bell's funvitational 2015

The point when I realized it was too cold for shorts.

There are a lot of beer festivals. Like, a lot of beer festivals, especially because we live in Michigan, where there's a new brewery every twelve seconds (okay maybe more like twelve weeks) and there's nothing the vast majority of Michiganders like better than looping twine through giant sourdough pretzels & packets of beef jerky to maraud around in a field/parking lot/park/etc., potentially soggy & freezing or sweaty and what feels like actually melting, to taste tiny samples of weird ass beers while "accidentally" forgetting to turn in their tokens.

So, there are a lot of beer festivals in Michigan. I have been to a lot of beer festivals in Michigan (and elsewhere for that matter - shout out to Indianapolis, Chicago, and Toronto!), but nobody else yet has done it the way Bell's did it for their 30th anniversary.

Granted it certainly helped that I had three of my favorite people in the world there with me (I have always had this sort of weird tender and fiercely possessive love for my place in my closest friendship as the only girl among a handful of boys, but this time around there was the added delight of introducing them to my boyfriend & watching the lot of us act like we've all been friends for the entirety of our lives), but you guys. Bell's does it like nobody does it.

The festival didn't start until 4 pm on Saturday evening, but registration & check in started at noon, so we sauntered in around 1ish after hearing that we could bottle share in line - and when we got there we were astonished to find we were literally only the second group in line??? Which ended up being fantastic for multiple reasons including:

• The line surrounded a football field, so we dragged a large team bench over to the beginning of the line and thus for three hours we had a place to chill, lounge, and drink beer with the masses.
• We made friends with the guys in front of us who not only shared huge amounts of delicious rare beers but also had secret friends inside who broke the news about double barrel Hunahpu to us which meant we had plenty of time to indulge before the keg kicked.
• At one point just before the doors opened for the festival, we realized we had a few scattered bottles left that we wouldn't be able to drink before being let in - and the rules were bottle sharing in line was allowed, but bringing in any alcohol, opened or no, was not, which, while being a crappy rule, did lead to the greatest moment of my life which was: standing on a shaky aluminum bench a little bit tipsy holding up a bottle of Goose Island Bourbon County Brand Stout and shouting FREE BCBS WHO WANTS SOME?? At which point the masses converged on me and I felt something akin to the Jesus of Beer. (This feeling returned later on when multiple people we didn't remotely know but whom we had shared beer with us found us inside the festival and showered us with extra beer tokens.)

My boys <3 <3 <3

So as I'm standing there pouring to the lot of people behind us who hadn't gotten there three hours early and weren't already like 15 tastings into the evening, the greatest thing to ever signal the beginning of a beer festival happened, which was AN ACTUAL MARCHING BAND LED US IN TO THE BASEBALL FIELD. No, really. A raunchy sounding slapdash marching band dressed in gold & black nonsense. I have never actually been more pleased. Until like three minutes later while halfway through my Hunahpu and standing in line for some Russian River Supplication I realized there were actual Bell's 30th Anniversary party hats, and they were free.  And then like an hour later when I realized both Spruce & Double Two Hearted were happening in my exceptionally blessed life.

ACTUAL MARCHING BAND.

I just don't know why people thought we were all so drunk already????

My literal only regret is that I was too busy tasting beer to play Giant Skee-Ball, but the opportunity will present itself again some day, I'm certain...

In conclusion, basically every beer festival should probably follow the format of: Giant pre-party, marching band, super huge lineup of tasty rare beers, giant funk/soul dance party back at the brewery afterward.  (With a small break in between for us to acquire the best shawarma of my life.)

Funk soul brothas.

I'm looking at you, Michigan Brewer's Guild.

michigan winter beer festival 2015 (aka: "i've never heard anyone say 'butterfly' with such anguish")

Greetings from Day 4 of an attempt to detoxify myself from the wildly absurd amount of alcohol I imbibed over the course of this past weekend.  I was a straight up tour de force of craft beer consumption and I regret none of it except the way my body felt midway through a 75 minute hot yoga session the other night.

Last weekend was Michigan Winter Beer Festival in Grand Rapids – and since my nearest and dearest college beer snob friends still live on the west side, it was basically a given that we’d be going, so when my Christmas present from them was a ticket & a membership to the Michigan Brewer’s Guild, I was zero percent shocked.

