Don’t forget après in your ski season preparations

Oct. 26, 2012

With snow in the forecast in coming days and Loveland and Arapahoe Basin premiering their individual ribbons of chaos for skiing and riding, it’s time to take stock of your personal provisions for the ski season. Ski conditioning classes have been squarely kicking my butt (whenever I can drag said butt out of bed in the morning to attend), and my sticks are standing at the ready for a final tune before Opening Day at Vail on Nov. 16. That leaves only one other key area of preparation to be addressed: après.

You can’t ride into winter without inspecting every arrow in your quiver of fun, from first tracks to last call.

And if you still need some help, head down to the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Nov. 2-4. For the second year in a row, the Colorado Ski & Snowboard Expo will take a double-barreled approach to shelling you into the ski season. If you want to grab some last-minute deals on gear, the expo features the largest ski and snowboard sale in the state, with prices marked down 40 percent to 75 percent on last season’s threads and shreds. But the really brilliant part is that you can don your new winter duds and strut over to the adjoining Rocky Mountain Brew Fest to test your après prowess. Find out if that sweet new softshell can handle a steady drizzle of wobbling IPA or whether you need some work on ski boot walking after a few brews by sampling the wares of these Colorado breweries:

>> AC Golden Brewing Co.

Steve Fletcher, a brewing with AC Golden, said the brewery would be pouring its flagship Colorado Native beer, as well as a relatively new offering, an India Pale Lager.

“It’s a pale lager, so it’s lagered, which really accentuates the character of the hops,” Fletcher said. “It’s more delicate, which makes the hop pop, and finishes really nice and crisp and clean.”

Fletcher has already taken his first few ski runs of the season and said the brewing and ski industries go hand in hand in Colorado because they seek to achieve the same results: have a great time and possibly try something outside your comfort zone.

“Obviously, what’s bigger in Colorado than the outdoors and riding and skiing. I think it’s a perfect blend of things to do,” he said. “Every time I’m up skiing or boarding, everybody is in a great, fun mood. Everybody is on vacation all day long — same with a beer festival.”

>> Elevation Beer Co.

The beer buffs at Elevation take their skiing, and their brewing, very seriously. The brewery divides its products into four categories, green, blue, black and double black, an homage to the universally recognized ski-slope rating hierarchy. Xandy Bustamante, co-founder and national sales and distribution manager, said Elevation, located just outside Salida in Poncha Springs, has a close relationship with nearby Monarch Mountain.

“The ski expo felt like a good fit for us, and we’re excited to be a part of it this year,” Bustamante said. “Our brewery is only six months old; it’s one of the newer ones in Colorado.”

Elevation will be pouring its First Cast IPA, 8 Second Kolsh and either Downpour, a double IPA, or Apis IV, a Belgian quad made with local honey. Elevation brews will be on tap for après at Monarch, Ski Cooper and a couple of places in Copper this winter, Bustamante said, and will also be making their way into the Vail Valley for the first time this season, starting with the black and double black series. Bustamante said the Elevation crew is looking forward to its first Colorado Ski & Snowboard Expo.

“We’re excited to go down there and pour beer for our target consumers, people like us,” he said.

 

>> Left Hand Brewing Co.

This will be the second trip to the expo and brew fest for Left Hand, said Josh Breckel, Colorado sales manager for the brewery. Left Hand will be pouring its signature Milk Stout Nitro and its Sawtooth Ale, a bronze-medal winner in the Ordinary or Special Bitter category at the recent Great American Beer Festival in Denver. The nitro version has a bit of a different mouth feel than the standard carbonated Milk Stout.

“CO2 is much more noticeable on the palate; it’s got that almost carbonic burning sensation on your cheeks and your tongue,” Breckel said. “(The Nitro is) much more smooth, creating a more creamy, rounder effect.”

Breckel said there isn’t a sexy story related to the brewery’s involvement in the expo. Coordinators reached out to Left Hand for the inaugural event last year, and the brewery agreed.

“Skiing is an important part of Colorado,” he said. “The people who get out there and ski and snowboard are definitely our demographic, and we want to support things that are interesting to them. … What I look forward to in any of these events is the guerrilla marketing aspect of it, talking to people who may not have had our beers before and introducing them to something that maybe becomes their new favorite beer.”

Big Choice, Bristol, Eddyline, Grand Lake, Great Divide, Odell and Ska breweries also will be in attendance pouring beers to help with your après conditioning.

