E-Malt.com News article: USA, TX: Rentsch Brewery to open in Georgetown next year

Rentsch Brewery, a father-and-son operation, is opening early next year in Georgetown, austin360.com reported on November, 20

Andrew Rentschler, the 24-year-old brewmaster of Rentsch, doesn’t have a set date for his brewery opening either, although he does know that it’ll be sometime in February, once all the TABC permitting guidelines have been met.

It’s a month he can’t wait for — and neither can the rest of the town. “Everyone keeps asking, ‘How soon?’” Rentschler said. “We’ve had a few people come over and try our sample batches, and everything I’ve heard has been positive.”

He and his father, David Rentschler, decided to open up a brewery together after dabbling in homebrewing. Their hobby wasn’t anything serious until David went to visit his son, at the time a Texas Tech student studying abroad in Salzburg and Berlin, in Europe.

“(During my time in Germany) I had a lot of German-style beers at a lot of different bars and beer gardens, and I fell in love with those kinds of beers,” Andrew Rentschler said, noting that he had never been a fan of light macro beer. “My dad came to Europe at one point, and while we were sitting at this little café overlooking the Eiger (a large mountain in the Bernese Alps), we were talking about life and had been drinking a beer local to that area — I forget which one — but we basically decided we should do this; we should open a brewery. When I came back, we did a lot of homebrewing.”

Although his father doesn’t do any of the brewing these days, he’s a happy taste-tester and acts as CEO for Rentsch Brewing. Brewing falls to Rentschler and their other employee, Stefano Alianelli, who had heard from a mutual friend about their plans and wanted to get involved. They’ve got a very specific idea of the sort of beers Rentsch will have.

So far, the brewery will open with three year-round styles: a hefeweizen, a weizenbock and a pale ale. They don’t want to limit themselves to brewing only German styles, but they do plan on brewing in accordance to Reinheitsgebot, the German purity law that dictates brewing only using hops, barley, yeast and water, the four core ingredients of beer. Austin’s Circle Brewing also sticks to that regulation; otherwise, it’s fairly rare to find a modern brewery following the ancient law.

In addition to those styles, Rentsch Brewery will have seasonals, too, including the already named Red Poppy Red, which will come out right around the weekend of Georgetown’s Red Poppy Festival, an annual celebration of the wildflower that blooms in the front yards of many of the town’s residents and has earned Georgetown the title of the Red Poppy Capitol of Texas.


21 November, 2014