behavior, the grain is grown and malted locally, and the house culture was caught from foraged flowers and berries. Managing partner Ron Extract's line on why they will not simply brew a good IPA: 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. It may be slightly better executed, and it may be a really good example of that, but it's not going to contribute materially to the world of beer. We have higher ambitions than that.
1 Stuffings is blunt about the method: Science isn't really our strong suit, it's really more of a sensory-based thing.
1 By 2019 the lab yeasts were gone entirely, replaced across the range by a mixed culture of brewer's yeast, native yeast and native bacteria, on 165 acres that had become a working farm with its own hop field and a designated farmer, Sean Peppy
Meyers. Stuffings on what that buys: The main thing we have going in our favor is that we let our natural surroundings dictate what our beer smells and tastes like. Whatever the flavors and aromas of our hops may be, we'll gladly embrace them.
4
Order this / avoid
- Order: Montmorency vs. Balaton if it is pouring, and if it is, look for the two single-varietal reissues built from the same spent fruit, one Montmorency and one Balaton.2
- Then: SPON Three Year Blend, gold at the 2024 Texas Craft Brewers Cup, and Atrial Rubicite, the raspberry ale that took bronze the year before. Noble King is the hoppy farmhouse ale where the well water, the local malt and the native microflora are the whole argument.31
- Avoid: driving out for the cans. The Japanese rice lager and the helles are in H-E-B four-packs now, and the barrel and spontaneous side is the part that only exists on the ranch.3
What locals & experts say
- The Austin Chronicle's brewery power rankings, Eric Puga, 10 October 2023, put Jester King fourth in the city on 91.75, and the streak is Puga's own sentence:
Jester King has never fallen out of the Top 5 since the AC Power Rankings began as a dinky Top 10 list back in 2017
. The 2024 edition drops it to eleventh on 89, which is the first time it has fallen out of that top five.23 - Medals, with their bodies and years: gold at the 2024 Texas Craft Brewers Cup for SPON Three Year Blend; at the 2023 Cup, silver for bourbon barrel-aged Moderne Danske and bronze each for SPON Tulle and Atrial Rubicite.32
- The biggest number here is a readers' vote and is written as one. Craft Beer & Brewing's readers voted Jester King their favorite sour or wild ale brewery in the world, ahead of Russian River, Cantillon, Jolly Pumpkin, de Garde and 3 Fonteinen, and fifteenth favorite small brewery in the US. A public vote is a popularity finding. CultureMap's Tastemaker win for Brewery of the Year is the same kind of thing, a nomination and a vote, and the Chronicle reports it without a year.3
- The award that is not about beer: the Brewers Association gave Jester King the F.X. Matt Defense of the Small Brewing Industry Award in 2014, attributed in part to its winning lawsuit against the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission.1
Good to know
- Where it is: 13187 Fitzhugh Road, off US 290 West, on a 165-acre site in unincorporated Travis County southwest of Austin, assembled by buying 58 adjacent acres in 2015 and another 107 the following year. The brewery itself is a repurposed 100-year-old machine shop, and there is a four-star inn on the property. Austin Monthly calls the location Dripping Springs, which is the postal area name; the county is Travis, and that is the one that decides who inspects it.542
- There is wine coming, and it has been coming a while. Wine program director Traci Walker planted almost four acres of Black Spanish, Blanc du Bois and sixteen other varietals at five-foot spacing, in compost carrying the brewery's own mixed culture, and her stated rule is
We're not planting with yield in mind. We're doing whatever it takes to make interesting wine.
That was 2019 and the SPON line already used Texas-grown albarino and muscat.4 - There is a kitchen, and its dough is the brewery's own culture. In 2019 the on-site restaurant, in the former home of Stanley's Farmhouse Pizza, was run by chef Damien Brockway with head baker Amanda Loadman, both building the brewery's mixed culture into the bread and the pizza dough. Brockway now runs Distant Relatives. That staffing is seven years old and is not asserted as current.4
- Hygiene: Austin Public Health has no inspection on file for this brewery. The ranch sits in unincorporated Travis County, which the department does inspect, so this is a missing record rather than an address beyond its reach.6
Verdict
should-visit — A 165-acre farmhouse brewery in unincorporated Travis County that went to wild ales and spontaneous fermentation in 2010 after being advised to brew an amber, a blond, an IPA, a wheat and a bock. The mineral-rich well water off the ranch is treated as an ingredient, shaping mashing and yeast behavior, alongside locally grown and locally malted grain, native wild yeast and house cultures caught from foraged flowers and berries. The beer to build a trip around is Montmorency vs. Balaton, six pounds of cherries per gallon, which Eric Puga calls perhaps the most perfect beer in town, with SPON Three Year Blend taking gold at the 2024 Texas Craft Brewers Cup. Puga ranked it fourth in the city in 2023 and eleventh in 2024, and the core canned lagers are now in H-E-B, so what the drive buys is the barrel room.