The GABF is simply awesome and I'm probably going to start thinking about tickets for next year just as soon as I'm done with this blog post. ;)
If you know me you know my favorite beer style (far and away) is a well crafted IPA. I expected to find a lot of good examples at the fest and there were several. I also expected to have my top 3 beers of the event be IPA's but I was wrong.
Best beer of the night for me was easily Firestone Walker's barrel aged Russian Imperial Stout Parabola.
This beer is glorious. Upon tasting it you will say "Damn!" pause for a second and then say"That's good". You won't say much else for a while and others drinking it will understand why you can't add much more than 3 words to describe the amazing beer you are drinking because it has 37,000 miles of depth to explore and you only have so much time to explore them.. It's a stellar beer deserving of as much praise as I could give it and the $25 per bottle you might pay should you ever see this beer out in the wild. Killer stuff!
Second best beer of the night Avery's barrel aged sour ale Immitis.
Maybe this is a difficult style to get into because the guys I was with both hated it but this was an easy walk away second best beer for me. It would have been #1 had we not discovered the Parabola. The RIS was simply world class beer and demanded the #1 slot. This Sour was amazing and for me it grabs the second place of the evening. Super complicated ale with green apple and cider explosiveness to lead in and a finish that grabs your attention as if it's saying "Look at me when I'm talking to you"...like the Parabola this is also a limited release that is difficult to buy. A guy was telling me you have to go to the tap room and enter into a lottery system to get a chance at it. Later on when I came back for more it was gone and one of the Pouring guys told me he didn't get a chance to taste it. I feel lucky that I did get a chance.
And 3rd place for the night an IPA...finally! ;)
Bear Republic's Cafe Racer 15
Ah yes....what's better than Racer 5? Racer 15 of course. Can you run down to your corner store and grab some unlike the limited release rare brews listed above? Nope..of course not. This is the beauty and the curse of the GABF. You get to taste awesome beers you will likely never get to taste again. I didn't grab a pic of the Racer 15 but what I can say is that it was fantastic. We had many, many, IPA's and some were rather simple, some were not quite up to snuff, most of them were good-great but this one knocked it out of the park. Very nice beer.
In case you wonder what it's like wandering into a room with more craft beer than you can possibly drink, like I started with..It's awesome! I had a freaking blast. Aside from the beer the crowd was all having fun and there are some things I didn't know about that experience will help with on future visits to the GABF. 1
1) Pretzel necklaces. Whoever came up with this idea was a genius.
2) Crowd participation. I kept hearing people start yelling at random moments. Eventually it happened close enough to me to figure out but when somebody drops a cup you yell AHHhhhhh! at them. not just you but everybody within 80' as to let them know the world saw what they did and we are not letting it slide. All in fun and why not? There is a huge "we are all in this together" vibe and it's a load of fun. Somebody spilled beer on me, I threw beer all over some girl, I tried to get Luke to shoot a pretend gun made with his own index finger and thumb at somebody and he wouldn't do it (man that was funny). At some point we were asked to take a pic of a group of friends and I told them we would not do it unless I could also have a picture of them and apparently they agreed because here they are and I'd say if a picture is worth a thousand words I feel confident in closing this post right here.
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