The Mother of All Father’s Day Festivals

I spent this weekend in Seattle, visiting my sister on a weekend that conveniently (ok, not entirely coincidentally) coincided with the Washington Beer Lovers (WABL) Father’s Day Festival.  [Pictures to be added to this post this evening]

We went on Friday night and then on Saturday during the day, which brings me to the first topic I want to cover: why the WABL festivals are some of the best run festivals around.  First, I guess I ought to explain what is so great about them before giving my thoughts on what makes them this way. 

1. Great breadth and depth of selection: The festival had 55 breweries serving 169 beers.  I spent a lot of time doing some online research today to categorize all these beers, and though my categorization is certainly subject to debate, I count at least one beer from each of the 22 Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) beer styles, and representation of 50 of the 79 BJCP sub-styles.  Most brewers bring three or four beers, and on Friday night it was ‘Cask IPA’ night, so lots of the booths had special cask releases.  There is a full list of the beers served, by brewery and by style, at the end of this post.
2. Great location: Both of the WABL festivals I’ve been to (Oktoberfest 2007, Father’s Day 2008) have been held in St. Edwards State Park in Kenmore, WA, at the north end of Lake Washington, near Seattle.  I don’t know if WABL bribes the sun gods to postpone the usual Seattle gloominess each time they throw a festival (and if so, how I can get in on that on San Francisco’s behalf), but it is always 75 degrees and sunny when they throw their shindigs.  The park itself is beautiful, with plenty of benches for drinking and eating, and parking is abundant and convenient.  The one catch? Taking public transit is very difficult, so a designated driver is a necessity.  Of course, I’ve found that most Seattellians (Seattlites?) wouldn’t take the public bus if stopped at their front door, blared their name and the theme song to Bonanza, and offered to drop them at their destination straight away.  So, perhaps no one else was frustrated by the need to drive.  We developed an alternate solution anyway…to be described later.
3. No lines for beer, short lines for food: Even though the park felt happily (but not uncomfortably) crowded, I never had to wait for more than two people to get their glasses filled before I got my beer.  Often, I could just walk on up to refill.  They also had real food available for purchase, that covered the necessities (wursts), the luxuries (east African cuisine), and the oddities (including the unfortunately named Dingleberries – I’m not sure the Shiskaberry’s [sic] chain selling these items is aware of their slang meaning).  The lines were reasonable on Saturday (<10 minutes) and though they were long on Friday, that was because only one booth was open.  Maybe next year they’ll convince more vendors to open both nights.
4. No inebriated mayhem: I’m all for trying all those interesting beers I might not be able to find again (as long as I’m not driving), social lubrication, and silliness.  However, I’ve been to more than a few festivals (ahem, San Francisco International Beer Festival) where silliness devolves into obnoxious shouting, dangerous glass smashing, and misguidedly macho fighting.  It was almost uncanny how all of the above, even the almost obligatory crowd cheering at the end of the day when someone spills, was entirely absent from the WABL fest.  This is even more impressive when you know how many people they had there, and that they ran from 11:00am to 8:00pm on Saturday.  That’s right, nine hours.  SFIBF can’t even keep its patrons sober for three. 



5. Special, but not too prominent, members-only features: I think it’s really fun that WABL goes the extra mile for its dues-paying members (glass instead of plastic tastingware, an extra drink token, passport stamps good towards a free growler coozy [oh, my!]).  I also love that they don’t go too over the top, which would turn the festival into an elitist-feeling us vs. the rest type of event.  I mean, I’m pretty sure the non-members don’t feel too jealous and excluded, and aren’t standing around thinking, “Argh!  Look at all those growler coozies!  I want one so badly, but dammit, I just can’t afford WABL membership dues!”
6. Friendly and knowledgeable pourers:  Almost every booth had brewery employees, whether brewers or brewery reps, pouring their beer.  And the scant few that didn’t usually had cheerful and well-drunk (is that the beer world equivalent to the literary world’s well-read?) homebrewers manning the booth.  Any time I had a question along the lines of “Is this a Scotch ale or just a Scottish ale?”, “What hops are in here?”, or “What’s the purpose of white flour in the mash?”, the pourers always had the answer. 
7. Abundant and sparklingly sanitary toilets: This can be the downfall of an otherwise fantastic festival, because there’s only so long “well-hydrated” festival goers will cross their legs and wait before taking matters into their hands behind the closest patch of fairly dense shrubbery, or if male, against any object that presents a half interesting target.  I didn’t have to wait more than 30 seconds on either Friday or Saturday, and the port-a-pots were the least disgusting I’ve ever been forced to frequent.  They even had hand sanitizing gel dispensers!

