The Great Alaska Beer & Barley Wine Festival
Every year for the past 3 years, I have gone back to Anchorage for Christmas and had to return to California two days before the beer festival because the semester was beginning. Not this year. I finally got my priorities straight. For $30, you get a glass, a beer guide, 30 beer tickets, and 5 hours of bliss.
Each ticket gets you a “1 to 2 ounce sample” but when you get their early most of the samples are more like 2 and a half ounces. You can buy additional tickets if you run out, but towards the end of the night most women have a surplus and are willing to share if you ask nicely.
Beer making 101 Beer has 4 basic ingredients: water, barley (or occasionally wheat), hops, and yeast. There are a few kinds of yeast used for beer, dozens of types of hops and hundred of barleys. Hops is the flower used as the bittering agent, which also acts as a preservative. Germinated barley is boiled to dissolve out the maltose (aka malt), the sugar metabolized by the yeast to produce alcohol. Beyond the wide varieties you can get from just those ingredients, people do other things to alter the flavor, such as smoking the barley, or adding various spices and so forth.
If you aren’t familiar with barley wines, its just a style of beer with high alcohol content, say 10-12% (for comparison, Budweiser is around 4-5%). They tend to be lightly hopped, dark in color, and have a strong malty-sweet flavor. The style isn’t especially popular, except in Alaska-which produces more barley wines than any other state or coutry, as the unsuspecting often get plastered before they know what hit them. However, Stone Brewery (of Arrogant Bastard fame) in San Diego makes a good barely wine (it won the festival in Alaska several years back). Its called Old Guardian, and is fairly available on the West Coast.
Anyway, getting the most out of a beer festival requires some strategy, particularly if you are drawn to the heavier beers. Eat a big meal about half an hour before hand, as the food in your stomach slows the alcohol absorption, and drink as much water as you drink beer. After I finish my sample, I rinse the glass, and then down a shot of water and make my way to the next stand. This helps cleanse your palate and slows the rate of intoxication. It gets harder to do as the night wears on, but if you are prone to hangovers, you’ll be thankful the next day, as alcohol is a diuretic and most hangover symptoms are due to dehydration. Start with the stronger beers and work to those with less alcohol. This is a little counter-intuitive, as generally you want to start with the weaker flavored beers (which usually have lower alcohol content), as they will taste like water after a stout, porter, or barley wine, but its important to be able to gauge when you need to stop, which is easier working stronger to lighter. However, try to put the hoppiest beers off until the end of the night. Maltiness rinses from your mouth pretty readily with a glass of water, but hops sticks with you and the effect is cumulative. If you start with a couple IPAs, everything you drink for the next half-hour (including water) is going to tastes like IPA. (IPA stands for India Pale Ale. The style developed during British control of India. Beer shipped for soldier’s rations tended to go bad before it reached the colonies, so they started brewing beer with a LOT of hops, which preserves it through the voyage, but makes for a very bitter beer.) I managed to get through 35 different beers (16 of which were barley wines with 10% or higher alcohol content) before they shut us down for the night. That probably amounts to about 80 ounces, and roughly equivalent to two six-packs of typical canned beer in terms of alcohol content. Needless to say, plan on taking a cab home.
So, for posterity, here are the beers I tried: name (and style, if it isn’t apparent) and brewery. I am also including my very subjective rating, on a scale of 1 to 5, although trying to fairly rate 35 beers in rapid succession is a bit ridiculous. Also, I am a total sucker for Belgian ales, so you’ll see some bias there. I put an asterisk next to beers from Alaska.
