I was fortunate once again to be able to travel to Washington, DC to attend the second SAVOR event held by the Brewers’ Association. This year the location was the National Building Museum, which had plenty more room than last year’s location. This meant less crowding and easier to see lines for all of the stations. This year was also improved by having the breweries using similar food for their pairings grouped together at the same table, which made trying multiple beers with the same food much easier than before. Many breweries were represented at the event including our own local craft brewery, Great Lakes Brewing Company. I didn’t try any of their beers that evening, of course. Here is a picture from above to get an idea of it:
SAVOR also has smaller break-out sessions called salons that offer a smaller venue for one or more brewers to speak or showcase a particular product. The first salon I attended was held by Sam Calagione from Dogfish Head in Delaware. Dogfish Head is known for doing what they like to call “off-centered ales for off-centered people,” so when an archaeologist discovers the remnants of a vessel likely having contained a fermented beverage, who better to attempt a modern interpretation of it than Dogfish? There were three of these sorts of beers presented for tasting. The first I had had before, which is called Midas Touch. It is generally available, so you ought to be able to pick that one up easily. The second was called Chateau Jiahu. It is taken from a Chinese clay pot that is believed to be over 9,000 years old. The last, called Theobroma, was taken from an archaeological dig done in Central America. The first two were somewhat similar, both having honey and grapes in the recipe, but the third was surprisingly different. It was based more around cacao and chile peppers, making it quite a bit different than I expected. Overall, Sam gave his usual spirited opinion of the Reinheitsgebot (Bavarian Beer Purity Law) and pigeonholing beer in general. Sam is an excellent speaker on the topic of brewing outside the norms, and I highly recommend catching him if you get the chance.
The second session I attended was given by Rob Tod of Allagash Brewing and Peter Bouckaert of New Belgium Brewing. This was done more as a private tasting than an educational session. The maximum attendance size was much smaller for this, so I was fortunate to get tickets. Both Rob and Peter discussed a few beers they have been working on and the sort of accidental success that sometimes happens with beer fermented with unknown or wild yeasts. I had heard Rob’s head brewer, Jason Perkins, discuss the wild fermentation process on Basic Brewing Radio not too long ago, so I was excited to both hear Rob discuss it as well, plus actually get to try the beer. As much as I enjoyed Sam’s presentation, I will probably put more focus on these private tasting salons next year as I enjoyed the cozier atmosphere and opportunity to have discussion rather than lecture. Here is a shot from the session:
The only complaint I had and heard from a few other people was that the food was of lower quality than the year before. I would agree that the food was not as imaginative as it was last year, but the catering staff did a much better job of keeping everything stocked, which I think was an improvement overall from last year. I already talked about what I am going to do differently as an attendee next year, so I guess I would have to recommend this event to anyone as I am certainly going again next year myself.
I am adding another complaint. For those of you who did not attend, a little background would be helpful. Both years now, SAVOR has offered a parting gift to compliment the experience. I love this idea as it lets you continue to enjoy things about the event after it is over. This year, the gift was a USB drive containing recipes and other information about the beers and breweries. Or at least that’s what they said it was. I popped this into the drive not long after I published this post originally and was horrified to find that it would not open on my Mac. Because I work in technology, I am used to these sorts of things coming up, so I started up my Windows virtual machine on the Mac, and connected the USB drive into the virtual machine. My horror doubled when the first thing that happened was Norton Anti-Virus popping up telling me that there is a Tracking Cookie on the drive. I sigh as I normally do and tell Norton to fix it. Once I get into the drive to look around, my horror has now tripled as I see that drive only contains a web browser launcher to use this cookie and take me to a webpage on the Internet. I also discover that a proprietary format of a CD image inside the filesystem was used to create the drive, which was why the Mac wanted nothing to do with it.
After calming down a little at this technological ineptitude, I recalled getting an email for a survey about SAVOR that had a link in it. I read the email again, and lo and behold, the link that takes me directly to the content without having to mess around with the USB drive. I instantly forgave the designers because they gave me an alternate way to access the information, but as I am looking through the content, I arrive at a page about beer styles. I am reading through it, and I see that Hefeweizen and Kölsch are listed under the Lagers section. Excuse me? I am certainly not a certified Beer Judge nor an expert in the field, but after looking around the Internet a little on the topic, I confirmed my suspicion that these are indeed types of ale. I think this kind of misinformation coming from the trade association for craft beer is such a crushing defeat to an otherwise fantastic event. The point of the event is education about craft beer, and if the teacher has got it wrong, what will the students do?
I have sent an email to the BA to get their take on this. I received the perfunctory reply from a CSR. We will see where it goes.