Two Acadiana craft breweries are producing beer as fast as beer lovers can drink it. And that’s music to the ears of beer lovers in Acadiana and beyond.
Karlos Knott, President of Bayou Teche Brewing in Arnaudville, acquired his love of beer while in the U.S. Army stationed in Germany and the Pacific Northwest. When he came home, he and his brothers started making beers for the VFW and family gatherings to go with Cajun cuisine.
“Then one day, we were probably drunk, and said hey let’s start a brewery!” Knott joked.
And now a drunken night has turned into a profitable business for the Knott brothers and their wives. Bayou Teche makes French and Belgian style beers with a Cajun twist. Its most well-known beer is LA 31 Biere Pale.
The Knotts started making beer in a small white building next to the current brewery.
“That’s right it’s an old railcar in the middle,” Knott said. “We had a little keg and barrel system with nine fermenters. We could make six kegs. Six kegs a week basically.”
Knott said the brewery took off so fast they built a new brewhouse several months later. Bayou Teche Brewing now has 13 fermenters. All of them are named for towns on the Teche. The brewery started out brewing 1,000 barrels a year. In 2014, they brewed 5,000 barrels and by the end of 2015 they’re hoping to produce 7,000 barrels a year.
Bayou Teche also brews specialty beers, aged in wooden bourbon and wine barrels. The company’s beers are in ten states and Quebec.
Andrew Godley’s story may not have started with a night of drinking… but his new bottling machine at parish brewing company in Broussard is also hard at work filling bottles of Canebrake, Parish’s most popular beer.
“It’s certainly an amazing feeling to go to work every day making a product that people get excited about and an industry that people are excited about,” said Godley, who is Parish’s owner and brewmaster.
Parish serves the Lafayette, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans markets. Godley hopes to expand into other parts of the state soon.
“We will start shipping to those areas as soon as we have the capacity,” Godley said. “It seems every time we grow the demand for our beer increases in our existing markets and we’re just consuming it there.”
Godley started Parish Brewing five years ago. He rented out a small shop in Broussard. He worked as a chemical engineer by day and brewed beer and sold it at night. The company built a new facility in Broussard two years ago and that’s when production really ramped up.
Godley started with one employee. He now has 14. Parish expects to brew 13,000 barrels of beer this year. The brewery makes several types of beer and has a tap room on site.
The owners of both breweries said Louisiana and the Deep South have lagged behind other parts of the country in craft brewing, but that is changing. Prior to 2010, there were only three craft breweries in Louisiana. There are now 12 craft breweries in the Bayou State.
Bayou Teche and Parish led the way in Louisiana’s new generation of craft breweries.
“I don’t know about forefront,” Knott said modestly. “We kind of stumbled into it. If we’d known how much fun and how much people enjoy great beer in this state we would have started five years earlier.”
The craft brewing industry in Louisiana shows no sign of slowing down. The Louisiana Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control is reviewing an application for a 13th craft brewery in Bossier City.