Beer Radar

Just returned from the Alaskan Beer & Barley Wine Festival. What a great event! Since Alaskan beer never makes it to the east coast, it was 4 straight days of almost all new beer for me: Midnight Sun, Glacier, Homer, Urban, Kassik’s Kenai, Moose’s Tooth and many, many others.

Sleeping Lady poured a beautifully balanced barrel-aged barleywine to win top Alaskan barleywine at the event. The No. 1 overall was Lagunitas Gnarlywine, a classic California barleywine that was perfectly hopped.

For me, though, the biggest revelation was all the cider and mead they’re making up there. They can hardly grow apples in the region, and all the honey is imported. Yet the varieties from Celestial and Ring of Fire were undoubtedly the best I’ve ever sampled.

I spoke on the tradition of winter beers at the annual Great Northern Brewers Club meeting. Let’s just hope I didn’t leave the homebrewers with any fodder for bumper stickers (like a certain Delaware brewer did last year).

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Beer etc., Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.