Barlow Brewing

Well, if you are reading this, I guess so.

I’m living up to my self-proclaimed moniker of the Lazy Blogger.

But no excuses.  

I took the family on a trip to Europe, and we visited Orval ruins and as well as the Cantillon brewery. 

I’ve been homebrewing, and I even had a beer and a cider make it to the final round of the Nation Homebrew Competition.

I got to use one of my recipes to brew a batch of beer at Starr Hill for our entry into the Great American Beer Festival’s Pro-Am competition.  As I type this post, it should almost be done fermenting and ready for some dry-hopping.  Let’s just say the same brewing principles apply, but there’s a big difference between brewing 6 gallons of beer and brewing 360 gallons of beer.

I’m in the IronBrewer competition, where a bunch of amazing homebrewers get together and test their brewing prowess and creativity by make beers with three assigned and disparate ingredients. (My round requires the use of centennial hops, vanilla beans and smoked malt.)

I’ve been tackling the new Citra hop, and a Black IPA, and the Leuven yeast strain with my homebrews. And let’s not talk about my continued obsession with making sour beers.

Those things ought to be great fodder for a few blog posts, huh?

I promise they will come.

After the Dominion Cup BJCP competition this weekend, I’ll get back on the horse.

So the New Year begins and so must the business of the, newly named, Emperor Norton Memorial Tasting Society.

This learned group is dedicated to tasting beers that are difficult to obtain in Central Virginia, or have been cellared into rarity.

The first meeting of the year will delve heavily into the works of Boulevard Brewery Company. The next meeting will probably return to one of the Tasting Society’s favorite breweries: Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales.

At this time, coherent notes are not expected to arise from these scholarly sessions.

The January 11, 2010 docket includes (but is not limited to):

Surly Bender (Oatmeal Brown)

Boulevard Saison (Saison)

New Glarus Wisconsin Belgian Red (Fruit Beer)

Boulevard Saison – Brett (Sour Saison)

Boulevard Long Strange Tripel (Tripel)

Goose Island Matilda (Belgian Strong Pale Ale)

Russian River Damnation (Belgian Strong Pale Ale)

Boulevard Harvest Dance (Wheatwine)

Boulevard The Sixth Glass (Quadrupel)

Surly Darkness (Russian Imperial Stout)

Brooklyn Black Ops 2008 (Bourbon Barrel Russian Imperial Stout)

BarlowBrewing’s Homebrewed Drunken Wendigo (Bourbon Barrel American Barleywine)

Three Floyds Behemoth (American Barleywine)

I went down to the Dominion Cup BJCP competition on August 29th with a few of my fellow homebrewers from the CAMRA club in Charlottesville, Va.  The Dominion Cup is the largest homebrew competition in Virginia, and it is run by the James River Homebrewers, which is the Richmond homebrew club.  The three of us were going to help out during the competition in three different roles, and it was my first real chance to see a BJCP judging in person.

The Cup happened at the Capital Ale House Downtown and took place in the Music Hall room behind beside the restaurant and bar.  It was intimate place to see a band, but it was big and roomy venue for a beer judging to go down.  It was a long and dark room with exposed brick walls and dark wood, but the judges were ready with flash lights in hand.

I was assigned to be a steward which basically entails making sure that the judges have everything they need to score and judge their assigned beers.  That means getting the table ready with a pitcher of water, crackers, cups, pens, a dump bucket, the appropriate forms, and any other items they might need.  That’s the easy part.  The interesting, and more challenging part, is keeping the paperwork orderly.  The judges are filling out Beer Scoresheets, and you are trying to keep those straight while juggling the Cover Sheets (to organize all the related papers with each entry) and the flight sheets which track the individual and agreed upon scores for each beer in that category.

