On September 23-27, I traveled to Denver, Colorado with F and 3 friends to experience the Great American Beer Festival. This annual festival at the Colorado Convention Center is the largest public tasting event of American beer, and also is a competition where breweries big and small compete to win medals. If you are an enthusiast of beer, this is probably on your bucket list.
There are multiple sessions during the 3 day festival, and we had tickets to the Saturday session. However, even before entering the convention hall, my friends and I had an incredible time visiting and sampling various breweries of Denver, as well as bars of Denver many of who were having adjacent special beer tappings in honor of GABF. Even without a ticket to GABF itself, you can have a great experience just with all the events around it.
I have several blog Travel Tuesday posts planned about this beer vacation aka beercation. I will start with this post of my thoughts first on the session of GABF 2015 I attended and what my experience was like as a first-timer and as a girl who enjoys beer, but by no means is a beer expert.
- Control Yourself. Since this festival offers more than 3,500 beers, there is no way you can taste everything, even while sharing your sample pours and pouring some tastes out after a few small sips during your few hours of your session if it’s not above a certain “good” threshold. Otherwise, you will lose your palate and your sobriety.
Some beer booths poured from kegs, other from cans or bottles like here where we tried Elevation Beer Co‘s Oil Man, an Imperial Stout aged in Bourbon Barrels, and Senorita a Horchata Imperial Porter, both of which are seasonal releases. We also had tastes from Flossmoor Station Brewing Co of their Barrel Aged Shadow of the Moon Imperial Stout, Barrel Aged Pullman Reserve, and Electric Line saison with caramelized lemon peel and rosemary - Making a sampling plan gives you focus. Before the day of our session, I had already glanced at the list of beers and decided that I wanted to focus on 2 of my favorite types of beers- barrel aged beers and sour beers. After coming in one hour early to wait in line, I had a paper copy of the book and the map now too of the individual locations of the breweries and their booth number. I then went in and started circling specific booth numbers on the map. This was better than the GABF app which only showed me areas to help me really located where to go.
We got in line at 11ish am, 1 hour before the doors would open for our Saturday session. This is what it looked like at that time (we were in row 2)… and 45 minutes later. It was pretty exciting when we could go (we were let in one row at a time) as the music of the Centennial State Pipes and Drums played to greet us GABF attendees as we enterMarking the booths we wanted to visit specifically by number helped us- Narrow down and set priority order of the areas we would go to based on how many beers in that location we had marked as interesting, but
- Gave us better focus in finding the breweries since I knew the booth numbers to go directly to them in the last hour when we realized we were in the final countdown and couldn’t meander down area aisles anymore.
- If there are certain breweries and beers you really really want to try, mark them so you know exactly where they are and you can get to them. We knew from our markings that we would spend a lot of time in the Brewer’s Hall, and that our first stop was going to be for Samuel Adams Utopias.
- Have a set meeting spot. Even though we came as a group of 5, we broke up into smaller groups based on our interests – and we knew ahead of time that we would meet by the Big Blue Bear (aka I See What You Mean). Within my smaller group of F and I, we would agree on a specific spot to stand in an aisle to meet back and, we would divide up temporarily to get our individual beers, and then meet back at that same spot to share our beers. We never left each other without an agreed verbal “meet back here.” Sure, you could say you have phones and texting, but you never know what your battery life, or the signal, may be like.
- Bring an external battery for your phone. I got a dual external battery charger so that both of us could charge our phones whenever, wherever so never had to worry that we wouldn’t be able to use maps, Uber, whatever. I got a RAV Power specifically because it had dual ports for 2 phones so we wouldn’t have to compare who had the least battery power and needed it most, it has simultaneous 4.5A Output for fast charge, and 16000mAh because there would be days it would charge the phones of every single person in our group!
- Now that battery isn’t an issue, it was a matter of conserving time that instead of checking in beers in Untappd, I took a photo of every beer name + brewery I stopped at. This helped jog my memory of what I had but saved time so I could taste, share, finish/dump the beer and get another one with our precious set time period of the session. The beers I thought were 4 or higher (on a 1-5 scale) I always had several pictures of often to get additional pictures of the label to add to my Untappd checkin 🙂
Great sours from Captain Lawrence Brewing Company such as this Rosso e Marron and also a Cuvee de Castleton; Berger Cookie Chocolate Stout; Kitka Coconut Chocolate Milk Stout from The Brew Kettle; Dirty Deeds Russian Imperial Stout; A taste of Wick for Brains Pumpkin Ale from Nebraska - Spend your time in areas other than your home region. GABF has brought the entire US down to a convention center – still huge, but better than travelling thousands of miles. In the first few hours, we meandered a little more in reading what each row had, but by the last hour we began to focus on getting ones we had marked on our map in step 2.
