GABF Pre-flight Post

GABF. The Great American Beer Festival. This is the big boy of American Beer Festivals. Held annually in Denver, Colorado, this is the one time where breweries and brewers whip out their big guns and show off a bit. With our flight early Wednesday morning, this will probably be my

Needless to say, I am pretty excited about this upcoming trip. It is an opportunity to get out of work, fly someplace we haven’t been to in a while and drink some good beers, nay, great beers. Well, that’s the plan anyway.

As much of a ruckus as I’m making about the enormity of the event, we are only attending one session at GABF: the Saturday afternoon “Members Only” session for American Homebrewers Association (AHA) members. From what I’ve been told, the Members Only session is one of the best events to go to as it’s not open to the general public so you get to avoid a lot of the drunken, frat-boy antics that has started to creep into the other sessions.

Despite only attending just one session we have a full itinerary planned out. There’ll be plenty of beer consumed, I promise you, just not all at GABF.

Here is our loose itinerary:

Wednesday: (All in Boulder)

1. Redstone Meadery
2. Avery Brewing Company
3. Twisted Pine Brewing Company (if there’s time)
4. Gold Medal Dinner at The Kitchen featuring: Adam Avery (Avery Brewing Company), Sam Calagione (Dogfish Head), Rob Tod (Allagash), Vinnie Cilurzo (Russian River) and Tomme Arthur (Pizza Port). If this line-up sounds familiar, the Beer Chef held a “5 Guys and a Barrel” dinner with the same guys. Here is the tentative menu as relayed to me by Ray Decker of The Kitchen:

1^st course : Russian River ‘Supplication’ & The Lost Abbey ‘Devotion’ – paired with Fois Gras

2^nd course: Avery ‘Bad Sally’(draft)   &   Allagash ‘White’ – paired with coriander dusted sea scallops and blood orange buere blanc

3^rd course: Dogfish Head ‘Sahtea’(draft)  &  Russian River ‘Temptation’  -  paired with prosciutto wrapped rabbit and squash ravioli

4^th course: The Lost Abbey ‘Isabelle Proximus’   &   Allagash ‘Interlude’  -  paired with Venison Chops

5^th course: Avery ‘Mephistopheles’   &   Dogfish Head ‘120min’  -  paired with dessert

Friday: (Fort Collins)

1. Shooting Lessons (Not enough time to go hunting so we’ll go shooting instead)
2. New Belgium Brewing Company
3. O’Dell Brewing Company
4. Fort Collins Brewing Company

All three of these breweries are in Fort Collins and come highly recommended by our hosts Mike and Bonnie. We’ve been meaning to get over to Colorado to visit them but haven’t had the opportunity until now. If anything, we plan on being with them more than being at GABF itself, which is the point of the trip anyway. What good is having all this great beer if the company isn’t up to par?

Saturday:
We’re heading on down to Denver to attend the Members Only session. Afterwards, we had planned to go to another beer and food pairing dinner hosted by Draft Magazine featuring the beers of Flying Dog Brewing Company but it’s not set in stone yet.

Monday:

1. Coors
2. Golden City Brewery
3. Great Divide Brewing Company
4. Sandlot at Coors Field
5. Wynkoop Brewing Company

Monday will be our lazy day where we bum around Denver for the remainder of our trip. The only brewery I really want to visit would be Coors (came highly recommended by a BJCP Grandmaster level judge, go figure), Great Divide and the Sandlot.

Tuesday: Fly back home.

Related posts:

1. Back and Ready to Post This will be a short post. Just letting folks know...