People

A Real Change of Pace

Rather than start with just any old mash to make its new line of whiskey and gin, indie beermaker Real Ale Brewing Company turns to the complex brews already cooking up just a few doors down. Head ...

Sugar Buzz

If the Cinnamon Toast Crunch chef decided to enter a homebrew beer competition in Austin, Hazelnut Crunch is what he’d probably make. Seriously, it’s got actual Cinnamon Toast Crunch in it, ...

Newsom Legacy Comes to the Hill Country

While at Texas Tech in the late 1970s, Neal Newsom (Texas High Plains cotton farmer Doyle C. “Hoss” Newsom’s son) had the fortune to encounter chemistry professor Dr. Roy Mitchell. At that ...

The Best Kind of Buzz

William Ball and Philip Speer started My Name is Joe Coffee Co. last February to offer people a pick-me-up—but not just via the caffeine. In a respectful nod to the ever-important number 12 (as in ...

a.k.a Alicia Kim

Observing Alicia Kim at the Texas Farmers Market at Mueller, you’ll notice that her youthful, warm and sparkling personality manages to upstage the row of jewel-toned juices and syrups that glow in ...

That’s the Beer Talking—and Saving

Homer Simpson famously called alcohol the “cause of—and solution to—all of life’s problems.” Craft brewers (and husband-and-wife team) David and Quynh Rathkamp wouldn’t exactly agree with ...

Tea Time for Yaupon

Like Game of Thrones’ Cersei Lannister, yaupon is a complicated villain. A native Texas holly, it’s grown out of control in the Piney Woods near Bastrop ever since the devastating fire of ...

A Whiskey 100 Years in the Making

To become the first whiskey distillery in Austin since Prohibition, Still Austin Whiskey Co. had to fight against the architect of Prohibition himself. Long-dead Senator John Morris Sheppard of Texas ...

Gary and Dee Kelleher

As the founders of Empresario, LLC (Texas’ first self-appointed “Spirits House”—sort of the Condé Nast of Texas booze brands), Dee and Gary Kelleher are at the helm of distilling, importing, ...

Back to the Grind

Coffee had been in the blood of the Alvarado family for five generations, until Nicaragua decided it shouldn’t be. During the country’s Contra War in the 1980s, the government seized the ...