The great thing about these competitions is that the beers are judged without knowing the brewer for each beer.  That’s important if you want real and honest feedback from the judges.  Now none of the judges that I met would have been anything less than honest in their reviews of the beers, but it really is hard to say that any among us wouldn’t be unconsciously influenced by knowing the brewer and our perceived notion of their brewing skills and reputation.  To avoid that, beers are separated into the appropriate BJCP guidelines, and they were all in 12 ounce, brown bottles without labels or marks on their caps.  Each bottle then gets a competition label conveying which style of beer it has been submitted to and its cryptic number, which is only linked back to the brewer info’s on a computer held by organizer of the competition.

So part job of the steward job is keeping all of the information together and organized so the right scores and feedback get to back the organizer and the homebrewer who made it.  That is the real bottom line in these competitions: getting quality feedback from experienced judges so you can make better beer and hone your craft.

Of course, the cool part for a steward is being able to listen in to the judges as they talk about each beer after they have thoughtfully filled out their sheets.  It is beer geeking at its best.  You can also taste along with them and compare your mental notes with the experts.  I worked the morning and afternoon sessions, and in the first I was assigned to one of the American Pale Ale tables and, being a popular category, that is all that those judges scored.  For the afternoon, I was assigned to the Porters table and that encompassed Brown Porters, Robust Porters and Baltic Porters, which can vary from each other in significant ways, but they are all still competing against each other in the Porter category.

I was very impressed by palates on the judges and their ability to pick out nuances out of the beers.  One of the huge obstacles in judging can just be taste fatigue.  Realistically, they are only having a few ounces of each beer, but after having a few ounces of 9 beers, my mouth started to get a little tired.  I could certainly drink more than that, and did afterwards, but it a challenge to keep your taste buds focused after wave after wave of beer.  I respect their ability to do so, because I don’t think I’m there yet.

Yeah, this is pretty much my only look.  It is all I have to work with.

Greg did some judging, so he got to see the competition from the other side of the table. 

Tom was a cellarman with Mark from the James River Club.  They had a good but, probably, an occasionally frantic time.   

After the second session was over, it was time for the Best of Show judging.  That was composed of the best beers from each category.  I’m not quite sure how the BOS judging works because it must be hard to compare a Flanders Red with an Oatmeal Stout with a Bohemian Pilsner, etc.  It must just be one of those blink moments where the heavens open up and a few beers just shine through.  

As you can tell from the picture above, it was show of colors and flavors.

In the end, it was a very successful trip for the CAMRA guys.  We got to see how a BJCP competition works, and the club walked away with 15 medals in the competition.  I was very happy to receive the inaugural Plato award, which is a “Brewer of the Year” award, for the most 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd place finishes.

Final results from the 2009 Dominion Cup: http://dominioncup.jrhb.org/DomCupWinners2009.php

Some takeaways:

It looks like putting on a competition of this size is a ton of work.  The Dominion Cup had 366 entries which is very impressive and a big jump from the previous year.  One of the things my club wanted to check out was the feasibility of putting on a competition of our own in the coming years.  We now know that it will be just as difficult as we had imagined.  I have to give lots of credit to the James River Homebrewers for making it all look so seemless and easy.  We know it couldn’t have been, but they did a great job.

The feedback  sheets were good, illuminating and I’m honestly still plowing through those.  Often, the hardest part about feedback is deciphering the handwriting of the judges. (Hint: Cursive = bad.)  Overall, the beers I thought would do well did, and the beers I thought were average, or off style, did just ok.  My highest scores were for my “Fritz the Cat” (Gumballhead clone) American Wheat beer, which scored a 43, and my “Cleopatra Jones” American Brown Ale, which scored a 39.  My lowest were my 27 for “Up on Cripple Kriek” (Kriek Fruit Lambic) which was one of my first sour beers and it really didn’t get sour enough, and my Cherry Waterloo, which scored a 28.5 and it was the subpar side of a split batch of Berliner Weisse.

And it was interesting to see how my younger beers fared.  I submitted an American Barleywine that was only 9 months old, and it took 3^rd place.  And that same 9-month old barleywine, that I aged a little longer on bourbon and oak cubes, took 2^nd place.  Also, my Flanders Red, which is a beer that often doesn’t find its stride until about 18 months, got a 2^nd place medal and it was only about 4 months old.  I’m pretty geeked to see how these beers will taste when they start to hit their peak.