Entry to the Colorado Ski & Snowboard Expo is $12, cash only. The Rocky Mountain Brew Fest is an additional $12 or $15 at the door, which includes three beer samples and one full beer. Additional sampling tickets also will be available for purchase. For more information on the expo and brew fest, including a list of exhibitors, or to buy advance tickets, visit http://www.bewisports.com/expos/denver.

Krista Driscoll

Hophead

Vail Daily Weekly

The best way to spend $20 in the valley

July 13, 2012 

We live in an expensive place, a place where 10 percent off barely covers the sales tax and people ride their bikes to work because it’s healthy, yes, but also because gas hovers right around $4 per gallon. So we adapt, we pick and choose when and where we splurge, and we’re constantly looking for the next slamming local deal. Well, my beer-drinking friends, I’ve found it.

Avery brewmaster Matt Thrall, bottom right, and his crew from
Avery Brewing, Dustin Lemoine, center, and Jason Hardwick,
left, taste food pairings from Executive Chef Todd Bemis,
rear, during Vail Cascade's Brewmaster Weekend recently
at Atwater restaurant in Vail.
Photo by Justin McCarty, Vail Daily.

The Vail Cascade, home of the annual Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywines festival, prides itself on its craft-beer program, and in March, the resort’s Atwater restaurant rolled out a new Brewmaster’s Weekend series. Each month, a new brewer shows up to show off a handful of select beers from one of Colorado’s craft breweries. The beers are paired with inventive small plates from executive chef Todd Bemis and his kitchen cronies, and the price tag comes in at a whopping $20.

To give you an idea of what you get for your hard-earned Andrew Jackson, I recently attended one of these small-plate sessions, co-hosted by Matt Thrall, head brewer at Avery Brewing Co., and scribbled some illegible notes on my placemat between bites. This is what I could derive from my shoddy penmanship:

The first beer was Avery’s Maharaja. We obviously wouldn’t be easing our palates into anything here. Thrall calls this beer “a slap in the face” — if you don’t like hops, you won’t like Maharaja. The double IPA is brewed with six to seven pounds of hops per barrel, a blend of Simcoe, Centennial and Chinook that imparts a piney, citrus-forward flavor. Bemis needed something that would stand up to the hops in the beer without elevating the spiciness. He and his crew of chefs landed on pulled Jidori chicken sopes with roasted poblano fennel and salsa verde.

My favorite thing about pairing beer with food is that each bite can bring out new flavors in the brew. In this case, the corn in the sopes helped mute the spice in the Maharaja so you could catch the more fragile flavors of floral and citrus. To bring the hops roaring back, we needed only to take a nibble of the gooseberry that garnished the plate.

For the second course, Bemis had the challenge of pairing one plate with two very different beers from Avery’s Holy Trinity series. The first, Salvation, is made with a Slovenian hop that lends a white-pepper flavor to the beer. The second beer was The Reverend, a strong, dark Belgian quad with a more malty profile — think caramel or raisin flavors. The solution was twofold: mango nigiri with smoked strawberry caviar and braised pork in a lop chung steamed bun.

On to the third beer of the Holy Trinity: Hog Heaven. Thrall calls this his desert-island beer: “If you were on a desert island, you’d want a case — no, a pallet — of this beer to wash up.” The beer has a dank aroma, which lends to its nickname of “dime bag in a bottle.” Originally a home brew created by Adam Avery himself, this one ranks at 100 international bittering units and 9.24 percent alcohol by volume.

Bemis’ “hogs and frogs” pairing for this beer was the first to cause me pause: I’d never had frog legs. I’m from Iowa; we used to catch frogs to use as fish bait. I wasn’t the only one at my table who seemed a bit apprehensive about it, but after a brief inspection, I dived right in. The amphibious little limbs were wrapped in beignet pillows with saffron mayo and sauce puttanesca, a sort of bastardized Southern tomato salsa. Once again, the pairing was dead on.

The fourth and final round was the knock-out punch. The beer, Samael’s (sch-males) oak-aged ale, comes from Avery’s demonic series.

“Samael was God’s knee-breaker,” Thrall said, and this 15.4 percent brute definitely packs a wallop. Thrall said it’s brewed more in the style of an English ale, heavy on the malt and light on the hops. The limited-release beer has a dark caramel color and a woody aroma that comes from being aged in American oak.

Bemis was given explicit instructions not to pair this sweet, strong ale with dessert. So the Atwater boys brainstormed and came up with a savory spin on bananas Foster. The dish featured seared foie gras with a slice of banana drizzled with pineapple sweet and sour and garnished with a fin of delicate dried pineapple. Bemis was able to showcase the fruit and malt characteristics of the beer without resorting to a cloying, syrupy finishing course.

