Lake Austin Ales | Boatloads of Pure Hopiness
Lovers of the hazy IPA trend are in for a treat this week as Lake Austin Ales launches two new hop bombs: The Juicy IPA and The Juicy Double IPA.
Easy Tiger is hosting the first launch event today, September 4th, at their sixth street location, followed by two more launch events this week.
Co-founders Zack Fuentes and Kris Gray are taking a unique approach to opening a brewery – they currently do not have one. Instead, the duo decided to go after the production market as opposed to the tap room market by contract brewing their beers at Celis Brewery, “our strategy is much like a lean tech start up strategy. Because we are launching in a saturated market we believe that it’s very important to prove we have a viable product before raising a ton of cash. This is why we are bootstrapping the business in the beginning. It’s definitely a novel approach in the craft industry,” Fuentes explains. By contract brewing at the state-of-the-art Celis facility, they are able control the quality and stability of their beers ensuring high quality shelf life. Aside from their unique start up plans, the brewery will only focus on the immensely popular juicy IPA style, “Kris has an immense amount of experience working with hops from his years at Stone Brewing and we are leveraging that by focusing on this niche,” Fuentes points out.
Ultimately, the goal is to open a production facility that will include a taproom. However, the team views the craft beer bars to be their taproom, “contract brewing allows us the freedom to go out and meet and get to know our customers like you would do in a traditional taproom,” Gray explains. For now, you will find the first two flagship beers around town on draft and in four packs of sixteen ounce cans in early October, “most breweries are releasing hazy IPAs in the taproom only, so we decided on a different approach, to can our beers and make them available to hazy IPA beer lovers year round,” says Gray.
This week’s launch events:
9/4 Lake Austin Ales Launch Party! | Easy Tiger 5pm
9/5 Lake Austin Ales Launch Party | Lavaca Street Bar S. Lamar 6pm
9/6 Lake Austin Ales Brewery Launch! | Banger’s Sausage House & Beer Garden 7pm
Keep up with Lake Austin Ales events on Craft Beer Austin and follow them on Facebook, Instagram & Twitter.
The Lake Austin Ales team is comprised of Co-founders Zack Fuentes, CEO, head brewer Kris Gray, formally of Whitestone Brewery, and founding partners Grady Renolds, formally of Thousand Oaks Brewing, Jordan Rail, Jeff Davis and Tom Berno.
