Zero One Ale House Begins Brewery Expansion

Diners packed into Zero One Ale House on Monday at lunchtime, several standing on the ever-growing wait list while others ate; the dining space halved due to ongoing construction.

Setting up shining silver tanks in the room to the right of the entrance, two men worked on assembling equipment for the Zero One brewery, a six-year dream of ale house owner Erik Zobel, who launched the beer-themed pub in March 2013.

The brewery was always a part of Zobel’s vision for Zero One, he said, but financial constraints on the opening limited the establishment to an eatery with a vast craft beer assortment. Now, with nearly three successful years behind him, he’s ready to expand.

“The cool thing about this approach is that I was able to test the waters before the huge capital investment of brewing equipment and all that, you know? [I got] to see how craft beers around here would be received…[Before we opened] you couldn’t go to a restaurant or bar and find anything besides what the macro-brewers were trying to push,” he said.

Since opening, Zobel has kept some 80 plus beers in-house, 23 of which are on tap. Seasonal beers, such as pumpkin ales and “winter warmers”, are brought in on rotation; a continually changing card that features a few different types of brew for San Angelo's beer enthusiasts.

Noting the veritable lack of an establishment selling craft beer beyond the local liquor stores, Zobel said he was uncertain how his concept would sell, but has received great feedback.

“The response has been great,” he said. “I had very low expectations just because it’s west Texas, it’s 100 degrees for 100 straight days, and who’s going to want to drink a craft beer that isn’t light, refreshing and ice cold, you know? But not longer after we opened I would look around the restaurant and bar and I would just see a rainbow of colors on the tables and was just shocked by it.”

Architecture

Zobel grew up in and around food service, working in his mother’s restaurant. After high school, he went to college to receive his associate’s degree in hospitality management, part of which included hands-on labs in the school cafeteria, a student restaurant and a classical French restaurant.

“I ended up deciding I wanted to be an architect, but I worked in food service all the way through architecture school,” he explained. “It kind of gave me an opportunity to develop my skills further.”

Prior to opening Zero One, Zobel had never owned a restaurant or bar, nor had he worked in a management capacity. While he was studying, he worked in a seafood market in California, attending classes full-time at California Polytechnic University.

After graduation in 1993, he began working for an architecture firm, and by 2001 he began taking on his own contracts. In 2003, he officially moved out of the firm and opened his own office. A string of coincidences led him to San Angelo in 2004, he said.

Zobel continued to work as an architect through 2008, specializing in residential architecture, including townhouses, condominiums, custom homes, etc. Much of the work, he said, was done by telecommuting to California with a contractor with whom he had built up a relationship, however that came to an end as the financial crisis of 2008 hit.

“Architecture is in the building industry and I would argue that it’s the most impacted industry whenever there’s a recession, or a slow-down or a speed-up,” he said, “and it’s a rollercoaster ride. One of the most common things you hear from architects is, ‘I’m either too busy or not busy enough’…I would have periods where I would just have zero work and then I would have periods where I just had too much work. The stress of one versus the other is negligible.”

As business began to slow in 2008, Zobel began looking for something else to take on. With the steady stream of work from California drying up, he began to hash out ideas, until he ultimately ended up with a home brewing kit and hit on what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

Home Brew

“As fate would have it—I don’t remember what it was, what actually occurred that I thought, ‘I’m going to try brewing beer’—but the moment I tried brewing beer, I thought, ‘This is great. I want to make a career out of this,’” he said. “I just fell in love with it immediately and immediately just started working on how am I going to get this together.”

For $100, Zobel bought himself a home brewing kit and began to experiment with designing his own brands. He purchased books on brewing and read about the processes online, bottling a few varieties and entering them into competitions for the sake of getting feedback.

“I worked hard at it,” Zobel said. “I wasn’t just a guy that home-brewed just to have beer or be cool or to save money…I was doing it because I knew I wanted to do it as a professional… I entered every single beer that I can recall…into competition. The reason I did that wasn’t for vanity reasons or so that I could win a medal, but so I could learn. The great thing about entering competitions is that you have nationally-recognized judges drinking your beer and…they tell you what flaws you might have in your beer [and] what you might do to improve it…that was great. It was a great learning tool.”