The big surprise, for me, was seeing my entries in the Spice/Herb/Vegetable Beer category do so well.  My Chai Milk Stout (no clever name) got a 1^st place medal, and my Bombay the Hard Way Coconut Curry Hefeweizen got 3^rd place.  (Which is very surprising because I thought that was a failed experiment, but it just need time to age and mellow.) That was very cool, and further fuels my mad scientist method to brewing.  (I should be posting something soon about my Sweet Potato Ale brew day, too.)

Once again, it was a great time, and we look forward to competing again next year.  The club is now more determined than ever to get some of our members BJCP certified.

August 22^nd, 2009 was the date of the Brew Ridge Trail Music Festival, and I wasn’t quite sure if I was going.  Clouds and rain were all over the weather maps, and there was some sideways rain hitting my house making me rethink a day outside with music and beer.

Despite common sense, I packed up the family and drove down to the Brew Ridge Trail Music Festival which was being hosted by the Devil’s Backbone Brewery in Nelson County, Va.   Central Virginia is wine country, but the brewers are quickly catching up.  The “Brew Ridge Trail” refers a group  of breweries, and now a cider maker, that are mostly west and south of Charlottesville that could be toured in one day. (a map of the trail)  The Devil’s Backbone physically hosted the festival behind their brewpub and Starr Hill, South Street, Blue Mountain and Albemarle Ciderworks brought their brews and ciders along, too.

Despite some ugly rain during most of the trip out to DB, it cleared up and slowly turned into a pretty day.

The admission tickets was pretty reasonable with the cost being $15 in advance, or $20 at the gate, for adults, $10 for kids 3-14, and kids under 3 were free.  Where the cost of the gig could have really piled up was the $5 per ticket price for beers.  But, for some reason, the cider was cash only.

The breweries rolled out their year-round brews, and there weren’t any surprises in their line-ups.  Since I was familiar with all of the great beers by Starr Hill and South Street, I mostly concentrated on the beers I had not tried from the others.  Stand outs, for me, were Blue Mountain’s ÜberPils Imperial Pilsener (smooth and slightly grainy) and the Devil’s Backbone’s Fresh Hop ale (which I could only get by going inside the actual brewpub, but it gave me the hop fix that I wasn’t going to get anywhere else that day.)

I wish I could tell you a little bit about Albemarle Ciderworks, I only had a sip of my wife’s cider and I’m not well versed in that beverage.  It seemed dry and refreshing, and there was definitely still some apple lingering in the taste.

I can tell you the line for beers was barely existent and the beers were cool and poured to order.

The bands, mostly of the alt-country and nouveau bluegrass variety, were great and the Infamous Stringdusters put on a long and high energy set.

The Sons of Bill began to rock the crowd as night fell and taps were turned off.

All and all it was a fun gig, but it definitely felt more focused on the music than the beers.  There were families in attendance (I brought mine), and there was nice tent set up for kid crafts, but the focus was the stage and the bands planning.

I will be really interested to see how this gig evolves next year.  The bands were great, but it there was a lot of space for more adult and kid activities, and perhaps even more vendors.  I imagine this is typical for first year festivals.

I’d also love to see some of the breweries bring there more unusual and seasonal beers to the gig.  Starr Hill brought their Festie Oktoberfest beer, but it would have been cool to see some more seasonal, one-offs or pilot batches on tap.  It might be a great place to test these beers outside the madness of larger brewfests with the actual brewers on hand for feedback and praise.

It was a fun first year gig, and I’m glad the weather cooperated.  I am looking forward to the Brew Ridge Trail Music Festival becoming bigger and better.

And so Beergate is upon us.  And why should be care is a natural question.

Much has been made about the invitation from President Obama to Henry Louis Gates and Sgt. James Crowley to meet over a beer.  And just as much hype has been heaped upon the beer choices that these men have made.

