Beantown adventures

This past weekend I went back east to a chilly Boston along with Johnny to go to the second annual extreme beer festival. The weekend started out with us arriving in Boston Friday night and going out to a number of small local bars that Johnny used to hang out at when he was stationed in the Coast Guard there. I knew we were in trouble when at one of the bars which was named Sullivan's they were cleaning out the bathroom with a garden hose. Johnny made the mistake of trying to keep up with one of his old Coast Guard buddies and paid the price for it later that night. The next morning he didn't remember me kicking his butt on a new test version of Golden Tee that was in the Beantown Pub by 30 strokes. His new nickname is weeble wobble junior. Most of the bars there that we went to served pretty much the same beers. I found the Harpoon IPA to be to my liking and to be a nice clean IPA. Boston has more than their share of local pubs and following the Coast Guard rules we were supposed to not go past a bar without going in and we held tru to that rule.

The Extreme beer fest is put on by the guys who run beeradvocate.com, if you haven't checked out their website I encourage you to. So what is considered extreme beer? Extreme beer are beers that push the boundaries of brewing and are either high in alcohol, high in hops, aged in oak barrels or made with exotic spices or herbs. Pretty much like most of our Papago beers. Some of the different ingredients I saw included gingerbread, seaweed, wild rice, licorice root, saffron, dates, figs, imported chocolate, coffee beans, caraway seeds, jalapeno's, white pepper, plums, pine shoots and peanut butter. Pretty wild stuff and for the most part the different ingredients did work well in most of the beers including the peanut butter which was a peanut butter porter from Boston Beer Works.

The fest was on Saturday and consisted of both an afternoon and a separate evening session. In order to have beer at the fest the brewery had to be licensed in the state of Massachusetts so most of the beers were from the east coast. There were a few beers from out west, Avery, Stone, Grants, Rogue, Anchor and Lagunitas. The fest had a number of guest speakers, like Adam Avery who did a vertical tasting of 4 different vintages of the Reverend which gave people a chance to see the difference in flavors as a beer ages. Jim Koch of Sam Adams gave a talk on his triple bock and later he and I shared a "belt" of his Utopias together. Utopias is a 25% beer that is aged in oak barrels and made with a hefty dose of maple sugar. It tastes more like a cognac or sherry than a beer. They had a cask of it there and I ended the evening by helping to drain it. The current batch is in the oak barrels now and will be out later this year. Last year I think they made 8000 bottles and if I remember right I think Jim told me that they are going to make 10000 bottles this year. In my opinion it is worth the $130 or so for a bottle of it. Start saving your beer money now.

There were too many great beers at the fest to list here but of note I did really like a beer from Allagash from Portland Maine who had a beer called Curieux, which is a Belgian Tripel aged in Jim Beam oak barrels which gave it some great vanilla and coconut flavors. Smuttynose from Portsmouth New Hampshire had a wheatwine that was pretty close to our Churchill wheatwine. Of course Dogfish Head from Delaware was there with a couple of Randall's going. They had a 14% Raspberry beer called Forte that I didn't get to try because they ran out really fast that was served through a Randall full of Raspberry's. They did just get a couple of new fermenters that will help them increase their production and so they are saying we should have their beer by April or May. I did enjoy their 90 minute IPA and a fruit beer called Au Courant that had a great purple color. Lagunitas had an English style barleywine called Hairy Eyeball that was excellent. There was one brewery that really stood out as exceptional in my opinion called Founders from Grand Rapids Michigan. Sadly they are a pretty small operation so we won't see their beer out here. They had a number of good beers like their Breakfast Stout that was brewed with oats, chocolate and coffee and they had a second version called Kentucky Breakfast that was the same beer aged in an oak barrel. They also had a double IPA called Devil Dancer that was 13% alcohol and they said it had 175 IBU's which would make it even more bitter than BJ's Imperor. Their beer didn't taste that bitter though and I questioned them about it. They claim it didn't taste bitter because of the high malt and alcohol content. I might have to do some experiments at home to test out their reasoning. I know more malt will make a hoppy beer more balanced but I can't imagine how much malt it would take to balance out a beer that is supposedly that bitter.

I will admit that because these were extreme beers they did have a few beers at the fest that were even out there a little too far for me. Nashoba Brewing from Boston made a beer called Medieval ale that they brewed the week of the fest in which they didn't add any hops which made it undrinkable in my opinion. The Kelpie seaweed beer could have been left behind, not that it was bad, just nothing special. They were a couple of Finnish Sahti's there. Finnish Sahti is oldest and one of the last original beer styles in the world. They use Juniper instead of hops in it. The Sahti's I had were pretty sour tasting and tasted like a Belgian guerze and didn't really pair up with the other beers I was trying. Overall though the great beers far outnumbered those that weren't so good and I'll probably make this fest an annual event on my yearly beer tours.

Cheers, Ron