I’ve been to the Summer Beer Festival about four years running now, and it’s always a lovely experience – you romp through a really lovely green park in downtown Ypsilanti, it’s in the middle of the summer, so you can wear sundresses and stick your feet in the river and take drunk recovery naps in the grass all afternoon.  This is NOT that.  This is brutal Michigan cold (thank god for the sun) in a parking lot full of slushy snow that soaks through your ill-advised cable knit definitely not waterproof boots and numbs your fingers to the point that you forgo Untapping your beer selections after about stop #2.  This is spilling your sampler glasses because you’re bouncing up and down trying to regain feeling in your limbs.  Fortunately, this is also high gravity beer lover’s paradise filled with a whole lot of barrel aged glory that makes a bit of a dent in warming you up.

I rang in the weekend at my buddy Tom’s with ALL THE SHAWARMA and sampling a slew of beers he’d saved up for my arrival, including but not limited to a coveted bottle of Dino S’Mores – (it’s everything you hope and dream it will be) – before heading up to Grand Rapids to round out our party and get Festival day started off right at Brewery Vivant’s Brewer’s Breakfast.  Vivant’s always been one of my favorite breweries because it’s in a building that used to be an old church, so it’s full of vaulted ceilings, ornate wood beams, and stained glass windows.  Plus they make a MEAN farmhouse/sour/ beer.  For breakfast we all picked out a different option so that we could share – I went with a red-wine barrel aged saison with brett and the crispy breaded chicken and cheddar-bacon waffles with an herbed cream sauce and maple syrup and I definitely won the breakfast lottery on that one.  We also made out on an exciting limited can release that sold out before we even paid our bills….

From our friends in New Holland......my favorite liquor to kick off the night.

The newest in Bell's planet series - maybe the best brown I've ever had.

ALL THE SHAWARMA KING.

At last, my precious nightcap.

Brewer's breakfast at Vivant!

Second best chicken & waffles I've ever had

The festival itself was, as expected, seriously chilly, but a good time – full of bearded dudes with carb necklaces (my favorite by far this year was the guy who upped his game from pretzels/bagels to a necklace of English muffins [??? Don’t you toast those???], and one I saw that was straight up Samoas and beef jerky sticks) and semi-frozen tap lines. I’d made a pretty solid list beforehand of brews I DEFINITELY wanted to try…..and I hit maybe half of those.  Still, there were quite a few standouts:

• Gravel Bottom – Jonny Applebottom [rye whiskey barrel aged apple butter brown ale].  Never in my life did I think something barrel aged or something brown would be one of my very favorites, but this was SOLID. Perfect amount of sweet and tart and crisp and liquor – I could have drank dangerous quantities of that.  (Side note #1 – the RISin Dead [maple bourbon barrel aged Russian imperial stout] was a very close second here, and Side note #2 – I’d say Gravel Bottom was probably the brewery I was most impressed with overall for having never heard about previously.)

• Brewery Vivant – Fat Paczki [Belgian inspired ale with prunes & powdered sugar]. Brewed for Fat Tuesday, it’d be easy to dismiss this as just another kitsch beer (Rogue Voodoo donut beers anyody?), but this is actually really great. Drinkable, like a nice, dark, fruity Belgian, but a little lighter. Upset I missed out on the can release.

• Harmony – Capricorn [chocolate donut absinthe stout]. At one point during the day I met up with my lovely friend Kristine, who I had met for the first time in Colorado & who I had bonded with immediately over our shared experiences traveling to Prague, which of course entails drinking massive quantities of absinthe.  We toasted the lovely memory of Praha while drinking this beer, which, while I deign to say was “good,” definitely did taste exactly as advertised.  (To be fair to Harmony – we also tried the Fee D’Hiver [Belgian dark strong with sugar plums] and I was really impressed/pleased with that one…)

• One Well Brewing – Xalapa [jalapeno blonde].  Yet another style I wouldn’t expect to see show up on my own highlight list, but One Well did something really cool here – they used a very mild jalapeno to flavor the beer itself, & then offered raw jalapenos that you could add on your own to hit the spice level you desired. Pretty neat, and pretty strangely tasty.

• Perrin – No Rules [maple bourbon aged Vietnamese porter]. If I’m being honest, I don’t know what on earth a “Vietnamese” porter is, but it tastes friggin awesome.  We actually got this twice.

• Pigeon Hill - Oatmeal Crème Pie.  I’ve had various types of ambers and browns that tried to go for “oatmeal cookie,” with varying levels of success, but this one nailed the sweet spot right in between “delicious disgusting overly processed sandwich cookie” and “that one really creamy cinnamon shot you had twelve of before you realized it was a really bad choice.”  Awesome.

• Tapistry – Reactor [dry-hopped American IPA]. I had quite a few good Tapistry beers, but the thing that stood out about this one was that it was EXACTLY what I want in an American IPA. Crisp, a little green, nice hop bitterness……the sophisticated beer drinker’s lawnmower beer (and I mean that in the best possible way).

