At the Great Austin Beer Festival last week, we unveiled Jester King’s new logo/artwork. We’ve evolved a lot since December 2007 when we first started working toward one day opening Jester King. Through various sources of inspiration such as traveling to the Craft Brewers Conference in Chicago, reading the exploits of The Mad Fermentationist and the writings of Jeff Sparrow, tasting several of the wondrous beers imported by the Shelton Brothers, concocting various homebrew experiments and just having our eyes opened to the world beyond cultured brewers yeast (saccharomyces cerevisiae), we’ve decided to pursue beers that age and mature for several weeks or months in oak barrels under the mischievous influence of wild yeast. Beers of this nature have become our greatest passion and hold a special place in our hearts and palates.
We’ve also taken stock of our location in the Texas Hill Country with its own unique flora and fauna influenced by the surrounding wineries, orchards and olive groves. We’re aiming to use the wild yeast from the Hill Country to impart unique and complex flavors in Jester King beer.
With that said, we decided to adopt new artwork to better capture our vision, passion, inspiration.
Created by Josh Cockrell of The Design Shaman
--Jeffrey
We spent Thursday using a pipe threader to cut and thread the pipe for our steam boiler. It’s kind of a scary machine with lots of blades, teeth and loud noise, but it’s actually pretty fun to use (I say that now with all ten fingers intact).
Pipe threader’s teeth
Pressure reducing valve to drop the steam pressure down to 15 psig for the kettle
--Jeffrey
This picture is of the bottom of our mash/lauter tun. The motor in the middle powers the mash rakes that churn the grist during the mash and prevent the grain from clumping together during the mash. Grain that clumps together will not become solubilized and will not be accessable to the enzymes that convert starch to sugar. The mash rakes allow for better efficiency by breaking up the clumps or “dough balls”. We opted for the bottom mounted motor to avoid any residue from the motor dripping into the mash. The blue handle on the left is for the grain out port on the bottom of the mash tun. We’ll open the port and shift the angle of the mash rakes so they force the spent grain out through the bottom of the mash tun as they rotate.
30 horse power boiler that provides 150 psig of steam to power the brew kettle.
Main office with event pavilion in background
Main hallway of brewery
We had Pedernales Electric out to boost the power available to the brewery to 480 volts
--Jeffrey
On Saturday of last week we had a booth at the inaugural Great Austin Beer Festival at the Austin City Music Hall. The event floor was absolutely packed. We had a great time and got to meet lots of fellow beer geeks. We enjoyed talking about the Jester King brewery, the beers we’ll be brewing and the unique location of the brewery. We didn’t have beer ready this time around, but we look forward to pouring at next year’s event. We also had some great volunteer help at the event from Will Sherman of The Wavemaker Group and Josh Cockrell of The Design Shaman.
Will, Josh & Joe
Jeff and JB from Austin Homebrew
Amber and Baby Laura
Our friends at Beer Town Austin
--Jeffrey