Festival organizers ought to take note: I think if you can nail the seven items above, you’re going to throw an event to remember.  Some of the measures an organizer needs to take to get these things right are self explanatory (have port-a-pots, lots and lots), but there are a few things WABL does that I think really contribute especially well to running a great festival:

1. Use tokens instead of unlimited tastes: I thought the WABL token system was a bummer at first, but I think it does more than anything else to ensure that everyone has a good time.  Instead of charging $30+, as most festivals with unlimited tasting do, WABL charges $15, gives you 6 tokens with your ticket, and charges $1.50 for additional tokens.  For what you’d pay at any other festival, you can taste 16 or more beers.  I say more because each pour is 3 – 4 ounces (depending on whether you got the plastic non-member glass or the larger glass WABL member glass), so it’s easy to share with friends to taste just a sip or two of something new.  Plus, last time around the brewers gave away lots of free tastes.  This year the festival organizers were cracking down on them, but a few brewers would occasionally “forget” to ask for a token, or use one of the 50 ‘comp tokens’ granted per booth to ‘buy you a taste’ of their beers.  Why this is so good:
   • It changes the whole “get your money’s worth” mentality to “what do I really want next” and weeds out those obviously just there to get drunk
   • It gives the organizers an easier way to cut off drunk festival-goers: they now have two lines of defense, the pourers and the token sellers, either of whom can cut off polluted patrons
   • It lowers the bar for admission, making it more accessible to more people, so you can bring along a bigger group of friends and family, and convert more of your non-beer drinking friends who don’t want to shell out big money for a festival devoted to a beverage of which they’re not (yet) a fan.
2. Build in special features: There are a few staples common to every beer festival: beer (obviously), food (often meat), and music (oompah or otherwise).  But WABL clearly puts a lot of thought into what else they can do.  The Friday cask night is an obvious example.  It’s something extra for the real beer lovers, can build out an otherwise anemic Friday night crowd, and gives the brewers a chance to showcase their talents for core customers.  They also have a brewers keg toss on Saturday, clever merchandise, and passport stamps for WABL members.  The passport is such a genius marketing idea.  The cost of producing and stamping them each time a customer shows up at a WABL event is miniscule compared to the amount WABL members spend on tickets sales and pint purchases at WABL events.  I’m pretty sure no one carries around their passport for the free pint you get at 15 stamps (I mean, it’s a nice bonus but there are easier and cheaper ways to get a free pint), but it builds loyalty to the WABL community, builds brand identity with members, reminds members when they see it sitting on their desks to go to the next WABL event, and gets some competitive juices going.  I don’t care what business I’m in next, it will have passports. 

Enough about the festival as a whole though, I know the real question at hand is, “So how was the beer?”

I can’t tell you about everything I tasted, given that by my count I tried a few sips or more of 40 beers over the course of the two days, but I will tell you about my favorites and about a few especially unique beers.

Summer is usually my least favorite beer season because there is a preponderance of beers from “light and crisp” category that I tend to find a little boring.  If I want light and crisp, well, I’ll have an iced tea.  I fully admit that this is a personal bias, and that drinking a pilsner in a lawn chair on a freshly mowed front yard is one of the iconic images of American beer.  But, if I’m going to go light, I still want some complexity in my beer, and I’ll go for a saison (like the Firestone Lil’ Opal I had again last night at Toronado, yum!) for some fruitiness or a rye pale ale (like the Bear Republic Hop Rod Rye) for some spiciness.