• Stormcloud – Red Wine Barrel Aged Fun Guvn’r [Belgian black IPA aged in red wine barrels]. I love hops. I love bitter things. I love Belgians. If I had to drink wine it would be a dry red with lots of roasty dark fruit flavors.  This was the first beer I had all day and damn if it didn’t set the tone.  Kind of wish I’d tried the straight up regular Fun Guvn’r just to compare.

• The Livery – A toss up between Maillot Rouge [oak aged sour biere de garde with raspberries] and St. Valentine’s Day Massacre [wild ale aged on blood oranges]. The first was the sour fruity delicacy I dreamed of all day, and the second was its sparkly, drier, less approachable best friend.

• Witch’s Hat – Bourbon Barrel Cherry Cordial Night Fury [imperial stout]. I mean….damn. Already a good beer, but now it’s syrupy and liquor-y and like a malty, roasty chocolate covered cherry melting in my mouth.  I wanted to never stop drinking this.  I’m still dreaming about this beer.

My Space Team <3 <3

Xalapa!

Met this lady in Colorado, reunited in Michigan.

Long lost beer running buddies.

Stella's Lounge in GR - good food, good beer, good arcade games - and also a ton of skeleton stencils.

Basically the coolest ceilings I've ever seen.

My poached eggs were a little cold, but they were covered in habanero hollandaise, so win some lose some.

All we could manage to imbibe at Osgoode's after the Saturday binge.

After all that…………………………………the obvious choice was to dump our things off at the hotel, change into dry socks, and head out to downtown GR for disgustingly big slices of spinach stuffed pizza, arcade games, and a growler of Anderson Blood Orange Gose from Hopcat, which we proceeded to drink until we passed out in front of some cooking show.

Sunday was mostly full of driving back to the real world – but not before hitting up the bloody mary bar/brunch menu at Stella’s Lounge (my salmon-y eggs benedict was all right, but the breakfast pot pie stole the show…..), and a quick flight at Osgoode’s – MI brewery #96!

cask days 2014 standouts

Welcome to Quebec!

I’d be remiss to go to a beer festival & not even chronicle the most delicious, interesting, and uh…questionable?? beers I sampled, so here goes! 

Cask Days was broken up by region – so each province had its own section, plus a section for some UK imports and this years featured US region:  California.  It was so funny to us to see all the Canadians going crazy over the California beers – they cost double the tokens and everything!!  Then again, if I didn’t live where I had constant access to Stone, Green Flash, Lagunitas, Ballast Point, etc., I probably would have done the same.  The cool thing was that a lot of the California breweries had modified their beers for the cask process – so it wasn’t just Stone IPA, it was “Stone IPA with raspberries and jasmine and etc., etc.”.  Kinda cool that us Americans did get a little surprises taste as well.  So, for posterity (and so I can remember when they finally start internationally distributing!!), a brief list of some of the notable tastes:

Ballast Point Brewing - Victory at Sea with Cacao Nibs & Ghost Pepper;
I actually tried this pre-Cask Days at BarVolo, but had it again on Saturday as well.  The cask notes on the tap list at BarVolo didn’t list, of all things, the ghost pepper part!?!  My dad ordered it accidentally (his intention had been to pick up Dieu du Ciel’s Peche Mortel, but he misread the numbers), but this baby was delicious.  The ghost peppers gave it some serious heat at the end, but the thick chocolate stout part of it was the perfect balance for the spice.  I’m a big fan of the chocolate/chipotle beer (Odd Side Ales’ Mayan Mocha Stout is one of my all-time favorites), but usually the spice is a little more muted.  I really liked just how dominant it was in the this one.

Monkish Brewing Company - Brown Habit W/ Thai Basil & Sriracha;

This was my, “I couldn’t drink a whole pint of that, but…” beer of the festival.  I’ve never had the original Brown Habit (although now I’d really like to), but this casked variation of it was amazing.  It literally tasted like drinking a glass of Pad Cashew – but despite how that sounds, it was NOT disgusting.  The basil and the sriracha worked perfectly with the malts to give it that Thai food feel (sans-spice), and in a way that created this weird delicious savory beer.  Sometimes I feel like the additions to cask beers are just too much (seventeen kinds of fruits/flowers/spices are SO not necessary – now it just tastes like I’m eating somebody’s fruit salad floral arrangement & I can’t pick out ANY individual flavors), but this was cask experimentation done 100% right.

