Cutting Your Brewing Teeth in the Camps: Bootlegger Brown Ale

I don’t think beers need to have a gimmick to sell – good beers definitely don’t need a gimmick to sell. On the other hand, it’s always nice when a good beer has a story behind it. There’s a story behind Bootlegger Brown Ale and, while I’ve known of the story for a year or more, I’ve been unable until recently to acquire this tasty Texas brew, and that’s a story as well, I guess.

Read the story of Bootlegger Brown Ale at the Independence Brewing website and you’ll discover that the owner’s grandfather learned something of the brewing trade during a stint in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Do a Google search for the Civilian Conservation Corps and you’ll find that it was a 1930s work relief program that ultimately took some 3 million young men and put them to work in our nation’s forests, parks and fields between 1933 and 1942.

Ponder long enough on the notion of 200 young men confined in a work camp and you’ll eventually come to realize that the program wasn’t a summer day camp for sissies. Rest assured the CCC was a huge success and likely the most successful of the Depression-era New Deal programs by far, but boys will be boys and so it seems with the grand patriarch of Independence Brewing.

For those of you who may still be in the dark, Homebrewing 101 was not a course that was taught in the CCC. Odds are the predecessor to Independence Brewing’s current efforts took place in a dark corner of a barracks or mess hall, or perhaps even in an out of the way part of the park, hidden in the bushes and trees. The story of Bootlegger’s CCC past is sufficiently vague to generate curiosity and at the least a passing “that’s cool” from the average beer nut. (Of course the story of alcohol consumption in the CCC camps isn’t always a happy one. A World War I veteran in one camp died as a result of drinking vanilla extract and there are no numbers documenting how many of the thousands of vehicular accidents involving CCC enrollees also involved consumption of booze.)

I’m predisposed to like the story behind Bootlegger Brown Ale. For the record, I’m a big CCC fan. My dad was in it, but got kicked out. My mom’s dad was a U.S. Forest Service foreman and worked in CCC camps almost the entire time it was in operation. But alas, it seemed the vague CCC story connected to Bootlegger Brown Ale was going to be my only brush with the beer since it’s brewed and distributed locally and isn’t shipped out of Texas. Nevertheless, I kept a watch on the shelves of the local Total Wine and BevMo, Trader Joe’s and Sunflower Market, but no luck.
It wasn’t until I began exploring the practice of beer trading that I found someone from that part of the country who would trade me some Bootlegger for some locally brewed beers from my region. We worked the deal and SCORE! I acquired a six-pack of Bootlegger Brown Ale just after the first of the year!

Here are my notes from the initial tasting, done on the very day the package arrived, January 5, 2009:

Hint of chocolate smell and malt in the bottle. Roasted coffee in the glass. Dark brown color, not quite opaque. Nice head but quickly gone. Distinct coffee taste, medium lacing. Tastes a bit like a stout. Slightly sooty finish.

I like Bootlegger Brown Ale enough to hope that I can wrangle another trade from out of state; the likelihood of my actually getting to Texas seems remote at the moment, though there are a ton of great CCC sites scattered around the state. I might kill two birds with one stone, eh? Sample some Bootlegger Brown Ale closer to the source and visit some terrific places where the CCC did great work almost 80 years ago!

If you're lucky enough to live where you can buy it, buy it!