“Light and crisp” beers were in abundance at the WABL Fest, in that I counted 33 beers from the light lager, pilsner, and light hybrid (primarily blondes and American wheats) beer styles.  I don’t have any particular comment on these beers though, since I spent most of my time with the IPAs (36 examples, the best represented style at the festival), Scotch beers (6 examples), and tripels (5 beers).

My favorite IPA was the Northern Lights IPA from Spokane, WA.  My notes from this festival as a whole are very brief, scribblings on the side of my beer booth map, but I can tell you at least that this one was very grapefruit-y.  I guess we know they haven’t run out of their supply of Cascades. 

There are a few others worth noting for pushing the bounds of the style.  These included the Laughing Dog Black IPA from Sandpoint, ID; the Diamond Knot Triple Simcoe IPA on cask from Mukilteo, WA; and the Boundary Bay Single Hop Crystal IPA from Bellingham, WA.  The Laughing Dog had a great floral hop aroma and a mild roast flavor, but was way too carbonated for my taste.  The Diamond Knot was very peppery and leafy, like the smell of old growth forest.  The pourer explained to me that it’s not a ‘Triple IPA’, but that it is simcoe hopped three times, and that there were 9 oz. of the green stuff dry hopping the beer in its cask as we spoke.  Simcoe hops are a relatively new American variety that is similar to a higher alpha acid version of Cascades, brewed to be bitter but not too astringent, with a piney and mildly citric aroma.  The other single hop beer was the Boundary Bay, made with crystal hops, which are an American hybrid of German Hallertau hops.  They have a spicy taste, with a clean finish, and are often used more for aroma than bitterness.  This may explain why my notes on the crystal IPA include ‘round and balanced.’  Unlike a simcoe hop bomb, a crystal beer is going to keep hop bitterness in check. 

I was very happy to find that there were so many Scotch ales on tap, not only because I didn’t know to expect them at a summer festival, but because they have already become my new favorite style of the moment.  My favorite of the Scotch ales was the Scuttlebutt 12 Year Anniversary Scotch Ale on cask from Everett, WA.  Some of the others had all the sugar of a Scotch, but none of the unique flavor.  Scuttlebutt got the smoky peat flavor right, and had the sweetness under control, presenting a flavor more in the line of nut toffee than brown sugar.    

The last style that I sampled broadly was Belgian-style tripels.  The best of the bunch, in my opinion, was the Water Street Honey Tripel from Port Townsend, WA, followed closely by the Big Time Brewery Trombipulator on cask from Seattle, WA.  I liked the Water Street brew because the flavor of the honey came through without all the honey sweetness.  It was a really unique experience to taste the ‘essence’ of honey without an intense sugar rush.  I liked the Big Time tripel because the cask really let the beer shine.  All the fruity tripel esters came wafting out and were as strong in the taste as in the aroma because there was no tongue numbing chill or hyper-carbonation. 

The last few highlights of the festival for me were the Quilter’s Irish Death, an imperial sweet stout from Iron Horse Brewery in Ellensburg, WA, and a couple imperial red ales from Iron Horse and Water Street (those two again!).  What I liked about the QID was that it was a great example of how a beer drinker’s tastes change over time.  Last time I had this, about 9 months ago at the WABL Oktoberfest, I just thought it was too much.  This time, I thought it was worth going back for seconds, a rarity at the festival given the amount of choices and the high bar that set for seconds.  The imperial reds, the Water Street Big Phatty and the Iron Horse Loco Red, I liked for having the assertive hoppiness of a double IPA, but also the malt backbone to stand up to the hops, something a lot of the new DIPAs lack. 

But lest you think the festival was all drinking, I should also tell you about what else was going on outside of all the beer sipping. 

