On a brew day in June, Kris Carpenter was on the floor. She was a human ruler in pink rain boots, stretched out between two metal brewing vats. Above her, co-owner and co-brewer Amber McCullough looked on, estimating vessel diameter from Carpenter’s height. The women improvised. They Googled equations. They tied a string to a cup and used it as a dipstick. The women of Lass Haüs Ales were quick on their feet, brewing largely on their own as the finer points of a brewing contract dissolved. The arrangement once offered extra man power, a grain mill, and canning, but the women managed without.
“Our science is dead-on, y’all!” said McCullough. She smiled at the gravity, or the measured potential for alcohol, in the sample she took.
“People are going to think we don’t brew when you say ‘contract,’ said McCullough later. They brew. In America, only 2.9% of breweries are owned exclusively by women, according to research from the Brewers Association. In Austin, Lass Haüs Ales are the only all-woman-owned and all-woman-brewed beer. Between January and April of this year, Lass Haüs beers went on tap in 15 bars across Austin and beyond. This despite having no brewery of their own.
Lass Haüs beers are punchy and flavorful. The women have a penchant for Belgians and assertively feminine naming. The Main Piece, a Belgian-style double saison, is emblematic. “Once you get it in someone’s mouth, they usually like it,” said McCullough.
The Damsel, Walk of Shame, and Aristocratic Mistress are, respectively, a Belgian dubbel, a Belgian saison sour, and a kind of doppelbock.
June’s brew day would yield the latest in a series of collaboration beers Lass Haüs created this past summer: a creamy ginger peach saison called G-Spot, made alongside Becca Bollinger of the East Austin Hotel. The saison’s ABV comes in at 6.5%, and while it’s not itself an especially strong offering of the style, craftbeeraustin.com owner Pam Catoe told us later that “[Lass Haüs does] typically make pretty high-alcohol, strong beers.”
Ordinarily, the women brew alone, though McCullough keeps her 18-year-old dog, Fifty, close by. Lass Haüs wants to own a brewery alone, too, a move that might save them from the kind of landlord disputes faced by Austin’s now-shuttered Thirsty Planet brewery. Other recent closures include Circle Brewing, Adelbert’s, and 4th Tap.
“They’ve been smart about keeping it small. Going with micro distribution has been a smart way to get their product out to the market while they look for a space,” said Catoe.
Starting Out
McCullough and Carpenter met in 2013. If their dreams aligned, so did their pasts, tied to West Texas towns. Carpenter is a born-and-raised Austinite, but some of her Polish Catholic family still lives in Yorktown, where cows roam their land. (Carpenter became a vegetarian after making friends with said cows.) After studying education at Texas State, the graduate taught fourth-graders as she struggled to pay off school debt. She took side jobs driving for Uber and bartending until accepting opportunities in more lucrative fields, where she would meet McCullough.
Between January and April of this year, Lass Haüs beers went on tap in 15 bars across Austin and beyond – this despite having no brewery of their own.
In Austin for 30 years, McCullough hails from the Panhandle town of Pampa. Her grandfather’s junk recycling rigs and her mother’s scrappy resourcefulness are reflected in the way McCullough sees herself. The universe rewards her, she told us, for hoarding potentially useful items like screws and wood. Old free cedar fence panels even line the Dive Garten, a backyard gathering space where Lass Haüs shares beers with friends. McCullough first home-brewed kombucha, selling SCOBY (fermentation starter) and envisioning profits flowing to disadvantaged populations. Eventually, she chose beer brewing as a more sound business model. When she met Carpenter over (512) brews, the two became fast friends and co-brewers.
McCullough spent so much time in taprooms talking about her dreams of having a brewery, she was eventually invited to just get on with it. “They told us to just bring some beer and they’d put it on draft,” she said. Eager to generate buzz and create a proof of concept to take to the bank for loan applications, she and Carpenter obliged.
As a team, Carpenter and McCullough moved from brewing on a 15-gallon system in McCullough’s backyard to a 15-barrel system almost overnight.
The smaller arrangement still stands at the invite-only Dive Garten. Lass Haüs experiments there and shares the results with friends. On the large 15-barrel system, the women learned to scale up fast.
“We had a master brewer walk us through a few times and we did some water brews,” said Carpenter of the larger system. They now brew alone in addition to collaboratively with taprooms like Pinthouse Pizza.
Heavy Lifting
Lass Haüs also kegs and delivers beer alone, which poses certain challenges. You could even say McCullough broke her back under the weight of her own beer, but it was a muscular issue. McCullough was in pain the first time we spoke back in May. An engineer by trade, she lost health insurance after being laid off and was nervous about her fate.
Unsolicited, if well-meaning, advice from men abounds. (McCullough said she’s also had encouraging and consistent male mentors in the industry.) “When I tell people I threw out my back … moving kegs around, they say there’s dollies and cranes. I say I have a crane and once I get it in a truck I have to slide it 2 feet from the front to the back. They’re like, ‘Oh, that’s easy.’ If I have to lift it 2 centimeters off the ground to wedge the dolly underneath that’s too much. Even guys who want to help still don’t understand where the limitations are.
“You better believe that when we have the brewery we’ll have all the things that are helpful to move things around. We’re also going to design using serving tanks as the primary vessels instead of kegs at the brewhouse,” said McCullough. “Up front, it seems a lot more expensive but over time the labor of filling a vessel versus all the kegs and washing the kegs and just the physical labor saving someone from moving all those kegs around [is important],” she said.
Banking on Beer
By October, the women could no longer prove a long history of income, further stalling their loan access plans. They’ll offer founding memberships for people who want to help support their mission and receive perks once a taproom opens. For now, they are weighing an invitation from a large Austin institution to tap their beer while also finding the time, money, and labor to grow to meet demand.
“We’re really low on beer,” said McCullough when we last spoke, but Lass Haüs is still participating in local festivals like last month’s Violet Crown Oktoberfest, with proceeds helping to benefit the community.
Violet Crown Oktoberfest Event Director Rob Hill invited Lass Haüs to participate, he explained, because “I would have wanted Lass Haüs represented just on the strength of the beers I’ve tried – their Drama Free IPA, and definitely the Low Key, a great Pilsner with interesting, but balanced and subtle citrus and pepper notes in it. But I also love that it is the work of two women, and we know that for most of history, brewers were predominantly women.”
So far no 180-pound keg has stopped production or delivery for either brewer working in what was previously thought to be a man’s world.
On Nov. 11, Lass Haüs will tap two IPAs brewed exclusively for East West Beer Fest as they continue to find their path to a permanent home. Keep up with them via their Instagram account, @lass_haus_ales.
This article appears in November 10 • 2023.