…and into the ski lodge. Bruce and I will once again be working the Rohrbach Brewing Company booth this Saturday at the Holiday Valley Beer and Wine Festival, at Elicottville, NY’s Holiday Valley Ski Resort.
We had a blast last April, when we did Holiday Valley’s Rites of Spring festival. This one should be bigger and badder. We will try to conduct ourselves with class and decorum, but we will probably fail.
-Mark
“I wish they had as much respect for beer in Belgium as they do here in America.” Said Gumer Santos in pleasantly accented English. As Head Brewer for Belgium’s Rochefort Trappist Brewery, Santos addressed us as part of a four-expert panel on Belgian beer.
Rochefort’s Gumer Santos, being affable
The fact that a Belgian brewer had flown across the ocean to join us, and the fact that there was an actual panel discussion at all, separated the Beer Advocate Belgian Beer Festival from every other beer fest I’ve worked or attended. Normally, this type of event can be counted on to do three things: give regional brewers a chance to demo their products, (ideally) make a profit for the host, and get frat boys trashed. The BA fest offered a refreshing dose of actual beer education that backed up the mantra of Beer Advocate founders Jason and Todd Alstrom: Respect Beer.
The Alstroms, waffling for the camera
The event hall is very good for beer festivals: a cavernous, circular room originally built to house a giant wraparound mural of the Battle of Gettysburg. Smart limitation of ticket sales allowed a still considerable throng easy access to seating, rest rooms, and the brewers’ tables. At no time did the brewers seem crushed under the sampler glass-waving press of humanity evident at many beer festivals. They had time to talk about their beers.
And what a lineup of beers! Belgians like Rochefort and Rodenbach were joined by some of the finest American interpretations of Belgian styles. Veritas 001 from California’s Lost Abbey was particularly impressive, leaving me rueful that it’s impossible to find in the beer mecca that is Rochester, New York.
sampling in the Cyclorama
But what impressed the most was the panel discussion. Santos was joined by Brewery Ommegang brewmaster Randy Thiel, Lost Abbey honcho Tomme Arthur. Dan Shelton of Shelton Brothers Distributing and Merchant du Vin’s Joe Lipa also sat on the panel. Some people would question my desire to sit there and let people drone on about making and selling beer with 25 breweries offering samples in the next room, but it was an enlightening, encouraging discussion, reaffirming that some of the top people responsible for the production an d sale of great beer shared my thoughts and ideas. Plus, some attractive volunteer chick kept bringing samples of Cantillon to my seat.
L-R: Joe Lipa, Gumer Santos, Randy Thiel, Tomme Arthur and Dan Shelton
I walked away impressed by the brewers’ commitment, not just to mimic a generic archetypal Belgian style, but to research the traditions and unique qualities of Belgium’s beers, incorporating their discoveries into their own brewing. Equally impressive (and a bit unexpected) was the passion the specialty distributors showed toward Belgian beer. It’s not just a numbers game; these guys are disciples, and that’s encouraging.
Belgium might be a dwindling market for its own specialty beer, and neighboring companies might be too myopically immersed in their own beer cultures to care, but the USA is the great savior, and vehicle of advancement, for these wonderful beer styles. Thanks to events like the BA Belgian Beer Festival, I can be confident that Americans’ knowledge and selection of Belgian beers can only grow.
-Mark
I had a great time in Boston at this festival. I learned a lot, got to hear the thoughts of key industry people, and drank a bunch of Belgian beer. We also roped the Head Brewer of Otter Creek into a mini pubcrawl which culminated in copious amounts of Murphy’s Stout.
The full writeup will be posted tomorrow. There’s a lot of material and I’m a bit limited on time.
-Mark
I’ll be heading on down to Boston this coming weekend for the Beer Advocate Belgian Beer Fest. It sounds like a lot of fun. My only reservation being the thousands of insufferable Red Sox fans strutting about, now that they’ve had their latest Hallmark moment. Maybe they’ll be in Colorado that weekend.
Anyway, the festival looks fantastic. We’ll be attending the first session, then hitting finer purveyors of beer around the city. I’m open to any recommendations for great beer bars.
-Mark
I can’t stress it enough. I am all about Oktoberfest. I was raised by a Bavarian mother. Hell, until I was ten, I thought the German word for ‘four’ was ‘G’suffa!’ I love both the festival and the festival’s beer.
