Sour beer. Pretzel beer. Pretzel beer with peanut butter. Beer styled after a breakfast cereal. Beer styled after s’mores or pizza or salsa verde. Pickle beer. Spicy pickle beer. Bloody Mary pickle beer. Ketchup beer. Even hot dog water beer. You can accuse Martin House Brewing of many things, but you can never say they are boring.
Fort Worth’s Wonka brewery seems to succeed despite playing against the rules for a craft brewery—or maybe by ignoring them entirely. Where most small breweries may turn out a dozen or two dozen styles of beer per year, Martin House proudly pushes out at least 150 different styles, many of them new, in addition to their base recipes and usually multiple variations thereof. Such a production schedule should fail spectacularly, but somehow they make it work.
Part of their success is the local fan base. As fanatical and brand-loyal as the base for any touring band, Martin House customers mob their long and narrow shotgun taproom with each and every beer release and festival to match. Sour Fest, Watermelon Fest, Summerween, Creedfest, Glizzy Fest, Pickle Fest, Lebowski Fest, Banana de Mayo… not to mention the more traditional anniversaries and “conventional” holidays like St. Patrick’s Day, Mardi Gras and Booery at the Brewery. It seems every weekend brings crushing crowds with something to celebrate.
Admittedly, I have only ever been at the Martin House brewery for these weekend events (at least since they opened their current taproom), which are usually an absolute zoo. The heat and humidity are unbearable in Cowtown summers, and the crowds are so thick your best bet for a seat is often a cement curb. But recently I found myself in Fort Worth free on a Friday afternoon and decided to stop by, and outside of the crush of weekend patrons guzzling the bière du jour, the brewery is a much different experience.
No more than five people total were ever in the taproom while I was there, including various staff in and out, stocking shelves or moving pallets. It was a mellow summer afternoon with the AC struggling to keep up in the high-ceiling industrial space, and it gave me the chance to figure out the other component for the brewery’s success: Their enthusiastic embrace of weirdness makes them easy to dismiss, but Martin House Brewing really does make very good beer.
Their enthusiastic embrace of weirdness makes them easy to dismiss, but Martin House Brewing really does make very good beer.
For instance, take their peach beer microseasonal, the Parker County Peach. Overall, my tastes run more along traditional styles, and much of the creativeness Martin House produces often does not tickle my fancy beyond a single pint. However, I am a fan of a well-crafted fruit beer. Using fruit is one of the oldest flavor elements in brewing history, easily dating back centuries, and many modern craft breweries throw out fruit beers all the time. But executing a fruit beer well takes a fair amount of brewing talent, more than simply dosing a batch with sugary syrup or acetic acid.
A good fruit beer should be both fruit and beer, not only a flavored malt beverage closer in profile to a commercial soda. Not every fruit works well in every style of beer, so it takes some finesse to match a fruit flavor with a specific beer that will showcase the produce but also allow the base style to shine through. Wheat beers are often a favorite choice, as are amber ales and American pale ales; also, stouts take to dark and dried fruits surprisingly well.
As for the type of fruit, citrus is often not a favorite choice as its flavors can too easily be subsumed by similar flavor profiles from hops varietals such as Citra, Amarillo, Mosaic or Galaxy. (Lemon-flavored beers more often than not derive their flavor profile from hops, not actual lemons.) Berries and stonefruits work the best with beers, as do certain vegetables like chiles (fresh or dried) or even prickly-pear cactus (ie, the tuna). Melons tend to be a little too mild to be effective additions to all but the lightest beer styles.
Pairing just the right fruit with just the right style base is the key to a really great fruit beer. Martin House’s Parker County Peach does just that using the famous local crop from neighboring Weatherford, the Peach Capital of Texas, bringing a fresh peach flavor that sits perfectly on top of an American wheat ale without overwhelming it. At this time of year, it is difficult to get better peaches anywhere in Texas, if not the entire country.
Of course, tomorrow is Peach Fest here at Martin House, and this space will once again become a sweaty flash mob of craft beer fans, with the Parker County Peach likely to sell out this weekend. But at least I got a sixer to go. PH
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