The choices for this historical summit are:

President Obama: Bud Light

Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. : Red Stripe

Sgt. James Crowley: Blue Moon.

As a craft beer fan, none of these beers stand out stand out as particularly good beers.  Well, in the case of Red Stripe and BL, the choices are downright bad.

But what is important about beer for this conversation?  Beer is still considered the beverage of the common man.  Metaphorically, we still call blue-collar workers “Joe Six-Pack”, although the Republicans may have ruined that for all of us. 

Beer is still the drink you reach for at a backyard barbeque, or at a baseball game.  Wine and liquor are a bit more formal.  You break those out for special occasions or structured events.  Beer, in this context, is about three men sitting around a table and working through differences.  Stepping beyond ceremony and just hashing things out like neighbors.

I think beer is the perfect choice for this situation and the environment that Obama is trying to create.  Obliviously, he could have chosen a much better beer than Bud Light, and frankly it behooves his images to move up to a Dale’s Pale (in a red, white and blue can no less) or a Sam Adams (brewer AND patriot) beer.

During the presidential race between Bush and Gore, polls pointed to George W. as the candidate that the typical voter would like to have a beer with.  I imagine that Bush would pick something as disappointing as an AB product, too.  I know they are human beings, but I think we all have to right to expect a little more of our presidents.  Certainly one of Obama’s advisors could have suggested something from his hometown of Chicago.  Maybe a nice beer from Goose Island.

I think Obama is a smart guy, but he isn’t the common man.  And, to be clear, I don’t really want him to be.   

It is common is for candidates running for office to be sorted into the “wine track” for upscale voters and a “beer track” for the blue-collar voters.  I’m naïve enough to hope that there is a common space between those two tracks that lends itself to some great craft beer. 

You want someone smarter than yourself to run the country, but the wine track guy is not someone I would immediately understand.  Seeing Obama at a White Sox game drinking something that actually deserves to be savored would actually speak to me.

Word is from Musings Over a Pint, that the World Beer Festival in Richmond has been postponed until the Spring of 2010.  That is disappointing, but it didn’t sound like things were coming together the way they had hoped.

In the meantime, Durham is still on for October.

What more is there to say?  It is American.  It is Badass.  It is Redneck.  It is a lager.  All of those things are fine individually, but only Kid Rock could pull them together to make magic.  And how could the label NOT look like a belt buckle?

Fans that go to Kid Rock’s shows in Comerica Park on July 17 and 18 will get to try it first. 

Isn’t going to the show in the first place punishment enough?  I hope they have staffed the medical tents at the concert appropriately.  They should look like M*A*S*H units before the opening act is done.

I think Jamie Foxx put it best when he said “let’s stop all of this white-on-white crime.”

This event has been postponed until spring 2010.  The latest post about the World Beer Festival – Richmond.

I heard about this last month, but I figured it would be worth a post if you hadn’t heard about the World Beer Festival – Richmond that is being put on by All About Beer magazine on August 29, 2009.

According to their website, they’ve hosted 16 beer festivals in North Carolina, and now they are setting up an event in Virginia.  The details are pretty sparse right now, and none of the breweries have been identified.  All we know is that it will be on Brown’s Island on 8/29/09, the tickets will go on sale sometime this month, and there will be two sessions with the general admissions tickets running $40 a piece and the VIP tickets will be $75. (I’ll hold off judgment of the VIP price until I know more specifics about the bells and whistles of that ticket.)

It will be nice to have a big festival come to semi-central VA, and I look forward to seeing what breweries sign up to be part of this gig.  I’ve heard the Brown’s Island can get hot and buggy during the summer, but that is nothing I know from experience. 

The only downside for me is that James River Homebrewers Club is holding their Dominion Cup homebrew contest that same day, and I’ve volunteered to steward in that competition.  It should be a very busy day of celebrating commercial and homebrewed beer in the commonwealth, and I am looking forward to it.

I’ll let you know more as it trickles down to me….

