Belly Up Beer aged like a fine wine edition

When you’re ready to graduate from the beer-soaked mania of IrishGuyCornerTap and try some more daring beers, the more trippingly named Festival Of Wood And Barrel-Aged Beer is the answer. This year’s event, on Nov. 7, has garnered nearly a dozen more brewers than it had last year—and tickets are going fast.

So far, 53 breweries have signed up to bring more than 130 beers to the event. With few exceptions, these small-batch, experimental beers never get bottled or sent to pub taps, so there’s nowhere else to try them. The premise is important, too—aging beer for a few weeks or months in wooden barrels (often already used for wine, port, or whiskey) gives the beer a much more complex flavor profile, often with noticeable hints of the wood itself and the wine or alcohol the barrel was first used for.

Ravenswood’s Metropolitan Brewing will have its beer on hand for the first time. Metropolitan made an ice bock—in other words, a bock that they froze during fermentation, and from which they scraped off the ice that formed, leaving a stronger, darker beer like a doppelbock. These sorts of unusual, small-batch beers exemplify the barrel-aged beer fest, which also includes brooding stouts with spices and chocolate mixed in, or “wild” beer brewed with different yeast strains.

Among the other new brewers to this year’s event (expected to be the largest yet, in terms of number of brewers, beers and drinkers): Bell's Brewery, Founders, Two Brothers, and Sun King have all signed up to cart out some of their kegs. Vying for most distant brewer, Maui Brewing Company and Kona Brewing Company will both have entries.

Admission gets you 12 tickets and a booklet describing all the beers. Each ticket is good for one taste. That leaves you with the dilemma of how to split up a dozen tickets among 10 times as many brews, so you'll have to be picky. Here's a strategy: Insist your guest share his or her beer samples, which doubles the possibilities. Head first for the beers that won awards earlier in the day during the judging session (those are usually the first kegs to get killed), then seek out a few brewers or beer styles you’ve never tried before. With any luck, by the end of the session, you’ll have just the slightest buzz.