Necessity is the mother of invention, but a good old fashioned dare is its drunk auntie, which is probably why every brewery in attendance at this year’s Extreme Beer Festival brought wacky concoctions made with, for instance, hot dogs, and peanut butter cups, and garlic, and I don’t know if I mentioned hot dogs, but hot dogs.
I’m getting to a point where weird beer, or beer made with complicated mix-matches of ingredients, are wearing me out, and all I want is just a regular-strength beer with only one or two hop varietals, a clean malt bill, and nothing else save for exemplary processing. Not that I’m against an oddball beer! But for a while there I feel like oddball beers were at the top of the list of my consumption, and after a while the novelty wears off. That said, I enjoyed myself at EBF; walking in I knew I’d be drinking exclusively oddball beers, and that means lots of time for mental prep. I have clear beefs with the structure of the festival, but not every fest can be the Vermont Brewers Festival*. C’est la vie.
You can read my full recap, including a list of the best beers of the fest, over at Hop Culture.
*Shout out to the eager beaver “enthusiast” who butted in on my interview with the guys at Foam about ten seconds into our conversation, dominated their time while I stood there helplessly with my recorder in hand, and then proceed to trash the Vermont Brewers Festival, which Foam is associated with and which their brewery is adjacent to, and then jokingly wrote his rudeness off about six or seven minutes later when he remembered that I was there! And also that I don’t work for Foam!
A Constant Visual Feast 