Since 1996 we’ve brewed in Blanco, surrounded by the natural beauty of the Texas Hill Country. Brewing here keeps us grounded in simple things—fresh air, wide-open spaces, working with our hands—and in a philosophy of doing less to the beer so ingredients can do more. Our beers are made with as little processing as possible.
Every beer we make starts with the highest-quality ingredients. We follow time-honored brewing methods and we don’t rush the process. Quality stays at the core of everything we do, from working with the top 2% of suppliers to making our own candy sugar for Devil’s Backbone. If you put good ingredients in, you get good beer out. Then the trick is doing it again and again the same way, so every pint tastes like the one you loved last time.
We’re tinkerers at heart. We keep an eye on new techniques and tools in craft beer, then bring them home to Blanco to see what we can do with them. While many breweries save experimentation for the lab, we do our tinkering on the floor of our 8-barrel pilot brewhouse. We explore variables one at a time: different hop varieties and addition points, yeast strains, fermentation temperatures, and timing. After fermentation, pilot beers are matured, then poured fresh in our taproom. These small batches are our proving grounds: we taste, get feedback, and refine. When a recipe sings at pilot scale, it’s ready to graduate to the big brewhouse.
After years of dialing in grain, yeast, and fermentation, stepping into spirits wasn’t a detour—it was the next natural step. We already lived in the world of mash temps, enzymes, and clean fermentations, so we began where we’re strongest: brewing an unhopped distillers’ beer with the same care we give every batch. From there the still takes over to concentrate the character that started in the brewhouse. When a whiskey is ready, those barrels come back to the brewery and our beers rest in them, picking up quiet echoes of vanilla, toast, and spirit. Brewing sharpened our patience; distilling deepened our sense of balance. Together they’re one conversation about grain, fermentation, and time—two crafts, one house, moving forward the Real Ale way.