Take six different American hops, mix in Texas honey from Uvalde and creativity of brewers Jason Davis and John Lee and you have a premise for tasty beer at Freetail Brewing Co.The Freetail Hopothesis will be tapped this Saturday after a little more than a month. Expect smaller snifters of this creation instead of a pint thanks to the 12 percent plus alcohol content.

NEW BRAUNFELS -- The historic Faust Hotel and its accompanying brewpub will get a new lease on life in downtown New Braunfels under new ownership.
 
The deal closed Tuesday evening to take ownership from the family that has owned it since the late 1980s. Vance and Priscilla Hinton bought the main street fixture and plan to make the brewpub a bigger beer destination and revive a full-service restaurant that has been absent for more than a decade.
 

While the hotel does well during tourist season and live entertainment brings in a good Saturday night crowd, the beer side of the brewpub has been a touch and go prospect since it opened with numerous periods where the taps for locally brewed beer had run dry.
 
But Vance Hinton is a beer lover and successful manufacturing executive in Katy. Priscilla Hinton is co-owner of Kork wine bar in downtown New Braunfels and loves a good beer on occasion. That focus could mean good things for the brewpub and the addition of a menu will help bring more people in the door to discover beer. My wedding reception was here nearly 20 years ago and the place has never lost its elegance.
 
The brewing system at The Faust in notoriously difficult to work with, according to numerous brewers I've interviewed over the years. It may need some professional revamping, but good beer can come out of the copper clad showpiece tanks when handled by a patient pro and when there is no skimping on ingredients. At last check, only one handmade beer was on tap and it wasn't the better of the two on tap a month earlier.
 
New Braunfels was the cradle of Texas brewing beginning in the late 1840s and tourists come there for the heritage. Let's hope the new owners of The Faust are able to capture that legacy.
 
Prosit!
-- Travis E. Poling

PHILADELPHIA -- Recreating historical sites with the look and the feel of something old, established and important is a difficult task. Keeping existing historic places alive is even harder. But in pockets of central Philadelphia, there are havens that make it easy to forget that we are nation still at war, that our modern economy is in shambles and that technology rules every waking moment.

Such a place is McGillin's Olde Ale House in an unassuming one-block alley near Philadelphia City Hall and the site of the nation's first department store. It's so olde in fact, that the official name appears as "old" and "olde" with careless abandon. But who needs consistent branding when 149 years of consistency in great beer and service are in play? The tavern has been on Drury Street since 1860, is the oldest continuously run pub in Philadelphia and frequented by local politicians, sports figures and stars and literary figures such as W.C. Fields, Tennessee Williams, Vincent Price, Robin Williams and Will Ferrell.

To say that the taste of Shiner Smokehaus is bold goes too far. What is bold is making it in the first place. The Spoetzl Brewery of The Gambrinus Co. introduced a mesquite-smoked helles lager in the last week that will have some people going back for more and leave others scratching their heads.

That’s because smoked beer is uncommon in the United States and, with the exception of a few brewpubs and hyper-local microbreweries, almost nonexistent in Texas. But it is a German tradition dating back at least 500 years in the Bamberg region of the country. Rauchbiers are traditionally darker and taste like smoked meat after being well smoked with beechwood.

While that flavor is one I embrace in beer as much as meats, even some of the biggest fans of diversity in beer have a tough time with this one.

What the brewers at Shiner have done is taken a light Munich style helles and added just enough mesquite smoke to it right on the grounds of the brewery to give it a distinctive flavor. The malt in a helles is by nature very light and toasted only to the color of a Saltine cracker, so the mesquite flavor is present without too deep a penetration.

This beer was built for some barbecue and it succeeds. It didn’t overpower an oak smoked brisket or Granzin’s Meat Market’s smoked bratwurst and melded rather well. I consumed a few bottles on their own without food and still found it thirst quenching as thermometer inched toward 98 degrees.

Give it a try and tell me what you think.

Prosit!