GABF versus GBBF

*TICK*

That’s my pencil scratching off a beer-thing that I’ve wanted to do for years: the Great American Beer Festival.

Held in Denver, Colorado, every year, it’s an outrageously big celebration of American brewing. In 2012 the festival numbers were record-breaking: 578breweries pouring 2,700 beers to 49,000 attendees. I was there judging the competition which was also record-breaking: 4,338 beers submitted by 666 breweries and tasted by 185 judges across 84 style categories.

But what’s GABF like compared to GBBF?

GABF runs four four-hour-ish sessions. GBBF runs for five days, 12-10pm.

GABF tickets are $65 a session (there’s a members only session at $55) while GBBF are £10; GABF’s cost includes all the beer you’ll drink whereas you pay for each beer at GBBF.

Measures at GBBF are one-third-pint, half-pint and pint. GABF is a 1oz pour. This is an interesting one as I thought that a 1oz pour would suck, but it doesn’t. Sure, there’s no time to sit back and relax by sipping on a half, but it gives the opportunity to taste a lot of beer and 1oz isn’t really that small when you’re there and doing it. Plus, if you like the beer you can just order another one and another until satisfied. And if you don’t like it then there’s only a mouthful to drink or dump – at GBBF I’ve had many beers which I’ve bought and then dumped because they aren’t what I wanted.

It’s worth lingering on this point because it’s important. I liked being able to taste 50, 70, 100 beers, or whatever it was, in four hours. And it is about tasting, not drinking (though it’s very possible to get very drunk if you go hard). With so many beers being poured, most of which I’d never had or even heard of, I wanted to drink as many as possible, jumping from IPA to pilsner to saison to stout to sour beer to whatever was on the next table. But there is a downside to this: the whole thing feels frantic as if there’s a rush to get the next beer and the next – there’s a casual, sit-down-and-enjoy-it feel to GBBF while GABF feels like a race.

I like the layout of GABF: it’s broken down geographically but then each brewery has their own space, compared to the large regional bars at GBBF (which require cartography lessons to navigate). Brewers can pour their own beers at GABF, which is great, though Andy Crouch would like to see more brewers there and I’d agree. This also means that breweries can put things out on their bars – beer info, POS stuff, whatever. I think brewers pouring their own beer at GBBF would be a great thing, as would more information about the beers we’re drinking, though this would involve a complete change in how things are done (similar to what was achieved at the awesome Independent Manchester Beer Convention).

This layout also creates a situation where drinkers line-up for specific breweries. Over the four sessions, a handful of breweries consistently had lines of people waiting to try their beer – Dogfish Head, Cigar City, Russian River, Crooked Stave. I have never seen a line at GBBF waiting to try the beer from one brewery, instead it becomes a big bundle at the bar as drinkers gun for the Champion Beer of Britain or some geek treat on the foreign bar. The queuing was actually a good thing, I reckon – there’s a buzz that comes with that.

The size of GABF kept on surprising me: it’s huge (just look at the map). Overwhelmingly big, in fact. But at the same time that’s good – it shows the sheer, exciting scale of American craft beer.

Olympia is a nicer place to drink than the Denver Convention Centre.

The beers: 2,700 beers at GABF and around 500 beers at GBBF. When I go to GBBF I spend most of my time at the foreign beer bar. Imagine that multiplied by about 300 and that’s what GABF was like for me. It’s not fair to compare the volume (500 is, after all, more than I could manage over five days anyway), but the range is more relevant to compare: there was simply more variety at GABF – you name it and it was there.

Like at GBBF, at GABF some breweries can choose to take up bigger bars. This gives them more presence, means they can pour more beer and can put more personality into it. At GBBF we get regional breweries and sometimes they excite and surprise with what they pour – this year at GBBF Twaites had a couple of crackers, Fuller’s had the superlative Fuller’s Reserve, Greene King poured 5X. At GABF it was bigger breweries who took these corner plots but still ones which most drinkers want to get to: Odell, Oskar Blues, Dogfish Head, New Belgium, Bear Republic, Anchor, Sierra Nevada...

Food at GBBF is normal stomach-fillers like pies, pasties and burgers, plus the wonderful pork scratchings. I expected good food at GABF but I didn’t see it: pizza was pretty much all you got.

Pretzel necklaces. These are a curiosity. For three days I saw people walking around with a necklace of pretzels hanging on their chest. I’d seen photos of these before and assumed there’d be a stall inside selling them. There isn’t. This surely means that all those thousands of pretzel chains were homemade. How the hell did that craze start?!

