“fait à la main”

“We like to think of ourselves as a big stop sign. To stop and have an appreciation about what we have that’s different, to not try to emulate other places and to not try to be like the rest of the country.”

A Mardi Gras Beer, Straight From Cajun Country

By RACHEL WHARTON FEB. 21, 2017

A Taste of Cajun Country

ARNAUDVILLE, La. — There is plenty to drink to these days here in the bayou country of southern Louisiana, where the flat farmland is already tinged green with sugar cane and rice. There are the first fat crawfish, a blush of pink on the swamp maples and Mardi Gras at the end of the month.

Arnaudville, a rural town northwest of Lafayette with just 1,000 residents, falls in the center of Acadiana, a hot, humid region that takes its name from the 18th-century French colony of Acadia in eastern Canada, whose people made their way to this swampy, Spanish moss-draped land after they were expelled by the British. The laws here follow Napoleonic Code, the gas stations stock good bread and the culture is still so Cajun — short for Acadian — that residents speak French and teach their kids to play the accordion.

All of this might explain how a small family brewery on a former corn and bean farm here produces some of the most distinctive craft beers in the United States, with flavors that could only come from Cajun Country.

Run by Karlos Knott, 53, whose paternal ancestors arrived here in 1780 from Quebec, Bayou Teche Brewing is an eight-year-old family-owned operation, situated on a piece of property that includes the four Knott family houses, a crawfish pond and a dance hall known as the Turnip.

From that 40-acre estate along the Bayou Teche — a bayou being the Louisianian term for a waterway smaller than a river — Mr. Knott and his brothers, Byron, 52, and Dorsey, 47, produce 200 barrels of beer a week, much of it intended to go with the foods they grew up eating: gumbo made with a dark Cajun roux, jambalaya and smoked meats, fried Gulf shrimp and fist-size oysters and butter-mounted crawfish étouffée served over local rice simmered with more butter and bay leaves.

“We’re Cajuns,” Mr. Knott said. “If we’re not eating, we’re thinking about what we’re making for dinner, or what Momma’s cooking Sunday.”

Bayou Teche Brewing is mainly known to those on the Gulf Coast, despite receiving awards at international beer competitions. Its distribution, like that of many other sought-after craft beers, is limited; for now it can be found only in Louisiana, Texas and Quebec.

Polly Watts, the owner of the Avenue Pub in New Orleans, usually has at least two beers from Bayou Teche on her list of 50 international brews. “One of the things that I think Bayou Teche does so well is that the beer is not just beer, it is part of the food culture,” Ms. Watts said.

While most American beers are made as stand-alone drinks, she explained, Bayou Teche takes its cues from the French and Belgian farmhouse traditions, in which beers are meant to be served at the table as part of a meal.

“When you’re eating that food and drinking that beer, it’s magical,” she said.

In addition to their regular roster of about a dozen craft ales, the Knott brothers also make two only-in-Acadiana spring specials. One is for the Courir de Mardi Gras, the old Cajun version of the holiday celebrated in towns throughout the region on Fat Tuesday.

While the New Orleans version of Mardi Gras is all about the parades, here the men go from house to house on horseback, dressed in handmade costumes, drinking, singing and begging for ingredients that eventually make their way into a communal pot of gumbo, including a live chicken everyone chases across a yard. (The Courir’s label, painted in Cajun folk art style, shows a man in traditional costume and rubber brewing boots, holding up a chicken.)

The beer is wheaty, slightly hoppy and high-alcohol, made in a style known as a bière de mars, or March beer, after the time it was traditionally consumed in France. A bière de mars was usually “the first big beer of the year,” said Mr. Knott, who chose the style for Courir de Mardi Gras not just because it pairs well with the complex flavors of a gumbo, but also because it was traditionally a celebratory beer that marked the arrival of spring.

The other Bayou Teche spring ale is made to go with the crawfish that appear January through June, when 30-pound sacks of still-wriggling freshwater crustaceans are often boiled right in the backyard and seasoned with a brick-red spice mix laden with cayenne pepper.
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Mr. Knott grew up harvesting the crawfish from his father’s farm, and now hosts boils at the brewery during the season. It ends with the annual Burning Crawfish Festival, planned for June this year, in which a colossal papier-mâché crustacean is set aflame as attendees drink Saison D’Écrevisses.