Next up on the docket for this monthly frugal foray into beer and food pairing is a visit from Odell Brewing Co. on Aug. 17 and 18. Call the Vail Cascade at 970-476-7111 for more information or to reserve your spot.

Krista Driscoll

Hophead

Vail Daily Weekly 

Sour beer: Open wide and embrace the bacteria

June 1, 2012

There are tons of ways to make sour beer, but they all start with bacteria. This might seem counterintuitive to homebrewers who live by the code of sterilize, sanitize, clean and repeat when it comes to brewing beer. Most times, bacteria are the enemy and must be vanquished before they ruin an entire batch of what would have been tasty stuff. Not so with sours.

Andy "Hollywood" Parker, brewer and barrel herder, extols
the virtues of sour beers in the Avery barrel room in Boulder.

“A brewer is basically a janitor 75 percent of the time,” said Andy “Hollywood” Parker, senior brewer and barrel herder for Avery Brewing Co. “With barrel-aged beers, you throw most of that out the window.”

The bacteria produce the lactic or acetic acids that create the unmistakable flavors found in sour beers. The microorganisms are trapped in oak barrels with the beer and work for six months or a year or three or more to do their job, thriving on the trace amounts of oxygen that seep through the slightly porous wood into the barrel. Lactic acid has almost no smell and creates a tingling, sour sensation along the sides of your tongue. The funky, rustic aroma of some beers comes from acetic acid, Hollywood said, which has a vinegary flavor that’s a great component in small amounts.

But how do you channel the bacteria that make great beer? These microbes are floating around us everywhere right now. How do you isolate them? Do you even want to isolate them? A lot of Belgian sours are spontaneously fermented.

“They leave (the beer) out in a big swimming pool, whatever’s in that valley floats in, and they put that work into oak barrels and let it roll for years and years,” Hollywood said. “There are still a few traditional breweries in Belgium that are doing it that way. But it’s a lucky thing; it depends on what’s there.”

One valley could have a population of yeast and bacteria that make great beer, and the next valley over could be a dud. Rather than waiting for the building blocks to fall out of the air, many brewers have harnessed specific strains that they know create predictably palatable beer. Hollywood found his favorite strain of acid-producing bacteria in a barrel and has been propagating it from barrel to barrel to create sours for Avery. What was one barrel became 150, and he continues to play around with other strains from labs to get more variety. Each strain of bacteria creates a totally different flavor profile — even a single strain can be the catalyst for a wide range of brews.

Because sours are so labor intensive — tasting, barrel aging, more tasting, blending, another round of tasting — they are a little harder to come by. That’s what makes Avery’s Sour Fest on Saturday, June 2, special. Hollywood said the 400 available tickets were snatched up in a matter of minutes. If you were one of the lucky ones to procure your golden ticket, look forward to sampling around 60 sours from Crabtree, Crooked Stave, Deschutes, Dry Dock, Funkwerks, Great Divide, Mountain Sun, Odell and The Lost Abbey, among others.

From the Fridge: Avery’s Eremita III

Sour Fest may be sold out, but you can still dig up some great sour beers at local breweries and liquor stores. This week’s installment comes from Avery Brewing Co.’s fridge, not mine, but Eremita III is an enchanting, acidic enigma and worth a closer look. As its name indicates, this is the third beer in the Eremita series of sours.

The series is exclusive to the Avery Tap Room in Boulder, as Hollywood wanted to put all of his time and creativity into the beer instead of squandering it on label approval or bottling or trucking it around to festivals. Eremita I was really easy drinking, he said, and Eremita II was a blonde sauced with loads of peaches and apricots, giving it an incredibly fruity profile.

Eremita III comes from the same microbial stock as its predecessors, but it’s an animal all its own. This brew is a blend of five different beers from 12 different barrels. Hollywood spent months with a blind tasting panel and started with a bank of about 30 oak barrels to come up with this rich, dark beer that has an earthy, sour aroma from just the right amount of acetic acid.

“After about 20 to 30 blends, we narrowed it down to those 12 barrels, and each of those barrels added something to that complex blend,” Hollywood said. “It’s not like hey, we put some beer in a barrel. It takes a lot of work. And by work I mean sitting around and tasting beer. We’re not sitting around drinking beer; we’re tasting beer — we’ll plan our day around not having coffee beforehand or eating beforehand.”

And when this big, tongue-tingling beer is gone, it’s gone.