Photo from here

The dropped-glass cheer. I figured this was a unique British element of GBBF: the chime of broken glass which sends a wave of cheers through the huge hall. This is not unique to GBBF and it also happens at GABF. Both are funny in their own ways: at GBBF a glass costs £3 so the butter-fingered drinker has to go and buy another one at the expense of three more pounds and the laughter of their mates; at GABF three of the four sessions use plastic glasses which, when dropped, bump around like a rugby ball and bounce in all sorts of different directions as their owner scrambles to catch it while everyone around them cheers. 

Award-winning beers. At GBBF there’s always a hush as the Champion Beer of Britain is announced, this is often followed by some ‘what the fucks’ which is then followed by people casually, but at great speed, heading to find that beer and drink it. After the awards are announced at GABF (which this year happened on Saturday morning before the final two sessions), lines increase to try and find medal-winning beers while brewers walk around with medals hanging proudly from their necks. One interesting distinction is that it feels like the medal winners at GABF are celebrated whereas GBBF winners are denigrated (unless you know the brewery and love the beer). I definitely think there’s a lot of work needed on the competition side of things in Britain with more transparency and information about how these things are decided, perhaps creating a bigger GABF-style competition.

Atmospheres at both are similar. Huge halls of drinkers create their own backing track of humming conversation. At GABF there’s also karaoke and a silent disco sponsored by Oskar Blues – can you imagine if GBBF had a silent disco? I’d love to see that!

There was a much younger demographic at GABF.

And then there’s one final thing: the stuff which happens outside of the festival. Things start on the Monday of GABF and lead around until the Saturday it finishes. Every day there are breakfasts, lunches, evening events and after-parties; there’s beer launches and rare beer tastings; paired beer dinners; you name it, it happens. Plus, all of the many bars and breweries in town are open and packed with drinkers. What’s impressive is that the 49,000 attendees pump $7 million dollars into Denver over the duration of GABF and that’s outside of seven-figure ticket sales. At GBBF there’s so much focus on the festival itself that nothing happens outside of it. Perhaps it’s the fact that drinkers at GBBF can stay all day, I don’t know, but it’d be brilliant if London could embrace the festival and turn it into a city-wide event that can bring in visitors for an extended stay.

I love both festivals and if you love beer and haven’t been to GABF then you must try and go sometime; if you haven’t been to GBBF then you should go to that.

The Interlude Explained

It’s been quiet around here, ain’t it? No posts in July or September and this is only the ninth post since the end of April. Considering I’ve averaged over 170 posts a year in the last three years, that’s pretty slack. I’ve not just sacked the blog off, I’ve been pretty busy and in that time I’ve been to Chicago, San Diego, Brussels, Copenhagen, Greece, northern Italy and Denver (plus Leeds, Manchester and lots of time in London), my little sister got married, I’ve written a few freelance beer pieces, I’ve moved house, I’ve changed my working life (less time in the brewery, more at home trying to earn cash from writing) and I’ve written a beer book.

The beer book is the big one. I had a four month deadline to write 80,000 words. It ended up taking almost five months of me getting up at 5am every day and working a few hours every evening. It was damn hard work, especially working full time for most of it. The book is done now and with designers. It’ll be out in spring next year. Given all the research and all the travel, I’ve got lots of things to write about and it’s time to catch up on all of them.

To get it rolling, here’s one memorable beer from each of the places I’ve been to this year. It comes five days after this blog should've celebrated its fourth birthday, which I forgot. That kind of shows you, along with the above, that it's been a busy, strange kind of year...

Chicago. Intelligensia Coffee. Not a beer, obviously. We drank a lot of good beer but the coffee was the thing I remember more. We even got a tour around the roastery as it’s next door to Goose Island’s brewery. The coffee is in Dark Lord. We went to Dark Lord Day. Dark Lord (Day) sucks. Gumballhead by Three Floyds does not suck. It’s awesome.

San Diego. Stone Ruination IPA at the brewery. It was the beer which made me love IPAs and getting it fresh was brilliant.

Brussels. Cantillon Lambic, obviously. It was my second visit to the brewery and if it was my 102^nd then I still think I’d be as excited about being there and drinking the lambic.

Copenhagen. Bourbon-barrel-aged Westvleteren 12. Seriously. Struise brought this along as a secret special and it was insane.

Leeds. Beer Bloggers Conference. Unfiltered Pilsner Urquell, drunk with friends, while laughing harder than I’ve laughed in a long time.