That beer, whose name means crawfish season, is fruity, spicy, fizzy, dry and refreshing; it’s also a joke for beer geeks, who know that a saison is a French-Belgian style. In France, it is typically brewed in winter, said Mr. Knott, and intended to be consumed in the hot weather to come. (In this part of Louisiana, it can be 80 degrees by April.)

Mr. Knott makes his saison with French yeast, which he believes adds citrus notes that go nicely with seafood. He also uses oats, whose creamy mouthfeel provides natural protection, he said, from “the heat of the crawfish.”

Many of the special beers the brothers have produced over the years incorporate southern Louisiana ingredients, like local raw sugar, rice and hot peppers. Not all have worked — most notably a beer called Shrimp and Grits that actually incorporated hominy grits and shellfish. “The beer tasted good, but it smelled like old shrimp,” Mr. Knott said.

He first developed a serious interest in beer in the 1980s, when the Army stationed him in Germany. He arrived and quickly ordered a beer. “Being from Louisiana, I thought I knew a lot about beer,” he said. “It was a big glass of liquid bread. It was amazing. I thought to myself, ‘I don’t know anything about beer.’”

He and his wife, Stephanie, now the chief operating officer of Bayou Teche, drank many regional European brews before they were moved to Seattle, where Mr. Knott learned to home brew and went on tours of craft outfits like Redhook Brewery and Pyramid Breweries.

In 1998, Mr. Knott said, he returned to Louisiana, where he and his brothers made home brew mainly to have something good to drink. They initially followed recipes for American-style beers, whose hoppiness and malty sweetness competed with their cooking. “After a few years we said, ‘Let’s really tweak these, and have these go with specific Cajun and Creole foods,’” Mr. Knott recalled.

A turning point came in 2009, at a beer festival in Lafayette. They served six kegs of a traditional Belgian pale ale they had named LA 31 Bière Pâle, after the highway that hugs the Bayou Teche. A local distributor promised to stock it as soon as they could make enough to sell.

Eight years later, they produce nearly 20 styles a year in a newly expanded brewery with an adjacent taproom, whose visitors include Cajuns in camouflage, tourists, local residents arriving by kayak and chefs like Justin Girouard of the French Press in Lafayette.

Mr. Girouard serves at least five of Bayou Teche’s beers at his restaurant, including the LA 31 Bière Pâle, which has become the brewery’s signature. “It’s a nice, crisp refreshing pale ale,” he said. “It’s perfect with crawfish and fried food.”

What may be more significant, though, is how the Knotts have integrated their beers into the rhythms of local life. “They have been able to get their customers to think of their beers whenever they are sitting down to a meal like a crawfish boil, which is so important here,” Mr. Girouard said.

Most of the family is involved in the business: Byron is the head brewer, while Dorsey works the taproom with his wife, Laurin. Their father, Floyd, who is 83, gives tours three times on Saturdays — available in both English and French, his first language — where he points out his crawfish, the brew tanks named after the towns along Bayou Teche and the wetland built with Louisiana State University to filter water used in their two daily brewing cycles. “Mr. Floyd,” as he is known, hopes to add a trip to his catfish pond once he invests in a golf cart that can serve as a shuttle.

Visitors also come for the daylong Saturday parties, where they can sit outside with the brewery’s Swamp Thing I.P.A., admire the live oaks, bald cypress and pecan trees and dance to local music booked by Louis Michot of the Louisiana band Lost Bayou Ramblers. (Mr. Michot and the brewery also joined together to produce “En Francais,” two compilations of classic rock songs sung in Cajun French; Mr. Knott played bass on two Beatles covers.)

“This is a beer paradise,” said Michele Anne Boulet, a Sunday regular who runs an animal sanctuary down the road. Ms. Boulet likes to bring her dogs and watch the sun set on the cattail fringe of the wetland with a pint. The place is especially satisfying to her, she said, because it is “fait à la main,” or the Cajun-French term for made by hand.

Mr. Knott said: “We like to think of ourselves as a big stop sign. To stop and have an appreciation about what we have that’s different, to not try to emulate other places and to not try to be like the rest of the country.”