Shannon Beer of Keller, Texas

The Shannon Brewing Company’s local representative, Sam McClelland, was at the Guadalupe store of Wheatsville Co-op here in Austin last Friday.  I met him as I stopped in to get food for the long drive home down Lamar Avenue. (I had other shopping to do that took me off route. And Austin City Limits Live was enjoying their second weekend this year; so, traffic was worse than usual.) A couple of sips of good beer helped, also.

  

 Shannon Brewing Company is two years old.  Sam said that they have been popular in Dallas and are now branching out across Texas.  I think that they will do well. When I moved here in 2o11, I was not impressed with the beers.  The Prohibition Wars were fought in Chicago, not Houston, for a reason. In the five years since, I have found quite a few worthy brews and Shannon is one of the best. 

I tasted their Irish Red and Honey Porter.  The Red was flavorful, not hoppy, with a light grainy aftertaste.  The Honey Porter was surprisingly light and also not cloying the way other honey brews can be. 

On their website, they say:

Lets face it, beer is mostly water so brewing with the purest, best-tasting water we can find is a pretty good starting point. Shannon Brewing Company shares 20 acres of land with Samantha Springs, a natural source of exceptional drinking water. We secured the rights to brew our beer with pure Samantha Springs water — straight from the spring, through our filtering system, right into our brewing tanks — no chlorine, fluoride or any other treatments…just pure spring water.

At Shannon Brewing, we prefer two-row barley — the plumper, sweeter and usually more expensive version, which brings a full-bodied sweetness to the beer. It also provides a larger and stronger husk that is imperative to our natural filtration methodology. We will never compromise great flavor to save a few dollars. --http://shannonbrewing.com/ingredients/

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Saving the World Through Beer 

Awesome Austin Foods at the Wheatsville Co-op

Politics and the Inverse-Square Law

Money is Speech

BSides Austin 2016
Hurricane Tejas

Around Austin

Texas has no income tax. Sales tax is 8.5% here in Austin because 1% goes for CapMetro, the bus and rail lines.  Dell, Motorola, and a dozen more are here, hundreds of small high tech firms and design studios dot the economic landscape which is dominated by the University of Texas and the state government.  Then, there are cinema, music, and fine arts. KMFA-FM plays no NPR or other news; and Composer's Datebook reminds us that "once all music was new." (The NPR affiliate is KUT-FM, which also launched an alternative format KUTX-FM.) I live in a Mexican neighborhood (no surprise), but a mile up the road, two banks have signs in Chinese.


5th floor near 6th and Lamar looking north
(Whole Foods HQ not visible at far left).
Note all the trees.

You don't see a lot of people getting speeding tickets here. In fact, as a Michigander, I find it downright frustrating to be behind two enormous SUVs each doing 25 in a 40 MPH zone, along the main drag, Lamar Boulevard.  (The street honors Mirabeau Lamar, second president of the Texas Republic.  Houston Street is a small lane, easy to miss.  Sam Houston wanted the capital someplace else.)  Freeway ramps are longer than the roads between towns back East.

The Bar Crawler caught in broad daylight.

But business is booming and bursting and reforming and reformulating.  You will find real estate, minerals, computer chips, computer games.  The culture - music, cinema, fine art, theater - is an economic sector, of course. NPR-affliate KUT-FM provides a deep playlist of local and contemporary music. In addition to Whole Foods, Schlotzsky's home office is here.

The McCombs College of Business at UT is one of several
to have received an antique stock exchange station.

Michael Dell began building personal computers in his dormitory room at UT.  The town as seen busts: people turn nostalgic about the good old days of the 1980s.  An Austin American-Statesman article last year offered hand-wringing because recovery from the Dot Com Meltdown still might not yet have reached the gaming coders.

The Goodwill stores have a computer museum,
funded in part by Dell.
A Cray stands among the vintage machines.

The land is diverse, more like Ohio than it is like New Mexico.  We went through a drought last year with record highs for record days, but that, too, is one of the environmental textures.  When it rains, it pours.  We just passed the apex of cricket season.  You get so many in one place, you can smell them.  Same with grackles.


At the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center

Austin offers much.  Nearly two million people agree.  Housing is disproportionaltely expensive as a result.  The city owns the electric power company and rates rise as their operating costs fall.  Taxicabs are regulated and all charge the same rates.  Pedicabs are regulated differently.  In a lot of ways, Texas is very much like Massachusetts.... but don't tell them that.  The Texas flag flies at the same height as the American flag; and the Texas flag is larger than the American flag. You don't get that in Massachusetts.

Also on Necessary Facts
Austin at Night
Stadtluft Macht Frei
South by Southwest 2013
Images from SXSW 2013
South by Southwest 2012