The night before the SAVOR gig was a tasting and panel discussion billed as the Lupulin Reunulin.  As I mentioned in the previous post, the panel for the evening was Tomme Arthur from Lost Abbey Brewing Co., Vinnie Cilurzo from Russian River Brewing Co., Rob Tod from Allagash Brewing Company, Adam Avery from Avery Brewing Company, Sam Calagione from Dogfish Head Craft Brewery and Bill Madden from Vintage 50/Mad Fox Brewing.  In past, I think some of these were east vs. west coast extreme hop challenges, but this one seemed to be a straight forward tasting with a lot of time for banter between peers who were also good friends.

I’m not normally comfortable reviewing beers from tastings and beer festivals because it is hard to take notes and there are so many beers being poured that it is hard to do any of them justice.  But I tried to take some notes on my iPhone and, well, the alcohol and my Fred Flintstone fingers made that a show of its own.  Not to mention that the flight was 16 beers wide.  But here are the cliff notes for the gig.  It was a really, really good time and definitely an event that craft beer deserves.   

Right before the Reunulin started at the RFD, the brewers slowly took the stage and we were only missing Vinnie who was running late because of travel/flight complications.  Sam began to work the room early by going from table to table saying hello and shaking hands.  He’s a charming guy, it was a nice gesture and I expected no less of him.

(Yeah, the picture is missing Adam and Bill.  These events don’t come with steel bladders….)

The first beer we tried was Dogfish Head’s Festina Pêche.  This is probably my favorite seasonal from DFH, but I might be in the minority.  I am not a huge fan of fruit being used in beers unless they are sour ales, and this is in the style of a Berliner Weisse.  I’ve homebrewed a Berliner Weisse and, when done correctly (not that I did), they have a thirst quenching tartness and taste a little bit like alcoholic white grape juice.  In Europe these are usually sweetened with some sort of fruit syrup when served.  DFH added the peaches for you from concentrate and they come across firmly without being overwhelming and cloying.  This is a light, dry and perfectly tart session beer that is made for a hot summer afternoon.

Next up was Tomme’s Hot Rocks which is a stein lager done under the Port Brewing name in collaboration with Tonya Cornett of Bend Brewing Company.  This not a style of beer, but rather an old fashion method of making beer.  Back before they could direct fire a wort to boil it, they would superheated rocks and then drop them into the kettles and that would cause the wort to boil.  I used to love the Stone beer made by, the now defunct, Brimstone brewing in Maryland.  The stones would cause the wort to boil and sugars would caramelize on the rocks. They would then reintroduce the rocks back into the beer after fermentation and they would release these wonderful toffee flavors.  Tomme and Tonya’s beer was a nice malty dark lager with the same notes of sweetness and toffee.  A very nice and interesting beer.

It has to be mentioned that, at this point, the trash talk was increasing with each beer.    For every thoughtful remark about the art and the industry (like Tomme talking about a customer’s willingness to pay for the “the experience” in the bottle), there were equally illuminating pearls of wisdom about life in general (Like how you shouldn’t put accountants in charge of hiring strippers.  That is one service that you really shouldn’t cut corners on, or actively looking for bargains in.) 

Sam is the most out spoken brewer in the group, which is great, but it also makes him the target of a lot of jabs.  West coast brewers are known for their love of hops and Sam was quick to ask why all the west coast guys have to have gigantic hopbacks.  What were they compensating for?  Tomme was quick to ask Sam if his brewing style was compensating for the size of the state of Delaware.

Next up was Avery’s Brabant.  This is small batch that is, in essence, a Baltic porter fermented with two strains of Brettanomyces.  If memory serves, and it usually doesn’t after that sort of night, the strains were from Orval and Fonteinen.  This one seems to have mellowed over the last few months since I reviewed the Brabant.  It was still plenty funky, with horse blanket and baby diaper notes, but less extreme.  This one is becoming very balanced.

The next beer was from Bill, of Madd Fox brewing, from the stash he brewed at Vintage 50.  It was called the Molotov Cocktail, and he described it as a stealth beer that they rarely mention and just secretly put on draft.  It was a big piney DIPA with a lot of grassy notes. 