Stone - Sublimely Self-Righteous with Spruce & Cherry;

All of Stone’s offerings were variations of their mainstays (Go-To IPA, Ruination, etc.) with about a thousand different mix-ins added when they were casked.  Like I said above, I think a lot of them were just too much (my first beer was the Stone IPA with Raspberry, Jasmine, Lime, Chili and Mango, and I honestly couldn’t pick out a single one of those flavors except raspberry on the nose and a tiny bit of soapy jasmine at the end – it was just a cloying sweet muddle interrupting my IPA), but this one was spot on perfect.  The especially cool thing was that I’m not honestly a huge fan of Sublimely Self-Righteous in and of itself – it’s not a BAD beer, I’m just not crazy about the black IPA style in general.  The piney, resin-y spruce flavor and the tart cherries worked just PERFECTLY together, though.  They really brought out the roasty, malty flavors in the beer in a way that just worked.  I feel like hops often get buried in the roasted flavors of black/dark/whatever IPAs, but the spruce helped to really make that flavor pop and the cherry just added this lovely finish.  I tried a friend’s glass of this one, and I definitely wanted seconds.

Brasserie Dieu du Ciel! - Isseki Nicho Special Amarillo;

A collaboration between Dieu du Ciel & Shiga Kougen in Japan.  I’ve been interested in black/dark/brown/etc. saisons lately, and I tend to like them a hair better than their IPA breathren, but this one is billed as a hybrid of a Belgian saison and an Imperial stout, and it accomplished this brilliantly.  Strong, but tart, but roasty, and Amarillo are one of my absolute favorite hop flavors, so it had that bit of spicy, piney finish to it that set it apart from its Mosaic brother.  Also I thought it was really cool to see single-hop varieties of something that WASN’T an IPA – interesting to see how hops affect the flavor in a beer that isn’t necessarily hop-central.

Les Trois Mousquetaires – Reserve de Noel 2013;

When my buddy Pav handed me his jar of this, he did so with the information that this was “Christmas in a glass.”  Billed as an “extra strong” red lager brewed with Christmas spices & balsam fir and French oak, I’ve also see it called a “Grand Cuvee” (and we know how I feel about cuvees….), and weighing in at 10.5%, this was most definitely Christmas in a glass.  It was warm and welcoming and spicy and made me want to curl up on my couch and watch the snow with slippers on and Christmas carols playing.  The spice blend was just beautiful – not too strong that it overpowered the malty background (which was interesting in and of itself – I read later that the beer was made with 100% Quebec malt, and the bill included pils, rye, wheat, oat, cara 160, and roasted buckwheat, the last of which I think REALLY made this beer go a step beyond what I expected) like some “holiday” ales.  Somebody find me a bottle of this for Christmas, please.

Townsite Brewing – Timewarp;

When I got the initial list of beers available at Cask Days, this one was my “I HAVE to try this weird sounding thing!” selection.  I have gathered from the Townsite wesbite that this beer is normally a standard wet hop, but what really grabbed me about it is that it was listed on the bill as a wet hop with SMOKED HOPS.  Not smoked malt, but smoked actual fresh hop cones (Applewood smoked, at that!).  I generally like smoked beers, but moreso things like smoked saisons than smoked darker beers (although I have had ones I’ve enjoyed before, as well…), and this sounded so bizarre I had to try it.  It basically tasted like liquid smoke, earthy and ashy and….not awful, but not something I wanted to keep drinking.  Completely different than a smoked malt taste – and not quite the same savory beer experience I had earlier with the Monkish beer.  I’m glad I tried it but I’m not sure it’s an experiment I’d want to repeat.

Weirdly enough, a large chunk of my favorites were in the first couple hours of tasting – maybe, just MAYBE, my senses became a little dulled, as the festival went on???? ;) What I can’t believe is that there are pretty much NO IPAs on my list!  Then again, that was another kind of cool thing about the festival – IPAs are notoriously not the first choice of beers to cask, so many of the most interesting choices were a lot different styles than I would normally go for.  I tried to get in a good sampling of a bunch of different styles from a bunch of different regions, and while I did have some good IPAs (Fat Tug by Driftwood stood out, as did Four Winds Brewing’s Protect Your Nect, and Cameron’s Brewing’s To Catch a Brettator [although that one had Brett in it as well, so not just a standard IPA], but in general, they weren’t the stars of the show.  I think the best IPA I had all weekend was actually from Thumb Coast in Port Huron (although I did buy a bottle of Witchshark at Bellwoods, so it can’t be said that Toronto isn’t IPA-friendly).

Overall I sampled  HUGE number of mostly delicious beers – I don’t think there was anything I found completely awful, and definitely nothing I didn’t finish.  The only (and most!) devastating thing about the festival was that outside of the California beers, it’s going to be awfully hard to get any of these back here in the states.  Guess I’m going to have to head back…