Each time he returned from a competition, Zobel would work to improve the flaws the judges had noted in his beers in order to refine them. He estimates that it took him roughly a year and a half to perfect his technique, a long process of trial, error, heavy reading and correspondence.

“The ace in the hole, or the guy that I had in my back pocket the whole time, is a college buddy of mine, who is the head brewer at North Coast Brewing Company,” Zobel admits. “I was always honest with myself when I brewed beer…and I could tell if something was wrong…Sometimes there’s just something wrong and you can’t put your finger on it; you don’t know how to solve it or what equipment you need to solve it. So, I would bottle a couple of my beers and send them to Pat Broderick, head brewer at North Coast…and he’d be like, ‘Ok, here’s what you have to do.’”

Zobel estimates that there are roughly 2,400 licensed brewers in the U.S. and North Coast Brewing Company is in the top 50 by volume, he said. When Broderick sent back recommendations, Zobel would purchase the equipment needed to tweak the beer and get rid of the flaws.

Now that he’s got a handle on his technique, Zobel says he’s working on recipe design. Some of the beers he’s brewed in the past will be the first featured on the menu card. In the coming months, he said, he’ll be brewing experimental batches on the same home kit he started with, while serving the refined brews to customers in Zero One.

World-Class Beer

The equipment for the brewery came in on Monday, and Zobel says his system will hold 15 kegs or 232 gallons. He can only brew one batch at a time, but would ultimately like to have three or four on tap at any given time, while constantly working on new flavor profiles and experimental brews.

One of the first will be a rye pale ale, he said, however the name for the beer is still a work in progress. The alcohol content is fairly high at roughly 6.4 percent (Bud Light is 4.2 percent), and Zobel said he’s entered the beer into competitions in the past.

“It’s actually a little bit high in alcohol to be categorized as a pale ale,” he said. “It’s somewhere in no man’s land…This beer, it’s got all of the characteristics of a pale ale. It’s going to be hoppy. I’m using kind of a spicy hop that works well with the tinge of the rye. I feel they’re very complimentary, and this is a beer that I’ve brewed probably three times at home. It doesn’t score particularly well in competitions because it doesn’t fit into a style category…’Technically, very good beer, fun to drink, however, not to style’, and they mark huge points of for ‘not to style.’”

Zobel hasn’t yet set a definitive opening date for the brewery, but started construction in October and hopes to be able to start brewing his first batch in mid-December. The opening is dependent upon equipment delivery, inspection and “buttoning up”, he said, including painting and an instructor who will show him the ins and outs of the new set up.

“You’ve got to brew the beer, then you’ve got to ferment the beer, then you’ve got to condition the beer and then the beer’s ready to drink,” he explained. “So there’s still another few more weeks after that. Beer’s not going to be drinkable until maybe the first of the year, so I’m thinking mid-January we’ll do a grand opening.”

For the grand opening, Zobel plans to release two beers. He said he’ll also likely start selling the experimental batches to gauge customer response.

“I grew up drinking Budweiser,” he said, mentioning a poster hanging in Zero One with a circle diagram of all the different kinds of beer. “Way down off of this branch, way down over here is American light lager. That’s where you are, and here’s what’s available. People pigeonhole their brains. The gamut of possibilities in beer is enormous.” He said he’d like to show people what else is out there.

Currently, Zobel is on a “crazy Belgian kick,” he said. He admits it took a while for him to warm up to those varieties, but he enjoys the dimension and layers of flavor in those beers.

Ultimately, he’d like to design his own Belgian white beer, as well as a winter warmer, a golden ale, and virtually every other beer type out there, he said. In the near future, however, he’ll be working on creating quality beer with quality ingredients and honing his skills on his new equipment.

“If you put San Angelo water in your beer, it’s going to taste worlds different than if you put filtered water…That kind of separates the men from the boys,” Zobel said. “That’s the kind of thing we’re going to be working on. I don’t have a lot of experience…but eventually, I plan to be at a point where I’m doing world-class beer, and I won’t stop until I get there.”

Zero One Ale House is located at 20 W. Beauregard. For more information, visit their website.