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forward to a quiet, solitary enjoyment of a new experience, I
was part of a network of nine experienced tasters who would in
turn disappear from the group for a few minutes and come back
and share some beer they had just found. It's a very good way to
do a beer festival, but not at all what I had been looking forward to.
Cantwell said, "Did you actually think you could go to a
beer festival in North America and not know somebody?"
One of the aspects of the GCBF that attracted me was the
large number of cask-conditioned ales. Out of about 110 draft
beers, thirty were cask-conditioned. At the Friday session I
concentrated mostly on those, and I was severely disappointed.
Cask beers need to rest for a few days so the yeast can settle to
the bottom of the cask, and all these beers had arrived that day
so they had no chance to rest. They were all murky. I imagine
it would be prohibitively expensive to rent the venue for
three additional days just to let the beer settle, but as a showcase
for Canadian cask-conditioned beers, this festival is a failure.
I also drank a lot of IPAs since that is a favorite style of mine,
and I was disappointed with them, too. Canadian brewers are
more conservative in their hopping than I am used to here. There
were plenty of good beers, but it was hard to find anything as
hoppy as I like.
The Friday session is 5 hours long. The Saturday session is
8 hours, starting at noon. As on Friday, I got there early to stand
in line. When it opened, my "network" from the day before had
not formed yet, and I was on my own. I got a porter from
somewhere and found a side room with large round tables. I sat down at
a table that had only one guy at it, happy to have a quiet place
to sit and reflect on the beers, and he immediately struck up a
con-versation. That was exactly not what I wanted, but he turned
out to be a nice guy, and we had a good conversation. His
friend showed up and there were 3 of us. They were beer nerds
from Calgary. According to my atlas, Victoria is about as far from
Cal-gary as it is from the CA-OR border, so those guys had come
from some distance. (My atlas also shows that Victoria, BC is
actually south of Bellingham, Washington, which surprised me.)
The 3 of us sat there and chatted and saved seats for each
other, and as the festival got more and more crowded so did our table.
Some of my friends joined us. Strangers came up and
plopped down. For hours we all talked about the beers at the
festival, beers not at the festival, other festivals, etc, etc. It was really
fun, and everyone was really nice.
I was concentrating on porters and stouts at that time.
These styles are more popular there than here, and I'm happy to say
that the Canadian brewers do a good job with them. For me the
beers were better Saturday than Friday. Halfway through the session
a couple of us left to go out for lunch. There was food at the
fes-tival, but it didn't look that wonderful, and a break from the
crowd was attractive. We found a Hunan restaurant in nearby
China-town and had a nice hot, leisurely lunch.
(concludes on page 4)
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PRESIDENTIAL RAMBLINGS
In early December I flew up to Victoria, British Columbia for
the 2001 Great Canadian Beer Festival, thereby winning the
Triple Crown of beer festivals (I have been to the 2001 Great
British Beer Festival and the 2001 Great American Beer Festival, too).
I had never been to this Festival and nobody I know has,
either, so I had no idea what to expect, and that was very exciting to me.
I was looking forward to it particularly because it was going
to be a completely new experience. And I didn't really tell anyone
I was going after it was sold out, because I wanted to experience
it totally on my own.
I arrived in Victoria early in the afternoon on the last Friday
of November, checked into the hotel, and wandered around
Victoria a little. I found the Festival venue and then had lunch, and
at 3:30 walked back to the Conference Centre and joined the
line forming for the 4:00 start of the Friday session. There
were about 10 guys already in line, Canadian beer nerds talking
about beer stuff. Guys continued to join the line after me. One was
an American up from Bellingham, Washington. I didn't speak
to anyone. I didn't want any preconceived ideas about this
Festi-val. I was so looking forward to finding out all its good and
bad aspects on my own.
Finally at four a door opened and we filed in. I picked up a
festi-val guide and a glass and walked into the room. The other
guys were rushing off to brewery booths here or there to get their
first beer, but I decided to stroll around the room and take it all in
be-fore starting the serious tasting.
It was a large rectangular room with about 2 dozen
brewery booths around the perimeter and another dozen in the center
of the room. I was walking slowly down the long end of the
rect-angle checking out the booths to my left and my right when
I heard a woman's voice over my right shoulder say, "Dave!".
I started to turn, but realized that of course nobody knows
me here, so she must be talking to someone else, and I carried
on walking. When I got almost to the end of the room I saw
a banner for Alaskan Brewing. I didn't realize that there would
be any American beers here, so I headed over to see if they
had their delicious smoked porter, and as I approached I heard a
man to my left say, "Suurballe!". I turned and there was Dick
Cant-well in the Elysian booth (it's a Seattle brewpub). "What
are YOU doing here?", we said in unison. Just then the woman
who had called "Dave" caught up with me and tapped my shoulder.
It was Kate, a beer festival veteran I know from Seattle. While
we were all laughing about accidentally congregating in Victoria,
I spotted a Boundary Bay Brewing banner and asked Cantwell
if their brewer was here and he pointed behind me and there
was Skip and his wife. Moments later Cathy, another beer
festival veteran I know from Vancouver walked up with her husband.
15 minutes after walking into the Festival alone and looking so
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