One great thing about Oktoberfest is its influence on craft beer here in the USA. Each fall, a flood of Munich-inspired malty wonderfulness gushes forth from breweries all across the country. Some are very traditional, striving to match the Munich greats as closely as possible. Others benefit from the iconoclasm for which American craft brewers are becoming famous, resulting in beers that, while identifiable as Oktoberfest beers, take on characteristics all their own.
There are simply too many for one beer guy to try them all. Here are a couple favorites you can find on draft, in the Northeast, anyway:
Victory Festbier
Victory Brewing Company, Downingtown, PA
Festbier pays homage to the great brewing houses of Munich. It’s heavy on the malt, with noticeable caramel flavor, but not cloying. I got a touch of dryness in the finish, but very minor, certainly not verging on bitterness. This copper-colored, lightly foamy brew offers a substantial body without being too heavy. You can enjoy glass after glass, and isn’t that what a festival beer is for?
Samuel Adams Oktoberfest
Boston Beer Company, Boston, MA
Sam Adam’s mainline lager is a bit lacking (although it’s getting better), but they pull out the stops for this beer. Amber colored and luscious, Sam’s interpretation of Octoberfest beer has a toasty “liquid bread” quality imparted by the malt. It’s also slightly sweeter than the German Oktoberfest beers I’ve had. There’s enough of an alcoholic bite for this beer to match well with the cooling autumn air. Sam Adams’ excellent distribution means you can get a case of this practically anywhere where the majority of homes don’t have wheels. It’s a great grab to take to a Halloween party.
Saranac Octoberfest
F.X. Matt Brewery, Utica, NY
My wife and I stayed in and watched the movie Beerfest the other evening. I hadn’t intended to drink anything that night, but it proved impossible to watch without pounding beers. 7 Saranac Octoberfests later, the Americans had won.
I find Saranac Octoberfest a bit crisper and lighter in malt character than its counterparts from Victory and Sam Adams. You get some clove-like flavors along with the expected caramel. You also get a noticeably lighter body than the aforementioned, as well as a little more hop bitterness in the finish.
Incidentally, Hunahpu from the excellent homebrewing blog “The All-Grain Evangelist,” did not like the movie Beerfest as much as I did. What can I say? I love it when anyone takes the piss out of the Germans.
-Mark
Right, I’m back and sufficiently recovered to detail to you, dear reader, the happenings of this beer festival from the heart of the Finger Lakes.
Ithaca’s a weird town- a melange of rich, haughty legacy students, geeky post-grads, wannabe hippie artists, and grumpy working class townies. No group really seems to get along with the other, and the hippies tend to stand out most because of their garish dress and matted dreads.
Ithaca, NY, home of hippie nonsense
Hey, no problem. Craft beer and hippies go well together.
Of course, craft beer goes well with just about everybody, which is why I’ll never understand why festival promoters seem so surprised when thousands of people show up at their event. Starting at opening time, the entry wait for the festival stretched 45 minutes. Needless to say, not everyone got in. Although I heard nary a complaint, there seemed to be a clear disconnect between the amount of people expected and the amount of people who thronged Stewart Park.
Besides that, however, the festival was quite organized. The brewers were spread out into 5 individual tents, allowing plenty of mingling space in the center. Very capable volunteers were quick with the ice, helpful with requests, and fast on the uptake regarding the beer they were pouring. (NYS has this retarded new law in which brewery personnel can’t pour their own beer at festivals- you have to hand the job over to some kid who knows fuck-all about the beer).
Black Dog Brewing’s Nancy Carson, with a stuffed dog
The only complaint I could muster is the U-shaped table layouts within the tents created a catchment area which made it difficult to form lines for the individual brewery taps. A better solution would be to arrange the tents side by side in two paralell lines, allowing the individual queues to extend straight out instead of forming a confused, drunken clot of humanity.
Festival-goers evaluating the flavor characteristics of beer
My beer of the festival: Stone Ruination IPA, followed closely by Harpoon IPA. Besides tasting great, they also had the virtue of being located next to me.
Anyway, kudos to the guys from Ithaca Brewing for throwing one of the smoothest festivals I’ve attended. From Load-in to tear-down, they didn’t miss a beat, and everyone had a great time.
Except, maybe, that girl who was sitting on the grass behind a pile of her own sick. You really gotta watch that ruination IPA.
-Mark
The Ithaca Brew Fest is this weekend at Stewart Park in gorges Ithaca, New York. Bruce and I will, of course, be pouring for the Rohrbach Brewing Company.
