GABF - Worth the Hangover
Oh, baby...what a weekend. This Seattlest may have drunk more great beer in the past 4 days than we have in the preceding year since the last Great American Beer Festival. Well, maybe that's a stretch...but not by much.
After flying to Denver on Thursday afternoon, we headed to check-in to our rooms at The Curtis hotel. Just one block from the beer festival, it turned out to be a prime base for the weekend. We cracked open a few beers from our huge cooler loaded with about 50 top-notch rare offerings from around the world to taste throughout the weekend. Not a bad start to the weekend.
Thursday night's festival was by far the highlight of the weekend. Even though the session was sold out (all sessions for the weekend were), the crowds were not bad and no breweries were out of beer at that point. The first table we hit was Lost Abbey/Port Brewing, from near San Diego, CA, to try their very limited releases Cuvee de Tomme, Cable Car and Angel's Share; all of them were fantastic. The rest of the night found us wandering around from brewer to brewer tasting treats we'd been hunting for years, as well as a multitude of old favorites. But some of the best surprises were the random beers from breweries we never even knew existed.
GABF is a great excuse to check out the rest of Denver and what Colorado has to offer for beer. On Friday, we opted to hit some of the popular local spots rather than go to the festival. Having never toured a huge macro brewery operation, we decided to head out to the Coors brewery in Golden, CO early Saturday morning. Most of us will agree that the beer coming out of Golden is not good, but it was still a thrill to visit this huge brewery. We won't get into the visit too much here, but the fact that they've managed to take beer and strip out just about every characteristic that makes it appealing is an amazing feat.
Our next stop was the Sandlot brewery located at Coors Field back in Denver. Although owned by Coors, the beer served here is a completely different experience. All of the 6 or so beers that we sampled were pretty good. But, the 2 smoked beers they had on tap were fantastic. What a great bonus to have a place like this while watching baseball.
Next, we headed down the street to the Flying Dog brewery. Their Double Dog Double IPA was definitely one of the standouts of the weekend. After a short rest back at the hotel, we headed to The Falling Rock Taphouse, a true Mecca of beer in Colorado. They had plenty of rare treats on tap throughout the night; Vintage Stone Russian Imperial Stout from 2003 was a favorite. Dogfish Head brewer Sam Calagione stopped by to release 3 rare beers: Festina Lente (a retired peach lambic), 2003 Olde School Barley Wine and 2005 Chateau Jiahu. They also had an Imperial IPA from Pizza Port in Sand Diego that was fantastic.
After a much needed long sleep Friday night, we headed out to Rock Bottom just 2 short blocks from our hotel for lunch on Saturday. They broke out several of their rare specialty beers for the GABF weekend, and their 294 Bourbon Barrel Aged Stout served on nitro was a nice find. Full of nutty bourbon flavors and as thick as melting ice cream; this stout was a meal in itself. After another tasting session back at the hotel, we headed out to another night at the festival. Being a bit run down from the previous 2 nights, we had a rough time on Saturday night. The festival was absolutely packed and quite a bit of beer had run out (there was still PLENTY though). The presence of lots of Colorado college kids there to just get drunk on Saturday made it pretty out of control and the environment was a bit too much for all of us in our group. We still tasted plenty of good beer and enjoyed ourselves, but we vowed never to go back for the Saturday night session in future years.
We saw quite a few familiar faces from the NW beer community, and WA breweries were well represented at the festival. 27 different WA brewers submitted several beers for the competition this year, making WA one of the better-represented states at the festival. The biggest win of the weekend for the NW may have been Elysian Brewing Company’s silver medal for The Great Pumpkin Ale in the Fruit or Vegetable Beer category. This was the 2nd most competitive category in the festival with 96 entries. Elysian also took home a gold medal for The Wise ESB and a silver medal for Dragonstooth Stout.
Other local winners included a silver medal for Hales Ales’ O’Brien’s Harvest Ale, a gold medal for Pyramid Crystal Weizen, a silver medal for the Hop Bomb IPA from Rock Bottom in Bellevue, a gold medal for Old Woody from Fish Brewing in Olympia and a bronze medal for the Bottleworks VIII Anniversary made by Flyers Brewery in Oak Harbor.
As burnt out as we are after these 3 days, we will be ready to go back next year....
