Beer Run Blog

All six members of the Fearless Tasting Crew noticed it and agreed: There was a feeling that something was different, and better, about the 2012 Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywines festival this weekend.

Maybe dividing the high-alcoholfest over two rooms on separate floors opened the space up enough to make it feel more pleasant. Maybe the educational seminars, which felt directed to brewers and beer geeks rather than casual drinkers, were a little better. Or maybe there was this: The first time I tasted a beer that I didn't like, I looked down at my watch and realized it was 4:07 p.m. - one hour and 37 minutes into the show.

A festival that can bring out the best experiments in the brewing community - but also some concoctions that shouldn't see the light of day again - this year featured things both daring and shockingly drinkable. Even Avery's Coffeestopheles Stout, the 16.4 percent coffee/alcohol bomb formerly known as Meph Addict, felt just a little easier on the palate without losing any of its gusto.

With that said, here's a few things I learned at the festival:

* The Bruery is quickly evolving into one of the top breweries in America. If there was a beer of the fest, it was Partridge in a Pear Tree, the 3-year-old Belgian-style dark strong ale that presented itself as spicy on the nose, black and sweet on the palate and slightly sour with aged dried fruit. The Orange County beermaker also created the best beer of this Christmas season, Four Calling Birds, and continues to dazzle.

* Brettanomyces and hops really do make a great combination. Crooked Stave's Wild Wild Brett Green combined the magical yeast strain with three pounds of hops per barrel of beer and created a layered and unique hop bomb that stood out among a host of grassy beers.

* Brettanomyces and red wine barrels also make a wonderful partnership, as Surly Brewing showed quite ably with Five, a brett-fermented dark ale that walloped you with tart cherries. It jolted your taste bud at every sip. If only it was sold in Colorado ...

* Coffee and big beers are a combination of which we should see more. Between Coffeestopheles Stout (worth a trip to Avery's taproom if you have a designated driver), Ballast Point's Victory at Sea Imperial Porter (the most drinkable 10% porter ever) and Great Divide's Espresso Oak Aged Yeti Imperial Stout (a known entity, but one that proved its heft against the others in the room), there was a series of tastebud-rocking efforts adding a new twist to the known big and dark beers.

After three days of attempted recovery from the Great American Beer Festival, I can still taste some of the beers I sampled - and in a good way. Sours took on more nuanced and fresher flavors, IPAs seemed to have a more uniform grassy backbone and it seemed you could find a surprise beer around every corner, especially at the pro-am booth.

So, per annual tradition, here is one beer connoisseur's opinion on the very best that America had to offer this year.

Beer of the Festival: Never in 11 years of attendance have I tapped a Colorado brewery for this honor. But Trinity Brewing's Brain of the Turtle - a sour ale aged with cherries, coffee and almonds - defied every known category and blended terrific flavors into a masterpiece. While I was in line at the booth, two separate people told brewer Jason Yester that other brewers recommended they try his beer. The reputation is well earned.

Close Runner-Up: Tiny Captain Lawrence Brewing of New York state opened a lot of eyes with its Rosso e Marrone, an ale fermented in grapes and aged in oak barrels. In a world of increasingly complex beers, this went beyond pucker-worthy and was smooth and almost exotic on the tongue.

Best Lager: It isn't to style in any way, but Danny Wang's Lao Wang Lager, from Denver start-up Caution Brewing, should inspire admirers and copycats with its proprietary blend of Asian spices.

Best Wheat: Tumblewheat, from perpetual festival attention-getter Altitude Chophouse and Brewery of Wyoming, came across like a vanilla cream wheat with an exceptional blend of smoothness and sweetness.

Best Hop Monster: Coloradans got a gift earlier this year when Firestone Walker Brewing of California finally began distributing out here. Anyone IPA fan who doesn't demand their local liquor stores bring in Double Jack, an imperial IPA that blends flowery earth tastes and sweetness artfully, is missing out.

Best Malt Monster: Sun King Brewing of Indianapolis took home a festival-best eight medals, but none were more deserving than the one earned by Pappy Van Muckle, a barrel-aged Scottish ale that is big, sweet and ignites the taste buds with a lightly whiskey-sodden flavor.

Most Interesting Beer: Anyone who failed to wander over to the pro-am booth Saturday missed out on the Indra Kenindra Curry Export Stout submitted by Ballast Point Brewing of San Diego, which had the nose of a south Asian rice bowl and backed it with a dark undertaste that helped it settle smoothly. It makes you excited about the next generation of beers to come in the years ahead.

This is a few days late and maybe even a few dollars short, but there are a couple of things that I think everyone learned from this year's Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywines festival in Vail:

1) Sour beers are not only becoming more common among brewers, they're becoming more palatable to everyone's taste buds. The prime example of this is Odell Brewing's Friek, a blend of "old, young and even younger" barrel-aged sour beer - in the words of master brewer Doug Odell. The effort had the distinctly biting characteristic of tart cherries aged in the older barrels but was smoothed out by last year's harvest raspberries that were blended into the youngest strain. It was crisper and fresher than many of its sour counterparts - though maybe not with as piercing a bite - but I knew that it truly had transcended the genre when the Beer Geekette, who usually winces at sour offerings, said she enjoyed it. Let's hope this is the breakthrough beer that brings sour into mainstream offerings.

2) The roasted, percolated, straight-out-of-the-jungle taste of coffee beers is hitting new heights every day. This had become apparent by some local breweries' efforts, especially those of Pug Ryans and and Backcountry Brewery, at recent local festivals. But San Diego-based Ballast Point Brewing's Victory at Sea Imperial Porter may have ratcheted the competition up a notch. This 10% ABV concoction from took a coffee beer to levels the genre doesn't normally go: a fresh-brewed frontal assault with just a tiny bit of vanilla on the backtaste. It was arguably the strongest yet most pleasing beer at the festival.

3) It's time for Papago Brewing to start distributing outside of the greater Phoenix area. The purveyors of the GABF-famous orange wheat and vanilla coconut porter masterpieces displayed in a special tasting seminar a Irish cream coffee stout that made the perfect pairing for ice cream (which may not be a combo you've always thought of, but trust me when I say that you want to try it). Scottsdale-based Papago is doing with new flavors and styles the same wonderful experimentation that the much more heralded New Glarus Brewing is doing with fruit beers. Yet, they're just one state away, and that bar at the border that stops them from getting through to Colorado needs to drop.

4) Dissension, thy name is cherry imperial stout. The most debated beer of the festival, at least to the Fearless Tasting Crew, was Longmont-based Pumphouse Brewery's 10th Anniversary Cherry Imperial Stout. Some in the bunch thought it was an overload of cherries and chocolate that just made it unpalatable. But I felt it was one of the gutsiest experiments at the show, a bold bombardment of taste buds that was quite heavy and over the top but the closest thing that's ever approximated chocolate-cherry cake in liquid form. And it seemed to be the statement that announced brewmaster Dave Mentus to the world.

5) The traditional definition of a big beer is starting to fade. Barleywines, double IPAs - these were the featured attractions that defined the "big beer" genre for at least half a decade. But while some of them were still turning head - Coronado Brewing's Idiot IPA was one that exuded flowers while keeping its bitterness in check, for example - they were not the stars of the festival. Belgian strong ales, spiced porters, oak-aged offerings, these are starting to take the headlines in many ways now. And this is not a bad thing, even for us hopheads that would gladly attend a DoubleIPAfest if anyone were to throw one. It just showed that the American craft brew revolution of the past five years continues to spread its tentacles in many directions. And that can only mean good things for the daring taste buds of this country.