The next one was brought by Rob and it was Allagash’s Confluence.  The initial story behind this one is a common one for the style.  This started as a saison and the yeast, as saison yeast often does, pooped out a little early.  They let it set for a few days and it magically began to ferment again.  This sounds like a good thing, but it turns out, after some later lab testing, that it had attracted some brettanomyces.  For us, that was a great thing.  This one was tart, funky, floral with touches of melon and apple.

Vinnie popped into the RFD just in time to introduce us to the Russian River Blind Pig IPA.  This beer had a big hop aroma, but the bittering was very, very smooth.  There was lots of pine flavor, but the resins kept everything in synch.  It was amazingly balanced.

The next beer was an off-the-wall one from Sam of Dogfish Head that he called the Hoppy Onion.  I’m still not sure on the style, but it tasted like a Rye IPA.  He mentioned a multitude of unusual spices, like fenugreek, and smelled like a marble rye onion bagel.  It was really strange, but very likeable.  Somehow, I tasted a little Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce, too.  I don’t know if it is marketable, but it is a very bold experiment.

Lost Abbey’s Carnevale was next which was a bretted, blonde saison.  This one was comparatively mild, but refreshing.  It was lightly acidic and spicy, with a faint echo of American hops.

Adam broke out the Avery Maharaja DIPA at this point.  The hops on this are demanding, and the simcoe aroma and flavor is amazing.  There was a backnote astringency that hit me as harsh, but these big IPAs are not about subtly.

The next one came from Rob of Allagash, and it was the Hugh Malone.  Rob told a great story at this point about the hoops that the brewers have to go through to get their beer’s names and labels approved by the government.  There was a screw up in the process to get consent  to use the name “Hugh Malone” and they mistakenly got permission to sell a beer called “Huge Melons”.  Although, according to him, there were no immediate plans make such a beer, he seemed very happy to have that in his back pocket.  The Hugh Malone was a big Belgian ale with lots of American hops added throughout the boil, as well as a bit of dry hopping.  It was fruity with a little lingering grassiness.  It had that definite tripel feel.

Next up was Bill’s Vintage 50 Head Knocker which he described as a golden barelywine on cask.  This one was hard to nail down, but someone across the table from me smartly pointed out that it more closely resembled a biere de garde.   It was malty, but a big sweetness followed that made it hard to enjoy.

Tomme broke out the Port Brewing 3^rd Anniversary Pale.  If there were hops in this one, they had faded and left behind a sweet, Belgian strong ale.  Lots of candy sweetness and tropical fruits.

Vinnie then brought out his Russian River Consecration ale.  This was their strong dark ale aged in cab sav barrels with currants for 6 months.  This was a beast of sourness, and the vinegar flavor was huge, but very likeable.  The wine character was apparent, too, but not devastating.  This was amazing beer and probably the big winner of the night for me.

 
As we got close to the end of the gig, Sam broke out the Dogfish Head Palo Santo Marron.  This has become a regular offering from DFH, and it’s a got a long interesting story behind it.  I had had this before and it is big brown ale with big wood, vanilla and brown sugar character.   

Everyone was pretty loose at this point, and Ken Grossman from Sierra Nevada came to the “stage” and talked about the early years of craft beer.  Listening to his stories about trying the beers from Anchor Brewing back in the seventies and how they inspired him to start SN was very cool and a rare treat.  Clearly, everyone in the room had a lot of respect for Grossman and appreciated Sierra Nevada’s role in the craft brew movement both then and now.

The next to last beer was Adam Avery’s Mephistopheles stout.  This was a huge imperial stout with crushing amounts of smoke and bittersweetness.  There was alcohol warming that shot through despite my downward spiraling senses.  It was 16% alcohol and so full of flavors that it had to be respected for its absurdity.  A monstrosity of indulgence.

