I came to Austin (for the second time) for two reasons: 1) to get back with an ex-girlfriend from the first time, and 2) to open a brewpub. Within a week of being here in Austin, I hooked up with the beginnings of Black Star Co-op (then, “Black Star Pub”), and didn’t hook up with the ex. So now after two years of working closely with the other Black Starians, I get my own brewer’s blog!

I’d like to consider this blog as the written form of the conversations that go on at the bar towards the end of the night…when the good beers have gotten your mind feeling right and the cheap beers are now economically keeping it going. You know, when you come up with ideas like pingpongdungeon.com–the underground ping-pong fight club where…oh wait, we don’t talk about pingpongdungeon.com.

I surprisingly don’t get to talk about our future beers enough. We now have a catalog of 10 recipes with beers like Double Dee, Epsilon, Recalcitrant Dockhand, and Cul Sec. These beers have come a long way, but I don’t always get to talk about where they come from! Some of the people that have been in the co-op since the inception have seen many incarnations of these beers.

Recalcitrant Dockhand was probably the first beer I made with the intention of turning it into a future Black Star beer. It used to be called “Grandma’s Smoked Porter” and tasted not unlike a pint of roasty peanut butter. Which I kinda liked! After experimenting with blackstrap molasses for a while, I’ve decided blackstrap sucks. It always left a really dry, astringent flavor on the palate. Meh. So, I went back to Grandma’s Molasses like in the first time I brewed it and wow, a yummy, complex, rich, robust beer emerged! (as a side note, thanks to Steven and Johnny for making it the hardest to pronounce beer name in our catalog…people at our Beer Socials take a look at the name on the chalkboard, pause for a minute, then just ask what kind of beers are on tap!)

Cul Sec! That term was given to me from Pierre, the son of the mayor of the famous Belgian Trappist brewing town Rochefort. He was staying with me for a bit in Birmingham, Alabama and when we’d take him out he’d bitch about our (America’s) lack of beer pouring skills–no head! So he’d always get a fork, “fluff” the Hoegaarden to form a good foamy head, hold up the pint to us, say, “Cul Sec!” and down the beer. That was fun the first few times…and then a BLAST the next few times.

So, in honor of him and thirst quenching Belgian wit biers, I wanted to come up with a beefed up wheat beer that will quench your thirst without sacrificing the unique flavors of the Belgian yeast strain. That has proved very difficult…it’s still a work in progress (I HATE phenolics, but understand their place in this world…unfortunately though, the higher the alcohol in these beers, the more likely the spicy phenolics will run amok). I suppose I should also say, Cul Sec directly translates as “ass dry.” Pierre also taught me a phrase I only know phonetically–”fist-eh-put”…don’t ever say that to a waitress that took four years of French.