Travel - Central Texas Weekend Part 3 - The Great Hill Country Alcohol Tour, The Hard Stuff

As I discussed elsewhere, my wife and I went to San Antonio for her birthday, and for one of those days went on a tour of alcohol acquisition in central Texas.  I've already covered the meaderies we visited - Rohan in La Grange and Texas Mead Works in Hye - and here I will cover the other three stops.

Hye Cider Company is, by a quirk of brewing, the oldest meadery in Hye - a cyser is a hybrid made with pears or apples and honey in various proportions, and Hye Cider stocks mostly cyser rather than purebred cider, which uses primarily fruit sugars for fermentation.  That is hardly its only claim to fame, but it is worth noting because my first memory of Hye Cider Company is a few years ago, watching honeybees trying to collect sugars from their countertop.  Their entire sales area is open to the outside world, which can impact tasting flavors depending on the season.  Colder weather tends to suppress some of the aromatic components of taste, while hot weather tends to make the crispness of a good cider stand out more.

"Crisp" is the defining note of Hye Cider's products.  My wife and I tend to run sweet in our palates, partly because there is an unfortunate tendency in dry ciders, meads, and wines to run to vinegar; getting a dry product that is not also offensively bitter to me is a tricky proposition.  Hye Cider generally hits that line pretty well.  I will not say "always," as some of their signature ciders - Hye Hops, for instance - are not to my taste, but the ones that are, are very much so.  Especially on a hot day, their ciders are sweet enough not to be vinegar, and tart enough to deliver a refreshing jolt to the system.

Their alcohol content tends to run into the high-beer strength - 8.9% ABV is a pretty typical number - but limitations of using apples as the primary sugar source prevent ciders in general from hitting wine strength (a cyser using honey as the primary sugar can hit that, but then the apple tends to be a minority flavor).  What this means is that they are a little more potent than most beers, but not so much that, if you're used to drinking beer for refreshment or recreation, you're not going to be surprised by the alcohol content.  You might be surprised by the price and format; to-go is primarily in 750mL (about 24oz) wine bottles and those typically run between $18 and $25 a bottle, draft is somewhat less, but since we're generally not stopping there but stopping by there, we've only been able to get a draft once, more than a year ago, and I don't recall the prices.

If I were to recommend a single product from Hye Cider, I would recommend Hye Heaven, which is simultaneously the least alcoholic and most interesting of their flavors.  It is made with dates and peppercorns, which gives it a simultaneously sweeter and spicier flavor profile than one would typically expect from a cider or cyser.  We wind up picking up a couple of bottles of it - it's in the $20 range, so it's not a bank-breaker - every time we go by there, which means we get one to drink, and one to stockpile.

From Hye Cider and into Hye proper is a relatively short drive, not more than two or three miles, and then from Hye to Garrison Brothers Distillery is a couple miles down a narrow country road.  I don't really feel the need to provide Garrison Brothers with a bourbon review; they make excellent bourbon, but you pay for what you get, and my Garrison Brothers bottles are the only ones I keep where I have to work to get to the bottles, because they're that good, and cost makes them harder for me to replace than the ones I have to travel to another time zone to get despite being about an hour and a half from my front door.  What I want to talk about at Garrison Brothers is the fact that they have made a destination of themselves that is worth visiting on its own.

Visiting Garrison Brothers feels a lot like hanging out on a friend's patio.  The space is set up so that you can, if you choose, go in the on-site shop and buy things, or you can order from the bar, but you could just as easily just sit under a big tree and drink beer free of charge.  I recognize that the "yard games, beer, wine, and water for free" move is public relations, but it is good public relations.  Bearing in mind that I have spent much of my time talking about the personal-relationship aspects of visiting these places, and how much of running a craft brewery or distillery is establishing customer rapport, Garrison Brothers does the hands-down best at creating a space that you want to come back to visit.  This is appropriate, since it is also the largest and best-funded of the ones I've visited as part of this, but it is also exceptionally well-done.  Despite the cost of their bourbon, their target audience on-site isn't bourbon snobs, but rather anybody who happens to drive up regardless of experience level.  The only other thing I have to comment on at Garrison Brothers is their bathrooms, which... well, they have to be experienced.  I won't spoil it past that.

Back on 290 and headed toward Fredericksburg, it is almost absurdly easy to miss Hye Rum Company.  They are also in the process of relocating to Dripping Springs, so it may be impossible to find them in Hye in the near future, but I owe them an apology for all of the times I drove past their distillery and shied away based strictly on it looking like Ed Gein was running a tasting room.  I say what I am about to say with a fairly wide experience of spiced rums, including both mass-market and craft, and it is a significant enough statement that I will give it its own paragraph, all to itself, in bold.

They make the best spiced rum I have yet tasted.

It is smooth, well-aged, and the spice profile compliments the rum rather than overwhelming it.  While I enjoy, for instance, Kraken, I find that it is harsh and the spices are mostly there to hide that fact.  The second-best spiced rum I've ever had (Heritage Distillery) might be the better rum, but the spice profile isn't quite there.  Hye on the other hand makes an absolutely superb spiced rum.  It is not the only good thing they make - they make an orange rum that contains no added sugars, and therefore they're quite proud that it can be used as bitters, and having tried that experiment for myself, I can tell you that it works.  If you are going to get just one thing at Hye Rum, though, you need to get the spiced rum.  Their distiller - whose name is James, and whom I remember because he looks and acts a lot like Stephen Merchant - was absolutely shocked that we bought three bottles without a single tasting (we were on a timeline), but my only regret about that purchase was that I bought one bottle of spiced rum.  I should have bought three, minimum.  Given that three bottles of Hye Rum costs about as much as one bottle of Garrison Brothers - so one bottle is about $30 - I would happily have made that decision had I known just how good their spiced rum is.

Having talked about all of the tasting locations as an extension of sales, I suppose I would be remiss if I didn't talk about Hye Rum's.  It is bad.  From the road, as I said, it looks like the Ed Gein Distillery.  The first step in is a huge, non-standard-size step that you had best navigate sober.  Inside, there is one dining-room-size table, crammed in with a sales counter and display rack.  The building wasn't designed for air conditioning and struggles to keep up in July in Texas.  I suspect that all of this is part of what motivates their move to Dripping Springs.  Having acknowledged all of this, though, there is one inescapable fact: I don't drink appearances.  I can, with absolute certainty, tell you that I do drink Hye Rum spiced rum.

Next up, hopefully before the next time I'm in San Antonio - touristy things to do in San Antonio! San Antonio has a French bakery!