Sixth Annual Festival Of Wood- And Barrel-Aged Beer Competition
If there’s one surefire way to attract a bunch of self-appointed beer experts en masse, it’s to drop the phrase “barrel-aged beer” and wait for them to come flocking. It certainly worked like a charm on Saturday at pair of sessions for the Sixth Annual Festival Of Wood- And Barrel-Aged Beer Competition held at the Stephen M. Bailey Auditorium by the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild.
More than 100 beers—most of them on tap and some in bottles—ringed the edges of the auditorium. Excessive drinking was supposed to be held in check by the 12 tickets all attendees were issued, but with a roomful of rare beers and several hundred people rabid to try them all, the honor system soon went out the window along with the dozen tickets.
The A.V. Club immediately got down to business and tasted a total of 22 beers in about three hours—and still had six tickets left at the end of the night. However, sampling a diverse a range of beers soon proved tricky, especially when the awards were handed out.
Early in the day, the Best In Show Award went to Three Floyds’ Behemoth, a barleywine (for more on barleywines, check back here for Beer Primer on Friday). Naturally, this award also meant the beer would no longer be available because of its sudden popularity. Instead, Decider made do with the second-place barleywine, Flossmoor Station Restaurant & Brewing's Wooden Hell, which was very good in its own right, with hints of allspice and clove and a fairly sweet taste overall.
Despite the frigid temperatures outside and the warming effect of the booze, the vibe was far from rowdy. A collection of beard-wearing beer aficionados milled about in well-loved T-shirts from their favorite microbreweries—the true diehards even strapped their tasting glasses to thick lanyards between beers. There were quiet discussions on the relative merits of The Map Room and Hopleaf. And to keep everyone on their toes and sounding well-educated in beer matters, brewers from several local craft breweries were also in the crowd: Goose Island, of course, and also relative newcomers Half Acre and Metropolitan Brewing. Early on, many people earnestly debated their beer choices, holding their glasses up to the light to assess color and attempting to describe the “mouthfeel” of the brews in hand.
But as 9 p.m. rolled around, everyone confronted the sobering reality of too many kegs and not enough time to sample them all. That’s when the pouring got sloppier, as did the drunks. Patches of floor turned sticky with spilled stout and spittoons filled up with a not-so-festive mélange of used drink tickets and unwanted beer.
Imperial stouts dominated The A.V. Club’s final hour—especially ones from Glacier BrewHouse in Anchorage and Dogfish Head’s Palo Santo Maron (technically a “strong dark ale” but with the thick feel of a stout and layered flavors of butter and spicy cherries). Another favorite was the oak-aged bourbon cherry stout made by Issaquah Brewhouse in Washington, with its malty nose, extremely subtle cherry flavors and smooth tobacco taste.
If there’s a downside to tasting beers at an event like this (aside from the inability to bring the kegs home), it’s that most are very hard to find anywhere else and many never come to a bar in Chicago, let alone are bottled and sold. Often, brewers will age just a few barrels of their brews and then serve them at their own brewpubs. Goose Island’s Bourbon County Stout is one exception—you can find it at a handful of bars and several stores around the city right now. The Behemoth barleywine also gets bottled in small numbers each year. Since many of the beers were made by Illinois brewers, you might get lucky going to their brewpubs and finding one or two on tap.
It would’ve been nice to have the alcohol content of each beer listed—knowing that number up front can make for a more well-informed drunk. But then again, any event that leaves the masses both educated and solidly drunk is a success by any measure.