“I’m not even interested in trying (to replicate any of the Eremita beers),” Hollywood said. “I probably can’t reproduce Eremita. Is it possible? Maybe, but that’s not as interesting to me as creating something new and different.”

Krista Driscoll

Hophead

Vail Daily Weekly 

Hophead celebrates American Craft Beer Week

May 11, 2012

American Craft Beer Week is upon us, and this rollicking, nationwide celebration presents the perfect opportunity to roll out the Vail Daily Weekly’s new column about beer. Ladies, gentlemen, beer snobs — I give you Hophead.

Double fisting at Aspen Brewing Co. Photo by Devin Schow.

Each week, I will dive into the sea of beer culture and surface with some nugget of truth that every beer lover should know. We’ll cover everything from beer history and evolution to beer styles, from commercial production to home brewing. Think of it as a launch pad for your beer education, a two-handed shove out of your mundane beer-drinking existence.

I’ll also do a weekly mini feature titled From the Fridge that showcases a particular beer that I’m enjoying at the moment. I try not to ever buy the same beer twice, and with hundreds of microbreweries popping up all over the country every year, there’s always a reason to seek out a new and interesting brew.

I don’t purport to be a beer expert. It wasn’t so long ago that I was sneaking crappy beer out of my parents’ fridge, and it takes a lifetime, nay many lifetimes, to accumulate a sliver of knowledge about this wonderful, heady stuff. But what I lack in years on the pint, I make up for in enthusiasm and a dearth of vanity about leaning on those who are experts in the field. If I don’t know the answer, I will find someone who does.

So that brings us back to this week’s celebration of craft beer, and the best thing about it is that there’s a reason to drink a bucket of suds every day of the week:

Make the trek to Longmont on Saturday, May 12, for a collaborative event between Oskar Blues and Ska Brewing. Ska will expropriate half of the bar at Oskar Blues Home Made Liquids & Solids in a nonhostile tap takeover. The guys from Durango are bringing 15 of their favorite brews, and Oskar Blues will throw down its own staples, as well as a potpourri of specialty beers. Also part of Colorado Beer Week, Ska will be hosting a guided cruiser crawl amongst four bars in downtown Denver on Sunday, May 13. Crawlers get their first beer for free and discounts on all Ska beers after that. Visit www.skabrewing.com or www.oskarblues.com for more information.

You can’t go on a weeklong bingo bender without starting on Monday. About a dozen breweries in Northern Colorado have banded together with the American Brewers Association to present brewery bingo. Grab a bingo card at a participating brewery in Greeley, Berthoud, Loveland or Fort Collins  — Odell’s, New Belgium, City Star, Grimm Bros., Crabtree and Funkwerks are all playing the game — and get a stamp every time you try a beer listed on the card. Complete a bingo line, and you win a T-shirt. You have all week, through Sunday, May 20, to play the game. For more information, visit www.craftbeer.com.

Make a mid-week pit stop at Strange Brewing Co. in Denver for Nostalgia Tuesday on May 15. In honor of the brewery’s second anniversary, head brewer Tim Myers is rolling out some classic brews. Share a pint in Strange’s brand-new biergarten, or come back later in the week for live music Thursday, May 17, and Friday, May 18, and the big anniversary party on Saturday, May 19, starting with kegs and eggs at 9 a.m. For details, visit www.strangebrewingco.com.

Beer week also has some love for the ladies. Sisterhood of the Hop, a female brew club in Boulder, will be hosting a screening of the documentary “The Love of Beer” at the Avery Brewing Co. Barrel Aging Cellar in Boulder on Wednesday, May 16. The feature-length film celebrates women in the beer industry, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. Tickets are $10 and include a pint of beer. Visit www.averybrewing.com for more information.

The local guys are throwing themselves into the fray this week, too. Crazy Mountain Brewing Co. fans are invited to visit the brewery’s Facebook page and submit entries to a trivia contest throughout the week. A winner will be drawn on Friday, May 18, at a special event at the brewery’s tasting room. The night will feature music from the Stache from 6 to 10 p.m. and food from Belmont Deli, and the trivia drawing will happen near the end of the evening. For more information, visit www.crazymountainbrewery.com.

For full calendars of events and everything else you need to know about beer week, visit www.cobeerweek.com or www.craftbeer.com.

American Craft Beer Week is the perfect opportunity to cozy up and get friendly with the saucy mistress that is beer. Grab a blonde, brunette or red-headed craft-beer courtesan, and enjoy the ride.

Krista Driscoll

Hophead
Vail Daily Weekly