The newest New Orleans brewery doesn’t open until this fall, but it’s already turning heads with a unique selection using local foods as a source, such as with its upcoming flagship beer Roast Beef Pale Ale.
“New Orleanians love to eat, and they love to drink,” said Chad Chaddington, president of Brewery Breauxs. “It’s common to pair great food and great beer. So, we said let’s just put that food right into the beer. Why keep two great things separate, you know? They all end up in the same place anyway.”
Breauxs brewmaster Ry Lauder invented the Roast Beef Pale Ale in his kitchen one day when he couldn’t finish his roast beef po-boy from Parkway Bakery.
“I asked for extra gravy, and they just put more roast beef on it,” Lauder said. “So I decided to put the leftovers straight in the mash grain of a pale ale I was making. It was delicious.”
Breauxs didn’t stop there, though. Lauder decided to age the Roast Beef Pale Ale for three months in oaken pickle barrels to add more po-boy flavor.
“You might be surprised what all that brine and vinegar do to the beer. You’ll definitely want to follow it with a cold glass of water,” Lauder noted.
Breauxs will bottle other unique beers in the coming months, including Crawzilla, a pastoral barnyard ale dry-hopped in crab boil, SW&sonofaB, a stout, very dark beer that includes roasted barley, hops, stagnated water, and aged tears of frustration from New Orleanians, and 2TJs, a premium non-alcoholic malt beverage for underage consumers. For something sweeter, drinkers can try the Bywater Summer-Fresh Ale, a wheat ale fermented in whatever is available from local dumpsters.
The New Orleans brewery’s beer styles have helped it get around Louisiana law. Other breweries can sell no more than 10 percent of monthly sales on-site in their taprooms and can’t serve food unless it covers more than half of revenue.
However, legally, the Louisiana Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control considers beers from the New Orleans brewery to be food. This allows the Brewery Breauxs to be zoned as a restaurant and releases them from the usual restrictions on alcohol sales.
The Food and Drug Administration is also setting a precedent by requiring the brewery to place nutritional labels on their bottles due to the nutritive significance of the beers. The brewery aims to have the lines of beers marketed as “lunch in a bottle” to compete with meal replacement products such as smoothies and protein drinks.
“People are already so busy these days that you try to save time however you can. And now, you don’t have to choose which thing you consume first — the po-boy or the beer — because you get both at the same time in the quickest, most delicious way possible,” Chaddington said. “Though, we don’t recommend our beers for anyone with hypertension, acid reflux or shellfish allergies.”
Look for Brewery Breauxs beers starting September 31st. Early releases will be made available on tap at the Bulldog, Mid-City.