Best of British beers, stouts, porters & IPAs 

It's been a week now since I spent my time sipping some of the best beers in the country. Where was I, and what was I doing drinking these fine ales? Why, I was celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Real Ale Fest. The fifth anniversary of one of the best beer festivals in America. I spent the time with two of my best beer drinking buddies -- my wife and my friend Ryan -- both who contribute there stories to this web site. Their thoughts of the beers they tried at the 2001 RAF are here, too. But first, some of my notes for the festival.

For those of you real ale novices out there, I'll explain what I mean my REAL ale. Basically, we're talking about beer dispensed by handpump from a cask (usually in a cool cellar) where the ale is still completing its secondary fermentation. You see, the beer is still with the yeast that fermented it, it has not been filtered. This makes for a product much different than your typical mainstream American lager. It is ale that gets its fizziness from the yeast that created it making for a less carbonic pint. I'm not exactly sure why the term "real ale" is used except that it does seem more natural.

Now that you've had a primer on "real" or cask-conditioned ale, let's start talking about the beers! First, there were more than 150 beers to choose from at the fest, which was held at Goose Island brewpub in the Wrigleyville neighborhood of Chicago. Most of these ales were presented on tap, but some of them were present as bottle-conditioned, meaning that they were bottles unfiltered with yeast. The first day of the festival was reserverd for a homebrew competition, which I didn't attend or compete in (maybe next year!) followed by two days of tasting sessions. My wife (a.k.a. Marcofrau), myself and my friend Ryan attended two tasting sessions, and here's what we found.

LOTS of tasty beer!! Overwhelmed by the sheer number of beers to choose from among dozens of brewpubs and microbreweries, each of us in the group decided to concentrate on specific styles of beer. I focused mainly on the British selections (there were only 11), and dark beers, mainly stouts. I also tried a couple IPAs and Strong Ales.

Among the British beers that stood out was Gale's Prize Old Ale. I actually tried three beers from this English brewery, but the Old Ale was the best. This copper-colored ale had rich, maltly, warming intensity without being too cloying or heavy. Perhaps it helped that is was lightly carbonated. Wonderful caramel and biscuity malts melded with yeast and hop flavors to create an ale reminiscent of whisky. Gale's other beers an HSB (whatever that's supposed to mean) and their Festival Mild were almost equally is good. The HSB with aroma of apples, a firm body and nice malt with good conditioning was one of the first beers I tried. The Festival Mild was biscuit-like (or would it be scone-like?) with some fruit and raisiny, toffee notes.

A number of breweries offered the American interpretation of an old British style of beer, India Pale Ale, which is highly hopped. I tried a couple of these highly hopped ales, one of them was Barley's Winter Solstice IPA (location?). This beer had a nice toasted and caramel malt flavor, and a taste of what seemed to be several varieties of hops. For those brewers out there this beer had an original gravity (OG) of 1.071 and 75 units of bitterness. Pretty darn hoppy, eh? By far the hoppiest of the hoppy ales was Proving Ground Pale Ale from the Magnolia Brewpub of San Francisco. (See Ryan's report from San Fran for a review of the the Magnolia.) This beer had a huge hoppy flavor that tasted almost shockingly hoppy. Brewers: this beer had an OG of between 1.060 and 1.070 and a staggering 100 units of bitterness!!  One of the standout breweries that I liked and that Marcofrau and Ryan liked too, was the Bluegrass Brewery of Louisville, Kentucky. I never heard of Bluegrass before the RAF, but now I'm planning a roadtrip! One of my favorites was the brewery's Dark Star Porter, which was nearly opaque with a hint of ruby color, just as a porter should look. The aroma was that of coffee with hint of smoke. The flavor revealed more coffee along with chocolate and black malts. With a modest hoppiness of 35 units this beer was quite strong, weighing in at about 6 percent alcohol by volume. The Middle Ages Brewing Co. of New York City also presented a strong dark beer. The Middle Ages Black Heart Stout was quite strong with intense roasted malt flavor and a wonderful smokiness. A Michigan brewery, Dragonmead, upped the ante with a true Imperial Stout. Another ale with huge roasted malt flavor, but this time the warming sensation of alcohol. The bitterness in this beer also was evident. Alcohol content in this ale topped 8.2 percent by volume!
   Other standouts that I sampled at the fest included bottle-conditioned styles such as Strong Ale. Of particular interest was the award winning Southhampton Old Ale from Southhampton Publick House in Southhampton, NY. This very earthy ale was quite tasty. Excellent almost mineral-like malt flavor that showed up in the aroma as something sort of musty. Marcofrau and I agreed it almost smelled like our cat: but in the best possible way a beer can smell like a feline. The Deschuttes Brewery of Colorado also presented a Strong Ale called Jubelale. This beer had a sweetish malt character with a nice caramel malt flavor and was very smooth.
   There were many, many, other beers that I didn't taste but won awards. Check out the RAF website for results. If you're interested in going to next year's fest stay tuned! The Marcobrau Beer Pages will bring you the latest information as soon as we get it. Believe me. This is an event no beer-lover should miss!