The final beer was Bill’s Vintage 50 Wee Heavy from 2002.  It was the last keg in existence, and I think it was in the style of a scotch ale.  Bill said that this had been boiled for 6 hours, which sent a series of head-scratchings though the room.  To make fun of DFH’s IPAs, someone quickly pointed out that 6 hours was like 360 minutes to Sam.

At this point, I had a few parting thank-yous and goodbyes to the brewers, who were all very cool.  Tomme was especially patient and kind in dealing with feeling-no-pain me. In retrospect, the beers with dinner beforehand may have been a bad idea.

This was a great event, and I would definitely be interested in attending this sort of gig again.  It was the highlight of the weekend and, even if they repeated the same beers, I’d come back for the smack talk, the camaraderie that is apparent amongst these brewers, and the affirmation of all that is good about craft beer.

I missed the SAVOR event last year, and so I jumped at the chance to make it this time around.  The $95 ticket price was steep, but as a beer lover there are few opportunities to try craft beer that does not a have a distribution network on the east coast.  And the chance to meet some of those brewers was a huge bonus, as well, while inching closer and closer to beer heaven two ounces at a time.

I bought my tickets during the presale put on by the AHA, but it slipped my mind for the first 24 hours and two of the salons I wanted to get into had sold out during that time.  One was “Cult Beer from California” Tomme Arthur from Lost Abbey Brewing Co. and Vinnie Cilurzo from Russian River Brewing Co.  That hurt a little because they were two of the breweries that we cannot get here in Virginia, and ones that I was most interested in hearing speak.  

I’m honestly not sure what my expectations were for the SAVOR gig.  I was focused on the beers, but it was obvious from the website that they put a lot of thought into the pairing of craft beer and food.  I appreciate that, but I have to explain in advance that one of the few beer and food tastings that I’ve attended was put on by Garrett Oliver from Brooklyn Brewing.  His pairing of Brooklyn’s Cuvee D’Achouffe, spiced with Spanish thyme, with vichyssoise was amazing, and my taste buds exploded with spicy, herbal notes.  Both the saison and the soup made each other better, and something very different than they would have been alone.  The same sort of thing had happened just before when he paired his Brooklyner Weisse with a baby spinach salad with walnuts, feta, bacon, cherries and a weisse vinaigrette.  It was amazing, but I digress.

A few weeks before SAVOR, I heard about a tasting to happen the night before dubbed the “Lupulin Reunulin” at the RFD in Washington, DC.  In the past, it seemed like these were playful challenges between east coast and west coast brewers, but this one was more of a straight up tasting with a panel of brewing rock stars.  The panel for the evening was Tomme from Lost Abbey, Vinnie from Russian River, Rob Tod from Allagash Brewing Company, Adam Avery from Avery Brewing Company, Sam Calagione from Dogfish Head Craft Brewery and Bill Madden from Vintage 50/Madd Fox. 

I felt the beers and the banter would be well worth coming up a day early, so I did.  That was a great evening, and the highlight of the weekend.  But I’ll review that in my next blog post.

So, I showed up to the Nation Building Museum with a friend 15 minutes before the doors opened, and the line to get in was already a little absurd. 

For some reason, everyone was being let in through one set of doors on F street which I’m sure was a security precaution.  But the line got quickly out of hand and they had to open up the doors on the other side of the building to expedite the entering.  Of course, they broke the lines into two pieces just after me, so I got the worst of both lines.  That was a show, but line moved pretty quickly and we were inside by the time the beers started to pour at 7:30. 

The crowd was a little different from what I’m used to seeing at a beer event.  SAVOR urged people to wear “Business casual to cocktail party attire. Dress to Impress!” That gave the crowd a little bit of a different vibe.  It felt a little more like it as a big cocktail party or the lobby of a broadway show.  But there wasn’t much impressing going on…

Once inside, the National Building Museum is a nice venue, but the number of people there made it feel really claustrophobic very quickly.  There wasn’t always a lot of room between tables, and lines going to each brewer were very organic and, therefore, chaotic.