Come on down, bring your thirst, and bring your tie-dye and hacky-sack too because Ithaca is the most hippie-wannabe town this side of Haight-Ashbury. They try waaaaay too hard. But, as this video shows, they have good hallucinogenic drugs.
-Mark
I won’t say that the Flour City Brewers Fest is a clear-cut example of how not to run a brewfest. John Urlaub, proprietor of the Rohrbach Brewing Company, has organized this event year after year, and it always goes off without a hitch (apart from the inevitable annual torrential downpour).
Two things, however, were different this year. The venue changed from the High Falls festival site to the left-field concourse under the stands of Rochester’s AAA baseball stadium, and the Fest was compressed to one evening instead of two. The limited space in the concourse tunnel and the concentration of two days’ worth of attendees into one caused a crush of humanity that, from 7:00 on, sucked the fun out of the Brewer’s Fest.
If you were a dilligent beer drinker, and got there around the 5:00 opening time, you were treated to a comprehensive array of New York beers from Brewery Ommegang, Southern Tier, Lake Placid, and others, as well as Magic Hat and Otter Creek from further afield. Once the annual rainstorm abated, the patio are gave way to pleasant beer conversation and an amiable sampling environment.
Beercrafter Pat Hughes getting blurry, courtesy of Roosterfish Brewing
Relaxing on the open-air patio
Bruce dispensing beer knowledge at the Rohrbach stand
As the crowd grew more, uh, crowded, things got a bit different. Lines grew much longer than the one or two volunteers per booth could handle. People who just got a pour had difficulty getting out through the throng. Food lines snaked 70 people deep.
It looked, more than anything else, like the Delta terminal at JFK.
Most disappointing of all, with no way to replenish their stock and facing such a concentrated, larger-than-expected crowd, brewers were running out of beer while some people were still outside ponying up their $25 entrance fee.
Jeez, you’d think the Yankees were in town
The outside patio area: less comfortable
Although festival attendees were primarily young, drunk, and constantly jostled, the mood stayed very upbeat and positive. I saw no evidence of security being anything more than bored, so please don’t take this post as alarmist or reactionary. I really think festival organizers did a good job of adapting themselves to the changing realities of the evening, and I know they’re aware that the whole setup needs to be tweaked for next year. Still, we have to remember, it could have been worse.
The Frontier Field site actually offers clear advantages for both participants and attendees. The stadium’s permanent food stands are geared toward serving large crowds, and the built in bathrooms are far superior to the dreaded smelly-ass Port-a-Johns you usually get at these events.
My suggestion: Open the entire concourse instead of only the left-field half. That would better distribute the crowd.
Oh, and tell the brewers to bring more beer.
-Mark
I know I pimp my current favorite beer bar an awful lot. But I live in Rochester, New York, and when it comes to authentic British pubs, my choices are kind of limited. Besides, I’d like them a lot less without their passion for good beer.
Anyway, on Tuesday, August 21st, the Toad will be hosting a vintage beer and cider dinner. Here’s the menu:
Vintage Ale and Cider Dinner Menu
August 21st – 8PM
Cured Salmon with Sweet Citrus Asparagus and Dill Hollandaise
accompanied with Lindeman’s Cuvee Rene Guezue (2004 Vintage)
Roasted Pork with fruit stuffing, served with Rocket, Roasted Potatoes Pickled Beets and Danish Bleu Salad
accompanied with Cidre Bouche Brut – Etienne Dupont (2000 Vintage)
Apple and Walnut Galette with Green Apple Sorbet and Cinnamon Custard
accompanied with Schneider Aventinus (2002 Vintage)
Cheese Plate: A selection of artisan cheese served with crackers and dates
accompanied with J.W. Lees Harvest Ale (1998 Vintage)
The event is sold out, but there are always last minute cancellations. If you want to go, pop by the toad on Sunday or Monday night and see if a space has opened up, or call Manager Jules Suplicki at 585.232.2626.
Personally, I can only think of one better way to spend a Tuesday evening, and THAT’s probably illegal.
-Mark
The Rochester German Fest takes place this week in Gates Memorial Park. The reason I mention it is because German Festivals usually feature German beer. This is a good thing. We’ll be hitting the festival tomorrow around 7pm. If you see me, give a shout out and I’ll share a Spaten with you!
By the way, Beer School was great last night. We had about 30 people tasting the finest from Dogfish Head, as well as that nasty Peche shit. Thanks to Pete Malfatti for guest-yelling.
Beer School in session
-Mark
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