‘Lubricate your French-talking muscle’ with Bayou Teche Brewery beer

By Claudette Olivier
claudette.olivier@eunicetoday.com
How do you pack a Eunice Rotary Club meeting?
Mention beer in the email subject line.
“I told people to please RSVP for this meeting at the last meeting, and by the time I got back to my office that day, I had four RSVP emails,” said Rotary member Pat Dossman as she introduced her guest and meeting speaker, Karlos Knott, president of Bayou Teche Brewery in Arnaudville. “So use beer in the subject line for future emails.”
“Karlos is going to tell us about his family and how the brewery started. It’s truly what we are all about – Cajuns, French and family.”
Knott’s beer biography began in the 1980s when he was stationed in Germany for six years while in the U.S Army.
“I fell in love with the beer,” Knott said. “The first weekend there, I went to a German bar and drank beer. When they asked me if I wanted a large or a small (glass), I said large. But a large there is like a gallon. It’s like drinking a loaf of bread.”
“My wife dragged me around visiting cathedrals, and I dragged her around drinking beer.”
Six years later, Knott received orders to return stateside, and he wondered how he would survive without the country’s buffet of beer.
“I was told I was going back, and I panicked about the beer,” he said, laughing. “There are lots of different beers in Germany. How could I live without European beer? There’s so much different food there, and there’s a different beer served with every food.”
Once Knott settled back in Louisiana, he began to notice there was not really any beer in Louisiana to go with many of the state’s unique and tasty dishes, and he and his brothers began brewing beer on Sundays.
“Every two weeks, we’d have new beer,” Knott said. “We’d tweak it to go along with spicy food.”
“Ten years ago, my brothers and I got drunk on a Sunday and said, ‘Let’s build a brewery.’”
The three brothers started out brewing six kegs a week, and within six months of opening the brewery, they were getting orders from all over Louisiana.
“We were the third brewery in the state,” Knott said. “All the (business) models said it wouldn’t work because we were too far from a major metropolitan area. Now, there are 13 breweries in Louisiana.”
Bayou Teche Brewery currently brews six different beers year round and six more on a seasonal basis. Year round beers include LA-31 Bière Pâle, LA-31 Boucanèe and LA 31 Passionné. One beer is brewed to complement crawfish, and another one uses honey from Bernard’s Apiaries in Breaux Bridge while the Bayoust beer uses buckwheat from Germany and corn from Louisiana. The brewery has won five silver medals at the World Beer Championship, and the Loup Garou beer was recently named best beer in the state by Microsoft’s web site MSN.com.
Bayou Teche Brewery beer can be purchased at most major grocery stores in the area, with the exception of Wal-Mart, and products are also sold in Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Quebec. The brewery will also make a 100-mug batch of beer brewed especially for the Experience Louisiana festival in October.
“The beers lubricate your French talking muscle,” Knott said, laughing.
In addition to complementing Cajun culture and food and using French names for beers, the brewery also conserves water and helps the environment.
“There is lots of water used in the brewing process,” Knott said. “I thought, ‘There has to be a better way to dispose of wastewater.’”
With the help of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the Louisiana State University Agriculture Center, the brewery was able to develop a natural, wetlands system for its waste water. The first of the three ponds in the system is where most of the solids from the wastewater settles. The second pond is planted with cattails and native grasses and is tested quarterly.
“Sometimes the water in the second pond comes up cleaner than drinking water in Houston,” Knott said.
The third field is used to farm crawfish to cook for family and work events as well as taste test new beers. Tours of the brewery are available, and there is live music at the facility every Saturday.
“Next time we can have the (Rotary) meeting at brewery – I have way more beer than I brought today,” Knott said.