- It’s not just about the beer. I talked to the people serving beers to get the story behind a beer or a brewery or the booth decor.
Some of my favorite booth decor at GABF 2015 included the whimsical aquatic pool friends of The Bruery which fans enthusiastically helped take down after the last session; Deep Ellum Brewing had one where that smiley/bottle mouth face kept rotating and had a cool engineering vibe.
I talked to people in line about what beers at GABF were their favorite so far which helped point me towards new beer, but also chatted about where we were from, and in one case as one woman made fun of her boyfriend for liking “apple juice/cider” more than beer, I told them about the Cider Summit held in Portland and Seattle every year and how they should visit. Connect with others – we are all fans together.
Other brewery booths of GABF 2015 and their people- Copper Kettle pouring Basil Cherry, Denver Beer pouring Coconut Chocolate Graham Cracker Porter, Fremont Brewing with Coffee Cinnamon Abominable Barrel Aged Winter Ale
I had some delicious cheese (and talked to others about cheese) at the American Cheese Society table buffet of cheese. I watched people groove at the Oskar Blues silent disco.
Thanks for the great sampling of cheese, American Cheese Society! // The Oskar Blues Silent Disco – everyone has headphones where they can hear the music by the DJ but no one else can
We took photos at various set up photo ops. All of those are part of the full GABF experience. It’s not just about drinking beer.
Laughs at Horse and Dragon Brewing Company… where we then pulled the horse head mask out of my bag and had to take a photo. Fun times at Horse & Dragon with their Cucumber Cricket beer, a cucumber basil kolsch style ale and a Bad Panda coffee stout
Was this a memorable, fun trip that was worthwhile? Yes.
Beer Scouts with their badges // Horse meets Yeti of Great Divide and whispers secrets to him / #FCBMonsters (FCB from Fort Collins Brewing)
Some of highlights of GABF for me include
- Discovering the incredible beers of Destihl Brewery, located in central Illinois. They don’t distribute apparently to Oregon, so the closest to go to find them for us would be to go to Seattle, WA. They had lots of spectacular sour beers, and were sampling from a staff of 4 pourers an impressive 10 of their beers. It was great to see these beers even come in can form to make it travel-friendly and accessible!
- My biggest discovery besides Destihl Brewery was Short’s Brewing from Bellaire, Michigan where we found really unique, risky beers and fun labels like Bucktricutioner Berliner Weisse with lime and strawberry; Bloody Beer with a bloody mary influence as it is fermented with Roma tomatoes, and spiced with dill, horseradish, peppercorns and celery seed; and one of my favorites of GABF that I tried, Strawberry Short’s Cake a golden ale with strawberries and milk sugar that really made it sweet and I swear I could taste the seeds.
- One of my favorite beers I had at GABF was Funky Buddha Brewery’s Morning Wood, a Imperial Bourbon barrel aged Maple Bacon Coffee Porter. It was so good with depths of flavor of coffee and roast and some smoke and sweetnes… So good I was able to get over slight embarrassment when I realized when I got up that I was going to say “I would like a taste of Morning Wood” to the man.
- I saw a lot of chocolate and peanut butter porters. I also noticed a lot more distribution of beer in cans, not just bottles, as some breweries were pouring from the cans they distribute with like here from Denver Beer Co and Destihl above.
Denver Beer Co Princess Yum Yum Raspberry Kolsch, Graham Cracker Porter(they also the chocolate as well as a coconut chocolate they were pouring – I preferred the coconut), and Hey Pumpkin, an ale brewed with pumpkin and spices. Yes they come in cans!
Other Misc. Photos
In next Travel Tuesday posts, I’ll start posting about the other days before GABF and the breweries we visited and other beer events in the nearby area to give you an idea how even without a GABF ticket, you can easily celebrate beer in many ways during the annual fall Great American Beer festival week.
What do you think of the various beers I tried, would you have tried any of them?
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Visiting Denver for Beer Vacation / Beercation and GABF in September 2015
- My recap of GABF 2015 with tips and photos
- Beer Tasting in Denver: Great Divide, Crooked Stave, First Draft
- Best Beer Visits Outside Denver
- Denver Beer Vacation: Celebrate GABF outside of GABF
