Old stomping grounds

We just returned from Colorado where we took our staff for our holiday party. Next week featured guest writer Jon (who is your daddy) Schmidt has promised to tell you all about the visits we had to Redstone, Avery, Great Divide, Flying Dog and Falling Rock, this week however I am going to write about the Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywines festival that I attended in Vail this past weekend.

I arrived in Vail just in time to help out and judge the homebrew competition that they had in conjunction with the fest. The competition was limited just to the type of beers that were to be at the festival, Big beers, Belgians and Barleywines. Even with the limited amount of categories they still had over 100 beers entered. I had to judge the Saisons and Bier De Gardes categories and had to judge about 15 beers. Judging 15 beers in the high altitude can sure do you in, but even so I did still manage to make it to a beer dinner that night featuring Eric Wallace from Left Hand Brewing and Rob Tod from Allagash Brewing. I am pretty much just a plain old meat and potatoes kind of guy so a beer dinner with appetizers like Buffalo Tartar or Escargot was a little bit of a step up from chicken wings or beer buddies. The beer dinner and the pairings was actually very good and I did get to try out some new beers from Allagash and some vintage beers from Left Hand. I will probably write a little bit more about Rob Tod and Allagash in a future newsletter as Rob is going to be one of the brewers who will be in Belgium for the 24 hours of beer fest that our little Papago travel group will be going to in March. At the dinner I finally learned about how Left Hand Brewing got their name. It seems that there used to be a sausage making place in the same location that the brewery is housed at, and one day the owner of the sausage making place got his arm caught in a grinder and hence the name Left Hand.

The fest itself was held on Saturday and featured about 125 beers from around the world. It was a pretty small festival with I am guessing just about 500 people attending with many not showing up until the ski slopes were shutting down. One thing that was different than the Arizona Craft Brewers Guild Strong Beer fest here is that you could only pour one ounce samples so it was more like a tasting than a festival. There were some great beers at the festival and some of my all time favorites like Kasteel Brown, Sam Adams Utopias and Dogfish Head Worldwide Stout. Very surprisingly and coincidentally since I just wrote about it last week, Anheuser Busch was there with a couple of their specialty beers, the first was a pilsner, but it was an 8.5% pilsner made with all malt and none of the usually additives and adjuncts that they put in their macro brewed swill. It was pretty good but even better was the Michelob Celebrate beer that was an oak conditioned 10% brown ale with vanilla beans added. If these guys wanted to they could really give microbreweries a run for their money in the specialty beer market because they can produce excellent beer. On the other end of the production scale there were places like little Woodville Brewing from Colorado which is a brand new start up that is being contract brewed just like we do. I heard people comment that they thought the Papago Oh Brother and the Woodville #21 were some of the best beers at the fest so you don't have to be big or even own your own brewery to be able to make good beer.

This was the sixth annual festival but it was the first time I have attended. I already have it booked on my calendar for next year and maybe I'll spend a couple of extra days there to do a little skiing.

Prost, Ron

P.S. You can order tickets for The Arizona Craft Brewers Guild Strong Beer festival to be held on January 28th online at http://www.azbrewguild.com/