London. I’ve spent most of my time in London at Camden Town Brewery. Rude Boy, the 6.8% American-hopped lager, is dangerous by the stein but I can’t help slamming pints of it.

Greece. Cold Mythos, obviously. Sitting on the beach, at sundown, eating fresh fish.

Northern Italy. Birrificio Italiano Tipopils on tap. It might be my favourite beer in the whole world.

Manchester. Lovibonds Sour Grapes. Jeff finally let some leave the brewery but if I was him then I’d just be sitting in there drinking it all myself. WOW it’s good.

Denver. The second and then the last beer I drank was Pliny the Elder. I still can’t resist ordering it when I see it. Honorary mention, because it’s fresh in my mind, is Crooked Stave’s Oculus. Crooked Stave is incredible. Denver is getting a third beer: I judged a few categories at GABF and one of them was Barrel-Aged Strong Beer. There was an old ale (aged in wine barrels or bourbon, I can’t remember) in there that was simply spectacular and I have no idea what it was. 

Kent Green-Hopped Beer

For the first time this year I went to a hop farm during the harvest. The gardens are overflowing with bright green hops while speeding tractors carry piled-high loads of hops to be processed by huge, clunking old machines, filling the air with the dozy, fresh, spicy and grassy aromas. To see the scale and speed of it, to hold a handful of plump, soft hops, to pick them from the bine yourself and rip them open to rub the sticky oil on your fingers, to have your senses flooded by the unique aromas, to see how one variety looks different to another, to be surrounded by the thing which makes you love the taste of beer... it’s evocative and extraordinary and anyone who loves beer has to go to a hop farm when they are harvesting – it gives you a whole new appreciation of where beer’s most amazing flavours come from.

Having lived in Kent my whole life (where almost half of Britain’s hops are now grown), I’ve always had a close link to hops without ever really knowing. There’s the Hop Farm, but I never went there on a school trip; there’s oast houses across the county, the white tips high in the air, but I thought they were just fancy farm houses; those fields with tall trellises which smelt spicy on hots day as we drove through the countryside was just the smell of being outside.

Hops are brilliant and I love them, but British hops are on a bit of a downer at the moment and need some cheering on. One great way of doing this is with green hopped beers. As a beer-loving Man of Kent, the Kent Green Hop Fortnight, which saw 20 breweries make at least one green-hopped beer with fresh Kent hops, made the Invicta horse inside me kick with excitement.

Most hops are dried before they reach the brewhouse. Green-hopped beers are different: picked fresh from the bine, hops go from field to kettle as fast as possible in order to capture the maximum amount of oils into the brew. These volatile oils, many of which are lost to the drying process, give a delicate, fresh cut grassiness, floral and stone fruit flavour different to anything you’ll find in a dried hop. Only brewable during the harvest, these are the ultimate seasonal beer where local hop farms and breweries come together – they also require the brewery to be bold and brave with their hop additions, often needing 10-times the weight of wet to dry.

What makes green-hopped beers great is that they somehow capture an essence of the hop garden, a flavour of the countryside, of freshness, evocative of sticky green fingers and grass stains on your knees. Getting 20 of Kent’s breweries together has also highlighted the hop growing in the county as well as showing off the variety of beers brewed in the south east. It also gives a big backslap to British hops in general. That can only be a good thing and while all of the 2012 beers have been drunk, I’m already looking forward to 2013’s harvest when hopefully all of Kent’s breweries will brew again and so will others around the country, really showing off the brilliant hops grown in Britain.

Crate Brewery

A river running opposite, trains to the side which sound different to every other British train (the sort of train you hear in New York or Chicago), a big white building, jailhouse windows, bright and bold graffiti across the water, a buzz in the warm air, sparsely industrial, the tanks behind a sandstone wall and through bright windows, a central bar with pizza kitchen behind, wood for seating in many different forms - crates, tree trunks, benches. Tattoos on everyone. Moustaches. Bikes. This isn't London, is it? The wooden boards topped with freshly cooked pizzas, an air filled with charred, sweet dough. The girl opposite drinks Pabst Blue Ribbon, everyone else has the beer brewed here. A Golden Ale, dry and bitter, British in origin yet a hint of American accent comes through, unless that's just the Brooklyn vibe in the air. An IPA, huge hops, tannic citrus, a shot glass sample not enough to know what it's all about. A Lager, so brightly, freshly hoppy I get a Proustian jump to Prague and some bar I don't really remember (the second bottle - because it's too good for just one - is even better). Is this London? Really? It's new London. It's different. It's not the lights of central or the posh west, it's the new east, with the Olympic Park as the backdrop. Imagine waking tomorrow... reads the graffiti. But it's already here. In an amazing place. The Crate Brewery. Brilliant. Unlike anywhere else. And they make beer here. Good beer. And you drink it by the water, with smiling people all around, and pizzas which smell so good you have to order one, as you realise you're in London just after you think you're somewhere else.

