BetterBeerBlog

BetterBeerBlog friends and readers, Diane and Michael, have provided the content for today’s post. I met these two people at the Beer & Chocolate Dinner Firehouse Brewery & Grill in Sunnyvale hosted for SF Beer Week. Turns out that Diane and Michael do quite a bit of traveling to attend the various beer festivals that are held around the country. Diane was kind enough to take thorough notes about the Savor beer festival she attended last week and, despite some photography issues, managed to supply a few photos as well. Without further ado, here’s the Savor: An American Craft Beer & Food Experience Recap as written by Diane and Michael.

Note: I had some issues extracting the images. I”ll see if I can’t get better quality images and repost them. -Peter

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A beer fest without T-shirts, lawns, tents, crazy beer glass holders or grilled processed meat products - doesn’t sound possible, does it? But on Saturday, May 30, 2009, the Brewers Association held its 2nd annual Savor: An American Craft Beer & Food Experience in Washington DC. With a formal, and mostly followed dress code of “business casual to cocktail party attire - dress to impress!”, this was not your usual beer event. As you probably know, the Brewers Association is the same group that puts on the Great American Beer Festival, the biggest beer fest in the US. Savor is its new baby brother; a sophisticated upscale evening of craft beer and food pairings, held this year in the National Building Museum. Originally built in 1883 to house the Pension Bureau and to hold large formal events,it’s now used for exhibitions in its smaller rooms that surround the main ballroom, which still functions as a large and elegant meeting and banquet space.

The Savor event also included, along with the main beer and food tasting event, a number of extremely small “salons” for a lucky few who were able to get tickets that included such topics such as:

• Ancient Ales in the Modern World with Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head

• Bombastic Beers, Collusive Collaborations & Tall Tales! with Adam Avery, Avery Brewing Company and & Greg Koch of Stone Brewing Co

• Cult Beers from California with Tomme Arthur, Lost Abbey Brewing Co and Vinnie Cilurzo, Russian River Brewing Co

• Get Your Belgian Style Special Release Beers On with Rob Tod, Allagash Brewing Co and Peter Bouckaert, New Belgium Brewing Company

Thanks to our very dear beer friends Suzanne and Dana who picked up 4 tickets and invited us along, we were able to attend the Salon featuring Tomme and Vinnie. This was an hour session with these 2 iconic brewers (well, rock stars, really) first discussing briefly how they got into brewing and then as each of the 4 beers was poured, the history behind the beer and a pretty detailed discussion on each.

We started with Russian River’s much sought after Toronado 20th Anniversary Ale, which amazingly enough came from Vinnie and Natalie’s private cellar! The instant we tasted this we knew there was no doubt, this was one of the most amazing beers we had ever tried. A beautiful brownish red, it’s rich and complex, slightly sour (perhaps a tiny bit too sweet for some) with a fair amount of carbonation and just the right amount of oak. And at 10.5%, the alcohol is absolutely undetectable. Can’t say when we’ve enjoyed anything more.

Then, Tomme poured Lost Abby’s version of the 20th Anniversary ale – Cable Car. It’s a beautiful dark golden yellow with a nice amount of carbonation. Lemony, oaky and funky, it’s so complex and so drinkable. We really enjoyed this, although I think we both agreed that we preferred the RR 20th.

For our next selection Russian River Beatification was poured. We love this beer – a spontaneously fermented ale, it was so much fun to hear Vinnie recount his story of his first try at this technique and how Batch 1 turned out an outrageously sour beer. We could relate – we had tried this at the brewery - it was our first sour beer ever. We remember thinking, “Wow, if all sours are this sour, we’re gonna really have to work on these!” We laugh now, knowing the full story. The smell is barnyard and oak and while it’s sour, it’s crisp and clean and lemony. These are just such complex, multifaceted beers, that I think describing them is almost a waste of time – there’s so much to them that trying to describe them with words does them a disservice. You really have to drink them, certainly more than once to truly appreciate their complexity.

Finally, Lost Abbey Cuvee De Tomme, 2009 was poured. Well, if you’re a beer geek, you’d have to have been in a coma for the last few months as the Lost Abbey “lack of carbonation” issue has swirled and been discussed OVER and OVER and OVER again. No need to re-tell it here. Just one thing, though…this beer was also flat – no carbonation. Tomme himself admitted that there were issues with finding the right yeasts for bottle conditioning. For anyone who has found themselves mesmerized by this saga, this was a totally intriguing discussion on some of the issues from the brewer himself. We think you might be interested to listen to it – it’s going to be available to listen to on the Savor website (Savor) in a week or so. It’s a deep reddish brown with lots of brett funkiness to it; sour cherries, raisins, bourbon, oak – thoroughly complex and interesting. While this uncarbonated bottle is good, we enjoyed it on tap at the Pizza Port Belgian Beer Party just a few months ago and felt as though the sharpness of the forced carbonation actually adds another layer of flavor to it.