Hops and malt bare their teeth at RAF 2001

The cover of the program for the 2001 Real Ale Fest looked to me to be a riff on Marcel Duchamp's painting, "Nude Descending a Staircase." If you've seen the painting, you know that the "nude" is quite stylized and actually looks as if a stop-motion camera took a picture of every second of a figure coming down a set of stairs. The RAF program is not so stylized -- you can, in fact, see the pint glass being lowered toward a tap -- but it certainly reminded me of the painting with that same angular represenation of motion. And that was before I had any beer.

After I had tasted about 15 beers in two afternoons, I was not seeing masterpieces of modern art in advertisements. I was, however, dead tired. But the comparision to art here is not out of line. The beer we tasted at the RAF was like art in a way. You sort of had to know what you were looking at (or, in this case, drinking) to really appreciate what was going on there. 

What was going on for me was hops, and, man, that was good. Brewers who exhibit at the RAF know they don't need to hold the hops in check to please the brewpub investors who don't want to scare the crowds with unbridled lupulin. No, at the fest, the brewers were preaching to a chorus of hopheads. And I heard the angels sing when I tasted Magnolia Pub and Brewerey's Proving Ground Ale. My discovery of this beer proves that it's good to have friends who travel. We heard about Magnolia from our friend Ryan, who visited the place during his trip to San Francisco.

Ryan, knowing how much I like hops, told me to try it. It was hoppy, of course, and damn proud of it. As for mouth feel, it was no where near as smooth as, say, a nitro-poured pint of Goose Island IPA. The brewer himself told me that he made the beer after his regular customers got too used to the highly hopped IPA. So he hopped the crap out of it and made his customers happy. I thanked the brewer profusely for Proving Ground Ale.

The first beer I actually tried there was San Luis Obispo Brewery's IPA (They call the brewery SLO but I like to spell out the name because I was there and I like to think about the little donut shop we visited there and about having dinner in nearby Morro Bay where seals swam beyond the dock of the restaurant we ate at, etc, etc.). I must admit I was not impressed with it at first but that was because I was also taking in the scene and doing the "oh, that's the same as last year" and "oh, they were here last year" thing. The next day I tried it again and decided that it did deserve to win the IPA category of the National Cask Ale Competition. It was not, however, my favorite, but it certainly was a thoroughbred beer that had the balance and freshness of a winner. Other notable IPA's include Dogfish Head's Craft Brewery's 60 Minute IPA and Bluegrass Brewing Company's Professor Gesser's Mind Numbing Ale. 

The Bluegrass beers were one of the true finds of the fest. I also tasted Bearded Pat's Barleywine by the brewery, which smacked me between the eye with a 2-by-4. Barleywines were my other tasting category at the fest -- and my advice is to stick to two to three styles in order to truly compare the beers. Bearded Pat's was rivaled by Blue Star Brewing Company's King William Ale and Stuft Pizza's India Red, which tasted like red velvet.

Not classified as a barleywine but damn close is Three Floyd's Brewing's Dread Naught. Named after both the feared turn of the century German boat (and possibly the feared brick-like book about said boat), Dread Naught is called an Imperial IPA and it sure is. It probably is not malty enough to be an actual barleywine but after a few sips the distinctions are merely academic. This taste went a bit against the idea of the RAF -- to try new beers. I had actually had Dread Naught at The Map Room last year. But I feared never having it again and blew a ticket on it's hop-addled goodness. One more standout was BJ's - Boulder Abby Normal, a strong abbey-style ale. It was another example of an American producer taking something of European origin and pumping it up and that was just fine. I did not get the name of the beer until a complex reference to Young Frankenstein was explained. Fine. I still think that's a guy movie.

Alas, we ended the 2001 fest dog-tired and hungry and wondering if we might confine 2002's visit to one day. Then we were struck with the fear that maybe, maybe, the fest would run out of the best beer we'll ever taste on Friday if we showed up only on Saturday. So next year, we just need to do more pre-event preparation for these old bodies. Carbo loading, sports drinks, and plenty of training at The Map Room or the Hop Leaf Bar. Whatever it takes.

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