(With apologies for a crappy picture - it was dark, my phone isn't a camera, I was in a rush to get back to the bar. Look here for far better images)

Hop Fried Chicken

Chicken and hops are two obsessions of mine. Bringing them together a few months ago, I tried to make Hopcorn Chicken but failed to get the hop flavour into it – I didn’t use enough and the spices overpowered it. I also used a hop pellet, which is harsher and more potent than the flower of the same variety. So, Take Two took a different approach: chicken legs and whole flower hops.

What I wanted was the hop flavour, aromatics, floral quality and a little of the oily bitterness. In my mind they all complement fried chicken’s typical herb and spice mix. Having grabbed a handful of Citra flowers for some Home Hopping, I used one of the leftover flowers and crushed it in a pestle and mortar. Into that I added salt, white pepper, cayenne pepper, thyme, bay, cinnamon, paprika, turmeric, garlic salt, brown sugar and a little flour. I coated chicken legs in the mix and then cooked them in a hot oven until sizzling and golden (ignore that the name says ‘Fried’... frying food freaks me out so I go for the oven instead).

This time I got a lot of hop flavour into it. A citrusy bitterness, reminiscent of grapefruit pith, left a tang in the background to all the other spices, like the smoke left behind after fireworks have exploded. Next to it I had some of my homemade hot sauce, made with Sierra Nevada Torpedo IPA, and a cooling mountain of coleslaw made with beer mayonnaise (saison went in). A fantastic trio. The Hop Fried Chicken (aka Yakima Fried Chicken) is definitely something I’ll be cooking again – the bitterness added a little extra pow.

A triple-whammy of beer and food cooking. Sometimes I do leave out the beer when I cook dinner...

'Pint, please'

I worked three days on a bar at a food festival last weekend. Some knew exactly what they wanted and strode to the bar with purpose; many (I guess) ordered by their preference for lager, ale or stout; lots asked for a taster before ordering; and then some just asked for a pint.

'Which would you like?' We'd say. 'There's lager, pale ale or stout.' A blank face looked back. Lager is what most went for. A default choice.

This was a street food festival but it was also in the middle of tourist London, so the crowd was mixed. What I couldn't believe was the number of people that just walked to the bar and asked for beer without specifying anything else. Don't people care what they drink? They must have a general preference for something and be aware that more than one beer exists, right?

You wouldn't walk into a sandwich shop and just order 'a sandwich, please', would you? So why would it happen with beer?

Home Hopping

Somehow, inexplicably, you’ve ended up with a four-pack of Fosters in your fridge. It’s taking up valuable beer or food space but you don’t want to throw it away. Here’s your solution: home hop it.

It’s easy. Take one Home Hopper (some people also use them to make coffee), throw in a handful of whole flower hops, preferably something super citrusy or floral from America, and pour your beer over it (though watch out for the foam explosion. See: nucleation points). Give it a few minutes, swirl it around, press the plunger gently down and pour your delicious American-hopped lager into your favourite glass.

This home hopping device can be the saviour from those bad or boring beers you end up collecting in the fridge (and it needn't just be lager - use it for those bland brown bitters). Rather than hitting the drain, pour them over flower hops and see how they become delicious new drinks.

This does genuinely work, for those wondering. I used Citra hops and the lager had this beautiful peachy, grassy, tropical aroma to it, even after just a minute or two, and it completely changed the beer. The only issue was that the hops and the plunger kicked the carbonation out of the beer, but I think that sacrificing bubbles for hop aroma is a fair swap.

Lupulin vs Scoville

This one bugs me: hops vs chilli heat. The go-to food and beer match for anything spicy is so often something super hoppy. But I think it's a terrible way to go: hops kick at the capsicum heat of chilli and rather than mellowing the mouthful, it sends it in incendiary new directions of flaming bitterness which leaves the tongue begging for you to stop. How can that be a good thing?

