Livin' Large at The Great American Beer Festival
Travis Combs
The Metropolitan
Fact: a case of beer consists of 24 bottles of 12-ounce beer.
Pseudo-fact: most average 175-pound males would be roaring drunk after consuming 24 beers, and most would vomit and/or pass out.
The stuff of legend: if one person could sample an ounce of every beer in the room at the Great American Beer Festival, they would have drunk eight cases of beer. This, friend, would kill the likes of you or me.
Bagpipe music and random throngs of voices shouting with glee stand out from the clamor all around. "Whoooaa!" is shouted by dozens of nearby voices in response to hearing more voices elsewhere, peaking for brief moments with the entire room filling with a human roar. Smells of a lot of beer for a little money permeate the air and a feeling of faith gives way to a feeling of falling as the night moves on and beer is consumed.
Photo by Hans Hallgren
The Metropolitan
Mayor John Hickenlooper talks about being a brewer and Denver business owner at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver.
Is this some kind of alcoholic Hell into which we all eventually fall?
Maybe; and yet maybe this could be Heaven, with bagpipe background music instead of harps.
"(This is) a beer drinkers haven," said Leslie O'Donnell, a two-year volunteer, pouring an ounce of beer into a plastic cup. "I love it because you get to meet so many drunk people."
And drunken people there were at the annual haven for both brewers and the beer drinkers who love them. From the taste connoisseur to the quantity binge-drinker, thousands of beer lovers drank as much as they wanted to-or could-at The Great American Beer Festival.
Hundreds of brewers converged in the Mile High City to seek their fame and fortune last weekend at the Denver Convention Center. Amid the fallout from extensive construction being done on the building, the seeds of the festival's beer garden sprouted and opened its doors last Thursday until last call was sounded at 10:30 p.m. Saturday.
Dozens of brewers within the United States laid stake here to win coveted awards and the bragging rights they entail. The New Glarus Brewing Company won for Best Small Brewing Company of the Year. Nectar Ales won for Mid-Sized Brewing Company and Anheuser Busch took Large Brewing Company honors. Yes, Budweiser truly is the King of Beers.
Drinking beer is one thing, but brewing beer is another. Although it is unclear whether the brewing of beer is an art or a science, it is clear that the process requires knowledge, and useful knowledge at that.
"There's more to it than what people think," said Zach Henry, brewer for the Yazoo Brewing Company of Tennessee. "There's a lot of science and chemistry to brewing."
After beginning his career as a brewer at the tender age of twenty-one, have no misgivings that Henry's knowledge of the art and craft of beer brewing stems from a place in the heart, and no this is not acid reflux disease, but both a love of beer itself and respect for the time-consuming effort which goes into the making of a good pint of beer.
Photo by Hans Hallgren
The Metropolitan
Karin, a Cincinnati representative for Samuel Adams, was, like many others at the Great American Beer Festival, in town only for the weekend.
In fact, Henry was taught precisely how to channel this love into constructive avenues of activity by attending an accredited brewing school, sponsored by the American Brewing Guild. Stay in school, kids; crime doesn't pay.
Meanwhile, back in the beer garden, the "Whooaas" bounce recklessly across the enormous room. Tempers are beginning to fray to shoe string levels. A fight breaks out and is quickly dispersed.
The entire idea of tasting and enjoying the hard work of independent breweries gives way to hedonistic abandon as beer drinkers become less and less discriminating and begin approaching random tables with numerous beer samples. The pleasant alcohol buzz transmutes into an uncomfortable drunkenness. Surprisingly, the last night of the festival goes off with nary a hitch and the last call fire patrol moves through the thinning crowds, reminding them that even though they do not have to go home, they cannot stay here.
Anybody up for bar-hopping? |
