As you may recall, your Co-op represented the co-operative beer movement at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver! Our co-workers Jeff, Karinne, and Chris left Austin in the early morning with fellow member-owner/our partner in crime from Austin Homebrew Supply, Jon, to drive 943 miles in 14 hours. They were really excited to be serving Vector, Vulcan, High Esteem, Cantankerous Dockhand, and Waterloo to craft beer lovers outside of Austin.

To hear more about Black Star Co-op’s participation in GABF, check out this video with Jeff and JB of Austin Homebrew Supply.

While at GABF, Chris took his Cicerone certification testing, then the crew picked up their badges and festival bags. Check out Karinne in her complimentary oversized t-shirt and nose hair trimmer:

Looking good, Girl!

After registration they set up the booth and ran into another member-owner, Bob:

Hey Bob! (And he pulled out his membership card to prove it!)

The first people to stop by our booth: Member-Owners Doug and Vicki:

While Karinne went to her Pink Boots Society Meeting, Jeff, Jon, and Chris went to New Belgium and met one of their idols, Peter Bouckaert.

The Black Star Army is vast!  They ran into Member-Owner, Ted, who works at a Fort Collins brewery:

Here’s another Member-Owner:

Although we didn’t win any awards, they had an amazing time.  Congratulations to NXNW, Austin Beerworks, and Uncle Billy’s!

Simply put, this is one beast of a beer. It pours thick, black, and with a deep brown head of foam. It’s bittered with Columbus hops, a late Citra addition, and finished with a prodigious dry-hopping of Nelson Sauvin and Pacific Jade hops from New Zealand, creating a boastful, fragrant and complex hop aroma. The first taste is a resinous, piney hop flavor, followed by healthy doses of roasted malt flavors of coffee, anise, and cocoa. The roasted malt flavors are balanced fantastically with a touch of alcohol heat on the aftertaste. Top it off at 10.8% ABV and 100IBUs and you’ve got yourself one full-bodied beer. Come and get it- you know you want some.

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Now that the weather has cooled and Halloween is approaching, we’ll be serving one of people’s favorite pumpkin beers. At 7%, this has a solid malty backbone and is a “full-bodied brown ale brewed with real pumpkin, brown sugar, allspice, cinnamon & nutmeg.”

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The guys from Austin Beerworks will be in the house with their good-looking pint glasses and swag as we pour their new seasonal brew! More info coming soon…

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We’ll be serving one of the world’s greatest IPAs in their colorful pint glasses. With a huge hop presence in aroma, bitterness, taste, and mouthfeel, this beer embodies the American West Coast IPA style in a big way. “A multi-dimensional hop experience,” the brewery says they use Simcoe, Columbus, Centennial, and Cascade hops for an end result of 95 IBUs. 7.3% ABV

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Come try one of the nation’s most storied Imperial Stouts with Great Divide’s newest twist: a Belgian yeast. Many brewers are enjoying the complexity that a Belgian yeast can add to a beer. In this rendition, the roasty, chocolately, and hoppy flavors of their Imperial Stout are completed by the fruit and spice notes added by the Belgian yeast. The result is dense, creamy, and really tasty!

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Folks from one of Austin’s oldest breweries join us for this week’s glass night, which features two traditional German-style beers. Keep an authentic European glass, made by Rastal, when you order their Roggenbier or Oaktoberfest, and enjoy the changing of the seasons as we segue from one seasonal beer to the next.

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A bigger, Belgian-y version of their Lil Sumpin Sumpin Ale, which uses a base of different wheat malts and lots of American hops that start with the letter “C”. This limited seasonal release displays what Lagunitas is known for: hoppy and strong, yet drinkable ales. But in this version, they use a Belgian Trappist yeast, which is known for producing beers with complexity and distinctively fruity, spicy, rustic flavors. 9.4% ABV

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The great harvesting of the hops is here, and what better way to celebrate than to introduce our newest Irrational beer, Hubris!  Hubris is a classic American pale ale–pale malt with hints of caramel, balanced with American style hops–but makes use of the technique called “wet hopping.”  When a particular hop is ready to harvest, a hop farm hand-picks the large hop cones from the vines, drops them immediately in a box, and ships them overnight to us.  These fresh, un-processed hops still have moisture on them from the farm, and have optimal fresh aromas and flavors. I had Hubris fermented and waiting in the fermentor for the wet hops to arrive.  Once they got here, we immediately bagged them, threw them into a fermentor, and transferred the beer over the hops to help extract the goodness.

Our annual election for the Board of Directors is underway! Meet the candidates online (or perhaps at the brewpub!), and then cast your ballot below. Our Board elections are conducted by single transferable vote, so the ballot is extremely simple, just rank the candidates in your order of preference.

There are currently three seats open and five candidates listed below. You may rank the candidates in order of preference from 1-5, with 1 being the most preferential and 5 the least. But you don’t have to rank them all; you can leave fields blank if you’re not comfortable ranking the candidate. The election will close, and all ballots will be counted, at the Members’ Assembly meeting on October 16th.

Have questions for the candidates? Meet them at Pub Hours with the Board on September 20th from 7-9pm at the pub.

And don’t forget to vote for which community groups we support!

Board Election Ballot:

Your Name:

Your Email:

Your Member #:

Tony Grasso:

Chris Lehr:

Johnny Livesay:

Erin O'Bryant:

Mark Wochner:

Are you human?