1) *Big Woody Barley Wine - Glacier Brewhouse - 4.5
2) *Old Gander Barley Wine - Sleeping Lady Brewering Company/Snowgoose Restaurant - 4
3) *Arctic Devil Barley Wine - Midnight Sun Brewery - 4.5
4) *Moose’s Tooth Barley Wine 2007 - Moose’s Tooth Brewpub - 4
5) Rochefort 8 (Belgian Trappiste Ale) - Merchants du Vin (distributer) - 5
6) Storm Watcher Barley Wine - Pelican Brewery - 3.5
7) *Big Nugget Barley Wine - Alaskan Brewing Company - 4
8) Cyclops Barley Wine - Elysian Brewery - 4
9) Barrel-aged Barley Wine - Big Sky Brewing Company - 4.5
10) The Abyss (Barley Wine) - Deschutes Brewery - 4
11) Snow Plow Milk Stout - Widmer Brother’s Brewing - 4
12) Old Guardian Barley Wine - Stone Brewery - 3.5
13) Koningshoeven (Quadruple) - Brewerij de Koningshoeven - 5
14) 15th Anniversary (Belgian Strong Ale) - La Microbrasserie Unibroue - 5
15) *Darth Delirium 2004 (Chocolatey Pseudo-Belgian Dark Strong Barley-monstrosity) - Moose’s Tooth Brewpub - 5
16) *Darth Delirium 2005 (see above) - Moose’s Tooth Brewpub - 5
17) Winter’s Bourbon Cask Ale - Green Valley Brewing Company - 4
18) Mystique (Belgian Dark Strong Ale) - Andelot Brewery - 4.5
19) Skull River Barley Wine - Anacortes/Lock Fish Grill - 3.5
20) Tripel Karmeliet (Belgian Strong Ale) - Brewerij Bosteels - 5
21) Chambly Noir - La Microbrasserie Unibroue - 4.5
22) Old Blow Hole Barley Wine - Kona Brewing Company - 4
23) Westmalle Trippel (Belgian Trappiste Trippel) - Merchants du Vin (distributer) - 5
24) Westmalle Dubbel (Belgian Trappiste Dubbel) - Merchants du Vin (distributer) - 4
25) Orval (Belgian Trappiste Ale) - Merchants du Vin (distributer) - 4.5
26) Traquair Jacobite Ale (Scotch Ale) - Merchants du Vin - 4
27) Hog Heaven Barley Wine - Avery Brewing Company - 4
28) Blackwatch Cream Porter - MacTarnahan’s Brewing Company - 4
29) *Scottish Ale - Kenai Brewing Company - 3.5
30) *Valley Trash (Strong Blonde Ale) - Great Bear Brewing Company - 4
31) *Pick-axe Porter - Silver Gulch Brewing and Bottling Company - 3.5
32) Piraat Ale (Belgian Trippel) - Brewerij Van Steenberge - 5
33) *Cran-Raspberry Cyser - Ring of Fire Meadery - 3.5
34) *Nut Brown Ale - Kassik’s Kenai Brew Stop - 3.5
35) *Bigger Hammer Barley Wine - Haines Brewing Company - 3.5
All in all, I think I did pretty well, given the time constraints, though I barely made a dent in the selection of beers available (there were 28 barley wines alone, and something like 400 beers total).
They give medals in every beer category, but only announce the top three barley wines the first night. Midnight Sun’s Arctic Devil won! I was pretty excited, as I sort of know those guys. The brewery is about 4 blocks from my Dad’s house, and on friday nights they have a brewery tour which usually consists of pointing at the brewing equipment and saying “That’s the brewery” and then spending the next hour drinking free samples. I go there a lot.
The evening didn’t have the most pleasant ending, however. When I bought my airline ticket a few months back, I couldn’t find the dates for this years festival, so I looked at previous years and guessed. Turned out I guessed wrong, but I didn’t realize that. In my head, I flew out the night after the festival ended (which would have been sunday night, since the festival is two days). In fact, I flew out at late friday night. My mom called my dad while I was drinking beer and happened to asked if I was done packing my bags. I got home at around 10:30 pm to find out that I was supposed to be on the plane in 3 hours. So I got to pack as quickly as possible, while still fairly intoxicate, and rush to the airport. I got there on time, but found out my flight was delayed, so I sat in the airport for a few hours, and then flew home, also while still fairly intoxicated. That sucked, but it was worth it.
Next year, however, I’m going for both days. I’m shooting for 80 beers.