I would have liked to have hit every table but, at ~70 breweries, trying them all would have been folly as well as a waste of my sobriety and taste buds.  I made a decision before that night that I wasn’t going to try any beer that I had had before, or could easily get where I lived.  The beers I wanted to try were there, but not always easily found.  I had to refer to the program many times to look up the breweries I wanted to check out, and then I had to circle those tables like a shark to find who I was looking for.  This made my trip around the place pretty inefficient, but I muddled through.

The one salon I had a ticket for was the “Craft Beer and Cheese Pairing Taste Off!” 

I sat between a friend and Jeff Bearer from Craft Beer Radio.  It was great to meet him in person, and he was kind and knowledgeable.  The panel included Greg Koch from Stone Brewing, Greg Wallace from Left Hand Brewing Company and 2 wine/food/beer journalists.  Although it was a beer and cheese pairing, there was some chocolate, too, but I found it a bit granular inside like the sugars had not quite dissolved.  The maytag cheese was good, though.  From best to, well, not the best for me the pairings went 1) Deschutes’ Dissident, 2) Stone’s Ruination, 3) Allagash’s Black and 4) Left Hand’s Smoke Jumper.  The panel had good chemistry, but it went on far too long and none of the pairings really blew me away.  Greg was fun and amusing, and embodies what Stone is about but, outside of that and getting to try The Dissident, the whole thing felt like an hour lost away from the main floor.

Back out of the floor, the food was just…… boring.  It felt catered in the most pejorative way.  The 4 or 5 types of sliders sounded interesting, but ended up being mostly bread and all tasting the same.  The skewers were lifeless,  and I cannot remember anyone actually standing in one place with food in one hand and a beer in the other actually paring the two with any seriousness.  The oyster bar was a huge exception to this, though.  The line for that was obscene, worse than the best breweries, but the oysters I had were big, meaty and flavorful.

Perhaps I was spoiled by the Brooklyn dinner, but none of the pairings from that night hit me with that any of profundity.  If I was there for beer AND food, I would have been disappointed.  But I was there for the beer and the brewers brought their “A” game.

I loved trying Lost Abbey’s Cuvee Tomme, The Bruery’s Saison Rue, Russian River’s Consecration, Deshutes’ Dissident and Mirror Pond Pale Ale, and Great Lakes’ Dortmunder Gold.  Jeff was kind enough to score me samples of DFH’s Theobroma (which I am still getting my head around) and Sam Adam’s Utopias (surprisingly good, and as strong as you imagine.) I liked the Angel’s Share, but I tried it way too late in the evening.  After hours of sampling relatively strong beers, ending it with a barleywine aged in bourbon barrels was a bit too much. But that was my fault.  I look forward to trying that again at the beginning of an evening, or curled up by a fire.

Another big highlight was trying Pliny the Elder, which it seems we all pronounce incorrectly.  Despite the amazing amount of hops that goes into this beer, it was smooth and drinkable.  And the fact that my first Pliny was poured for me by Vinnie himself was priceless.

The beers were amazing, and the brewers were kind and patient.  It was great to see and meet them in person, but having a 15 second conversation with them diminishes the real value of having them there in the first place.  I’d love to have had some discussions about wild yeast and wood aging, but it just wasn’t practical.

It was a good event for the beer side, but the food was lacking.  And frankly that wouldn’t have bothered me if the event was just spun as just a celebration of craft beer.  But since they went to such great lengths to push the pairings aspect and they never even listed the beers without having the food pairings on their site, they clearly came up short on that goal.

Will I go again?  Maybe.  I really had a good time, but they need to improve their food pairings and bring in some real chefs, or just simply not make pairings the focus of the event. The price of admission was steep, but worth it for someone who was eager to try so many beers that he had only been able to hear about before.  Next year, thanks to this event, that list will be much smaller, so the ways they improve SAVOR will be much more important to me and my wallet than just the beer line-up.

I would go to another Lupulin Reunulin event in a heartbeat.  We’ll see about SAVOR in 2010.