When the Salon was finished, we walked down to the ground floor where 15 4-sided booths had been set up. This event was limited to 1800 tickets only. This is a beautiful grand room – high towering ceilings, massive columns and ornate decoration. It was wonderful to see craft beer showcased in such an elegant and upscale way. Unlike the previous year where is was done in 3 sessions, more like the GABF, this year there was one session only running from 7:30pm – 11:00pm. And very much unlike GABF where you might find a brewer at his/her booth, almost every both had their brewers pouring. The down side to this, is that as much fun as it would be to chat with some of these people we really admire, it’s just really difficult to do without ending up with 10 people in back of you getting pretty annoyed, so we kept it short.

Brewers had been sent a list of foods that would be served and were asked to pick a food to pair with the beers they were bringing. Each booth had foods grouped with what the brewery had requested. The only down side to this set up that came up immediately for us, was in order to start light and work your way up the darker or high alcohol offering , it required some walking around, as opposed to starting at Booth 1 and making your way through all 15. The first choices we had were a Milk Stout from Left Hand Brewing in Colorado, A Lagunitas Barleywine and Arcadia Brewing Co Triple Chocolate Milk Stout. We immediately gave up the idea of an orderly nosh through the room and just started looking for what seemed right to start with. Here’s the link to the attending breweries in 2009. There was one big surprise and we think ultimately a criticism: almost every brewery brought bottles - we’d estimate 90%. We were disappointed. We overheard another fest goer asking his buddy what was going on with that. We contacted the Brewer’s Association to see why and were immediately emailed back by Nancy Johnson, BA’s Event Director with the following explanation:

Both last year and this year we required participating breweries that bottle their beer to send bottled product. Because we don’t want to limit participation to production breweries, we allow draft product from breweries that do not bottle. We had the same percentage of draft product this year as last year.

The overriding reason is operational. For an event this size, it takes a substantial amount of time to set up draft (and bottled product). We don’t have the time or resources to make this happen within the time we have for set up. Also, when bringing product in from across the country, bottled product is easier to handle, as we don’t have to ship the kegs back to the breweries after the event. It’s quite a logistical undertaking to break down all draft product and arrange for shipping kegs back across the country after the event.

The room was pretty easy to navigate for the first hour or so, but as the evening progressed, it began to get really crowded and hard to walk through. Honestly, if attendees would just learn to walk to the outside edges instead of grouping right next to the lines, every beer fest on the planet would be easier to attend. For the best take on this we’ve ever seen, Jay Brooks of Brookston Beer Bulletin wrote one of his famous Top 10 lists for attending a beer fest. It’s a hoot and should be required reading for Fest goers. A plus was a large number of small round tables around the edges of the room that gave a large amount of seating – somewhat unusual for a fest and much appreciated. Someone deserves thanks for including that in the Savor set up. And as far as the set up goes, it was mostly worked well.

Food was to be an equally important component to this event – to highlight the exceptional ability of beer to pair well with food. It was really interesting to see the diversity of the food and beer pairings. One of our favorites was a “Mini Scallop Burger with Cilantro and Lime Mayonnaise”. It was paired with Troegs Brewing Company doublebock, The Bruey’s Tradewinds Trippel and Avery Brewing’s Maharaja Imperial IPA. Pretty wide range of brews we thought, but tasty with all. Unfortunately, the food was often cold and in some cases, gone, but not yet replaced so it was impossible to try the pairings. We didn’t think it was a huge issue – the caterer (Federal City Caterers) was trying to keep up with around 120 small stations, muscling their way through the crowds at each booth to re-fill. All things considered, it was an adequate job.

We had one issue with placing dessert items, like this luscious Espresso Sambuca Parfait, at various booths (again, based on the food item the brewery had requested to be paired with); it just became hard to remember where you had seen them and trying to pull out the program and look through the listings to see who had a dessert item was just tough to do unless you were sitting down.

Towards the end of the event, someone standing next to us said, “What was your favorite?” Well, quite honestly, neither of us had an answer. There were obvious stand out beers for us…from Easton PA Weyerbacher ‘s Double Simco IPA, so hoppy and so balanced - Woodcut No 2 from Odell Brewing in Fort Collins CO , a oak barrel aged golden ale just released that tastes just a bit young, but leaves no doubt what a little aging will do for it – Great Divide, from Denver CO who brought Hercules Double IPA and the over the top Espresso Oak aged Yeti Imperial Stout – Avery Brewing showed up with the absolutely amazing Maharaja Double IPA as well as their limited release of Brabant, a wild ale aged in Zinfandel barrels from Paso Robles. It’s got a ton of funky Brett character but not overly sour with the oak and zin giving it such unique characteristics – Troegs Brewing from Harrisburg PA with an extremely hoppy and malty Red IPA – Russian River Consecration, of course. So did we have a favorite? Well, in a word, no.

Savor - this was craft beer elevated to another level. There was no need to convince any of this crowd that beer and food can be paired well and with diversity; this was preaching to the choir. But what fun to bring dedicated brewers together with their fans who supported this effort to move forward the idea that craft beer deserves a enormous amount of respect, that it deserves an equal place beside wine, that there is more than one beer for any food and the joy is trying them out and finding what works for you. We would love to see this type of fest make its way to the west coast to allow a greater number of our fellow beer lovers to experience something so familiar but so new.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 11:22 am and is filed under Beer Festivals, Beer and Food Pairing Event, Breweries, Craft Beer, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.