Hogtown Barleywine Festival
By Mark Tumarkin

There are a number of barleywine festivals around the country - the oldest being at the Brickskeller in DC (started in 1990). Some of the others are the Toronado in SF, the Split thy Skull in Philadelphia (& now in Brooklyn), and the Great Alaskan Winter Brew & Barleywine Festival. There may be more I'm not aware of. Well, now we can add the Hogtown Barleywine Festival to the list.

For the Barleywine tasting at the last meeting, we had a selection of incredible beers to sample that staggers the mind. It literally caused a few of us to stagger as well. When drinking these heady brews it pay to be careful, otherwise you can hurt yourself. The club now has a portable Breathalyzer unit so nobody drove home without a bit of time to clear their heads and a better sense of their blood alcohol level.

But back to the beer list. Normally, I wouldn't go through all the beers for a tasting, but this was an exceptional tasting. We had a fantastic selection of meads for the tasting last month, and we've upped the bar for tastings with the phenomenal assortment of Old Ales and Barleywines we had for our Bwine Fest. We had such an extensive assortment of beers to sample that we were unable to try them all. This isn't as surprising when you realize that the smallest beer we tried was at 8 percent alcohol.

We started out with the Old Ales including Gale's Prize Old Ale (unfortunately this 1998 vintage had soured a little), Eldridge Pope's Thomas Hardy, and my homebrewed 1997 Snow Kiss. This was the first time many of our members had tried the Thomas Hardy, and unfortunately it may be the last time for most of us as the continued existence of this marvelous beer is in real doubt. It was hard for me to part with this bottle, but I couldn't think of a better group to share it with.

We moved on to the Barleywines , interspersed with a few big beers just for contrast and to round out our understanding of the high gravity styles. Perhaps I should list some of these next before moving on to the many barleywines we sampled.

With that in mind, we'll take a quick look at some of these beers. One of my favorites was Fred, from Hair of the Dog Brewery in Portland. This bruiser comes in at 10% alcohol and is name after Portland beer writer Fred Eckhardt. We also tried Brooklyn Brewery's Dark Chocolate Stout, one of my favorite Imperial Stouts. Samuel Smith's Triple Bock, a monster beer with maple syrup overtones, dwarfed these beers in gravity. This is an interesting brew, but certainly not one of my personal favorites. We also tried Skull Splitter to see where the big Scottish Wee Heavies fit in the spectrum. (There were several Scottish ales in the beers we didn't get to try, including Mac Andrew's Scottish Ale and MacChouffe, a Belgian interpretation of the Wee Heavy style). We also sampled Mendocino's Eye of the Hawk, another big but hard to place ale.

We then took a look at the Barleywines, beginning with the original English version of the style. We sampled Young's Old Nick and Anchor Old Foghorn. Although Anchor is an American brewery, Old Foghorn is true to the English style of barleywines. We then moved on to Sierra Nevada's Bigfoot as a classic American barleywine. The main difference between the English and American styles is in the use of hops. Although the English bwines can be quite hoppy, the American versions tend to be more aggressively hopped and also are typified by the use of American hop varieties. As hoppy as Bigfoot is, it pales besides Rogue's Old Crustacean. I think even Dr. Bob would agree that Old Crusty has plenty of hops. We also tried Leviathan from Olympia's Fish Brewing, Victory's Old Horizontal, Wayne's homebrewed barleywine, and AleSmith's Old Numbskull.

Wow, I didn't think I'd ever get to the end of the list! And that doesn't include the hoppy lager or the 2 brown ales that Dave had on tap, or my Dark Mild, or Robert's rauchbier, or Richard's Saison or Spiced Ale, or Jason's Stout or any of the commercial beers people brought. Sorry if I forgot to mention anyone's homebrew. This was truly a night to test the Buffalo Theory!

This was probably the most impressive list of beers we've had for a single tasting. I don't expect to match this (or even come close) with every tasting, but once in a while it's good to push the envelope. Well, that was the Hogtown Barleywine Festival 2000; hope you can make the next one.

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