Taking on Santa Rosa Beer Festival 2008

Q: What do you get if you mix one part food, three parts California beer, and 17,000 parts sunshine? 

A: The Santa Rosa Beer Festival.

I bet some people would say they had fun at the festival despite the heat, but I come firmly down on the side of having had fun at the festival because of the heat (at least in part – friends and beer supplied the rest of the fun).  Hey, at least this is California.  When we get heat, it’s dry heat, not the mosquito-laden wet heat of the south, or northeast.  I’m not a big fan of feeling like I’m drowning in a sticky swamp of what could have been my last batch of homebrew during the boil phase. 

The day got off to a bit of a slow start, as I spent some time recovering from the “Belizean” themed party my friends had thrown the night before.  Apparently, celebrating the culture of Belize involves eating loads of (damn good) ceviche, loading up everything else on your plate with deadly Marie Sharps hot sauce, and drinking paper umbrella-laden concoctions known as a ‘dirty banana’.  Or at least, around here it does. 

But by 11:00am, I was on my way, thanks to the generosity of Gail & Steve from Beer by BARTwho had offered me a ride.  On the way up, we managed to cover topics from the fairly run of the mill beer geek speak (the hop “class” we had taken two nights ago at Brewcraft [more on this in another post], non-hopped beers, the selection at Bender’s) to the esoteric (the culinary uses of the acorns of California oaks). 

When we arrived, we were greeted by a formidable line, though it dwindled quickly once they opened the gates.  We also met up with Sam, Mandy, and later Kevin and Tracy from Presidio Brew Club. (At left)

I have notes on the first five or six beers I tasted.  Or at least, I did.  I didn’t have my handy red notebook with me (thanks day time employer for the notebooks!) so I had to make do with a scrap of paper that I picked up at one of the tables.  Apparently somewhere along the way, this was lost.  But that’s ok because I think there’s only one beer I really want to write about: Moonlight Brewing’s Out to Lunch. 

Out to Lunch is another no-hop ale from Moonlight Brewing, following the Working for Tips that I discussed in the Boonville Beer Festival post.  While Working for Tips is a brown ale made with redwood tips.  Except for some slight piney-ness beyond the normal band of piney-ness of certain hops, the WfT tastes just like a hopped beer.  Plenty bitter, not tooearthy or resinous, I think I could have drunk a whole taster without guessing something was up if I hadn’t known ahead of time.  I bring this all up because I feel the same way about the Out to Lunch.  It was a golden colored ale brewed with blood oranges, cherries, and black pepper, according to the guy (not Brian) manning the booth.  It tasted very round, with no one flavor overpowering the others, and the redwood tips blending in extremely well, especially given that this wasn’t intended to be a very “hoppy” beer to begin with.  The orange flavor was neither the tart citrus that comes with a Cascade hopped beer, nor the spiced orange, reminiscent of clove-studded Christmas citrus, of a wit beer.  It was slightly sweet, with an intense actual orange flavor, like the smell of fresh squeezed oj in the morning.  I personally think ok always smells better than it tastes, so I was a big fan of this beer for seeming to capture the best elements of the oj smell in its taste. 

I also thought it was interesting that here we have another pepper beer.  Coming as it does after the La Fleurette from Russian River (roses, violets, orange blossom honey, elderberries, and black pepper) and the Avery Fifteen (black mission figs, hibiscus, and white pepper, fermented with brett), it seems we have a certifiable trend on our hands now.  My guess would be that the brewers do this to cut the sweetness of the fruit (or flowers and honey as the case may be).  If they didn’t add the pepper they might end up with something like (sorry, Boston Beer Co)  Sam Adams Cherry Wheat. 

After making a full lap of the booths once, the tasting gave way to socializing.  I met up with James, another survivor of our Belizean adventure.  Then at 2:30, I met up with Jay Brooks from Brookston Beer Bulletin (poor Jay, that’s him ducking out from behind the tree), Chris and Merideth from The Beer Geek (on either side of Jay), and was reunited with Gail and Steve from Beer by BART (at right), after having lost them in the crowd.  This was made possible in large part by the Bay Area Beer Bloggers community that Jay had just recently established.  Check out his initial posting or the group’s home page if you want to learn more.  

We also stopped Tom Dalldorf of the Celebrator as he walked by when we realized that he and Gail were wearing the same hops-themed Hawaiian shirt.  I loved Gail’s comment that she has gotten more kudos on her fashion taste from wearing this shirt than she ever got when trying to be particularly fashionable. 

I ended up going back to Moonlight for seconds (another helping of Out to Lunch) and thirds (Death and Taxes) and found that Brian Huntis not nearly the introvert that his reputation had made him out to be.  Of the times I’ve spotted him around City Beer Store or Toronado before, I always hesitated to say hi, because I had heard that although he was a nice guy, he wasn’t such a big fan of conversations with strangers.  Maybe it was the abundant sunshine, or the warm glow of knowing he was pouring some of the best of the fest from his kegs, or just the fact of the matter that reputations are so often wrong, but when I introduced myself he was smiley, approachable, and one might even say downright chatty. 

The end of the festival was a bit rowdy, as any event where hundreds of people have been drinking beer for four hours will inevitably be.  There were guys dropping their glasses, causing everyone around them to start a cheer that would spread across the lawn, picking up momentum where it went.  I have to admit, and maybe this just means I’m an oldster before my time, but I’m never really gotten the appeal of this.  The intervals between the crowd-wide cheers shortens as the event goes on, making it really difficult to talk to anyone.  In fact, I’d venture you could judge a festival’s proportion of sober and/or happily tipsy craft beer appreciators to the number of drunken idiots who don’t know a dunkelweizen from a doppelbock by the number of times the crowd cheers.  SFIBF?  Lots of cheering.  SRBF? Moderate amount of cheering.  WABL Oktoberfest? No cheering, that I can recall. 

We ended the day by heading back with the rest of the Presidio Brew crew to Sam’s place in Rohnert Park and manning the patio until the sun went down.  It was a fantastically fun event, with great beer and great new friends.  I even managed to avoid getting lobsterized, thanks to Tracy’s emergency provision of sunscreen.  What more can you ask for?