Jester King Introduces 2021 All-Texas SPON

From Jester King:

We’re happy to introduce 2021 All-Texas SPON — our first beer brewed with 100% Texas ingredients!

Brewing a beer with 100% Texas ingredients has been an aspiration and challenge for us for the better part of our existence. We’ve worked with well water, local grains, and native yeast for a long time, but what eluded us was Texas-grown hops. Our effort to establish hops at Jester King is still a work in progress. We experimented with wafer ash (I.e. the "hop tree") in our beer as a bittering alternative, but we didn’t love the results. Finally, thanks to the local homebrewing community, we were able to find Texas-grown hops.

Specifically, Texas homebrewer DUSTIN KIRKLAND grew several dozen pounds of Cascade for us in his backyard. We took the whole cone Cascade and aged it in the attic of our barn at Jester King for a few years before use. Finally, during the winter of 2019, we mashed in our first all-Texas beer. The water came from the Trinity Aquifer below Jester King. The barley and wheat were grown in west Texas and malted by Blacklands Malt, and the hops came from Dustin’s backyard in Austin. The all-Texas wort was chilled in our coolship and 100% spontaneously fermented with native yeast. After about two years of maturation in oak barrels, we blended and bottled our first 100% Texas ingredient beer this past spring!

Our brewing team gets notes of grapefruit, tire shop, diesel, stonefruit, vinyl album cover, and being inside the Alamo.

All-Texas SPON is now available at Jester King! We have about 1,100 bottles available (750ml/$28). No distribution. Shipping and delivery unfortunately are illegal for Texas craft brewers. No bottle limit. Proxies welcome.

We hope you enjoy this special project of ours and a milestone in our effort to make beer connected to a time, place, and people. Special thanks to Dustin Kirkland for making this beer possible!

Artwork by JOSHUA COCKRELL

Photography by TOMAS SEGURA

Here’s the packaging for All-Texas SPON 2020