I don't want a bite of hot food to be followed by a crack of hop bitterness – they poke each other, make each other more intense, and then set of the pain and bitterness receptors which kicks in the get-the-hell-away flight mechanism. Instead of hops, what I want is something cooling and refreshing: a wheat beer, an oatmeal stout, a helles. Rather than trying to put the Scoville scorch out with more heat, these beers with their cool, rounded, smooth flavours are soothing and balancing.

I've never understood English IPA and curry and never got the idea of Mexican food with US IPA; they fight rather than play. There are, however, some good matches with heat and hops, but these rely on malt sweetness to balance and hop fragrance (instead of bitterness) to lift it: spiced Jerk chicken and IPA can be brilliant and Thai dishes with Pacific pale ales. These work as the flavours balance each other. Balance is key when it comes to getting food and beer matching right. There’s no balance is big hop bitterness and fiery chilli heat.

Does anyone actually think that really bitter, hopped-up beers work with very spicy, chilli-up foods? 

What beer would you pair with it?

I’ve always thought that food would be what propelled beer into the minds of the masses. A couple of newspaper columns or a TV show, centred on beer and food, would elevate beer onto the same lofty level as wine, lifting it to be the alternative choice, something not to fear and instead something which adds genuine variety and a wide range of flavour to the eating experience.

But it hasn’t happened yet.

For four years it’s been like ‘it’s coming, I can feel it’ or ‘we’re really close with beer now’. But still we wait. The food and beer thing never gets that attention we’ve been expecting or hoping for. Yeah, there’s the occasional moment of breakthrough, but it’s never enough to make it consistent, or it’s presented by those who don’t know beer as well as they know other drinks or food.

Yet beer is cool right now. It’s a hot trend – it’s got provenance, it’s seen as something changing, challenging and exciting, people are getting interested in it and it’s an affordable luxury. To know about good beer is like knowing how to fillet a fish, choose between a thyme and rosemary and eat with chop sticks. Beer, like the others, takes a little effort to understand it, but once you get it you realise it’s easy.

With the growing interest, is aligning the meal table with the beer glass the right way to go? There’s a lot going against it: old fashioned prejudice is like a big bouncer on the door with arms crossed; it’s a default mindset thing – beer is for the pub or for curries and pizza while wine is for the dinner table or for finer foods; it’s difficult to educate people onto something new. Visuals are another thing: I think 500ml bottles are very unappealing (Fuller’s and Thornbridge are classy and sleek exceptions) and much branding leaves beer looking like it’s wearing grubby jeans and a worn old t-shirt (thankfully some hit the smart-casual middle ground). But at the same time, beer is the relaxed drink of choice and pushing it towards shiny cutlery and china plates formalises it, forcing it into a situation which it isn’t comfortable in.

Prescriptive pieces which say lager is like white wine and stout is like red wine are tiresome now and makes me think that I should just have a white wine. Likewise, I’m not sure how many more times I can read the cut, compliment and contrast approach – is that the best we can do? It’s the fun things which will put beer and food together, the natural and casual alliance. Like Leigh’s food and beer pairings – always simple and always good, it’s normal food and good tasting beer and it somehow feels happily coincidental and serendipitous that they’ve come together.

Beer and food is an important idea together but it hasn’t kicked on yet so maybe we need a new approach. Until it feels natural and normal then beer and food is always going to feel like we’re promoting something which isn’t ready for the top job (even if we know in reality that it could do it) or which is getting attention as a novelty idea. Maybe that TV programme will come soon. Maybe that column will be hitting the papers. Maybe not.

I love beer and food together. I’m not going to stop matching them as I like doing it. I also do still think that it plays an important role in the appreciation of beer, but perhaps that appreciation comes through learning more about beer on its own, backed up by knowledge of food in general, rather than ‘try these two together and you’ll discover that you do like beer, after all!’ Beer dinners are great as they introduce the idea of beer and food, but making it overly formal is a step in the wrong direction.

Does beer need food or do we just keep throwing bottles at it in the hope that one day we’ll get something back from it? What do you think?

Craft Beer at Petco Park

Now this is more like it. Stalls dedicated to craft beers and bottles in fridges. Hops everywhere. There's even a double IPA. 'Aw man, the line for Big Eye is always the longest,' says the guy behind me in the queue for the Ballast Point.

Two home runs in the first innings - that's the beer and the game. 5-0 to Miami and San Diego are down. Stone, Karl Strass, Kona, Ballast Point, New Belgium, Widmer and others. And it's spread around the ballpark; it's not hidden away. There's even a fancy wine shop selling carafes.

They take the drinks seriously at Petco Park. It's just a shame the players don't score as many hits as the beer bars.