Early on Friday evening, we ran into Frank, a friend of Melissa’s.  Melissa has been taking sign language classes and met Frank at deaf night at a local pub.  Since Frank mostly communicates by sign, and Allie and I knew zero sign language (at the beginning of the night at least), the night began with us making improvised hand gestures to try to communicate ideas like “The Gallagher’s Nut House Brown is gross, it has a bizarrely strong off-flavor of fake cherry and reminds me of a cross between Dr. Pepper and Robitussin,” or “You should try the Elysian Wit, it has orange and coriander in the brew, but also ginger, tamarind, and lemongrass.”  Needless to say, this did not really succeed, so Frank and Melissa started teaching me actual signs.  I’m not sure what all I remember except “beer” and “Scotch”. 

And our designated driver problem Friday evening was solved when Allie’s boss, invited us over to her house, practically walking distance from the festival, for a fondue dinner.  The intent of the dinner was to spend some time eating and not drinking to make sure our drive home was safe.  It ended up turning into the opposite, with fair amounts of both eating and drinking, ending with Allie, Melissa, myself, another co-worker, Allie’s boss’ son, and the son’s two friends, all sleeping over.  It reminded me of the fantastic type of party I hadn’t been to since senior year of high school, where no one taxis or drives home at 2:00am, and everyone just camps out wherever they end up at the end of the night.  Unless of course, that is, if you are me, and Melissa and Adam physically move you out of the bed you fell asleep in and onto the floor so that others could sleep in the bed.  How rude!  I woke up very confused in the morning. 

On Saturday, after returning home, showering, and filling up of on our first of two very delicious brunches of the weekend at the Rusty Pelican Café, we headed back over to the park for day two of the festival.  Our morning began auspiciously when we were cheerily accosted by a man in a utilikilt.  As I always say (or rather as I believe Melissa said, and I‘m going to say from now on), “It’s not a beer festival until there’s a utilikilt.” 

I think the high point for me of Saturday was seeing a Randall in action for the first time.  It’s a filtered infuser of sorts made by Dogfish Head, used to infuse beers with flavor, usually hops, in real time, right before it goes into your glass.  It’s a great way to get to know what different varieties of hops taste like, since you can take the same beer, pack two Randalls full of two different kinds of hops, infuse the beer two ways, and then taste your new hop-infused beers side by side.  This time, Dogfish Head had hops and apricots in the Randall and was running their Aprihop beer through it.  I was in line for Elysian (one of my all-time favorite breweries — in fact, their saison, which I drank Saturday at dinner, post festival, may be my favorite beer of the weekend) when I spotted the Randall and got so distracted I could barely order.  My sister said I was staring.  I think my obsession with craft beer and the people/tools that bring it into being is like that of guys with boobs or kids with puppies or kittens: It’s the kind of thing that can make me walk into a telephone pole if I’m not careful. 

We finished up Saturday pretty quietly, drove ourselves home and vegged out on the couch for the rest of the evening.  I thought Sunday would also be pretty relaxed (a little brunch, a little time outside in the sun), but little did I know the cycling ambitions Julia and Kate had acquired since moving to Seattle.  I agreed that a bike ride on Sunday would be nice, and was thinking this meant maybe 10 miles round-trip, tops.  I hadn’t really given it much thought until Julia let it slip that the ride she had in mind was 40 miles long.  Hells no!  Do I look like Armstrong is my middle name?  I don’t even wear one of the yellow rubber bracelets, much less ride a bike.  I haven’t been on a bike since before I had a driver’s license.  There’s no way I was coming back to cycling via a 40 mile ride.  As Julia started explaining that we could do the only 25 mile ride instead, I realized I was in trouble.  Luckily for me, three good things happened: (1) we fortified ourselves for the day at the exceptional Portage Bay Café, (2) Kate was willing to ride slowly with me on the first half of the ride, and (3) when we had five miles left to go, Melissa’s bike broke irreparably, and I got to sit and wait with her while the others finished their ride and came back to pick us up.  All in all, not bad, unless you consider that it’s two days later and my rear is still recovering from the damage inflicted by the none too soft bicycle seat.  For more pictures, click here.

List of breweries at WABL Festival:

I tried to paste the list in here but it kept getting cut off, so now you can view the list here in PDF format.