Copenhagan - European Beer Festival

I must confess that my preparation for this event began on the flight over, seated next to The Beer Nut while he made his hit list of essential beers. I was quite prepared to follow his lead in this respect and promptly fell into his slip stream when we arrived at the venue. His count sits at 112 for the three days and happily I can say that mine is very similar, but with far fewer notes, well, none to be exact, but the best of them are still fresh in my mind.

This event was superbly run by those involved, and no doubt the more civilised drinking culture that prevails in Denmark negated the need for me to step over vomit at any point during the weekend. The 100ml measures were ample for a great many of the beers on offer which seemed to effortlessly exceed 6 or 7% abv and would have done for the average Irish punter who would have opted for a pint and nothing less. The Danes are doing amazing things with beer and have fully embraced the American brewing culture with an endless supply of imperial stouts and IPAs and I feel somewhat sad that this kind of brewing is not really feasible in Ireland because of excessive excise levies and the attitude of the average Irish drinker and publicans. Beer and breweries of note for me included:

• Bryggeriet Djaevlbrg (The Brewery Devil's Brew) who brewed the wonderful Schopenhauer's Vilje, a wonderful example of the better balanced beer on offer with full malt and toffee along with wonderful hops. Their Nekron and Son of Nekron were a stout and porter that I could drink by the gallon and dearly wish they might turn up in Ireland and give a certain dark beer here a thorough hiding.
• Norrebro Bryghus had on offer a vast selection of beer which is all the more remarkable because according to The Beer Nut this brew pub runs a tiny set up that fits into a corner of their bar. Beers of note here include their New York Lager, not because it was an outstanding beer but more to do with the notion that a lager from New York has become a style of beer. What do the people at the BJCP think about that? Stevns CCC was an amazing guest beer available at their stall which was supposed to be a kriek of sorts but the cherries weren't too up front. Either way, it was delicious and was the beer I chose to finish up the weekend's events on.
  
• The boys at Mikeller were completely unknown to me, but you'd be hard pressed to forget these guys. Apart from their good beer which included a very tart red current lambic and an intense single hopped Simcoe IPA that could have done with a little toning down on the hop front, these lads were really enjoying themselves. Various wigs were donned and placards were carried around the festival floor along with a countdown timer for special beers they had on offer. One of these timed release beers was a blueberry lambic that I missed out on which was shame because I looked forward to trying a beer that reminded me of muffins.
• Not Danish but Norwegian were the Nogne O boys who sported a minimalist stall, but the same cannot be said for their beer. Dark Horizon Second Edition was a remarkable Imperial Stout packing 17.5% and resembling port more than beer. It had a funny way of disappearing up the back of your throat and out your nose which gave it very little length. Nogne O Porter was one of the few beers outside of the British Pavilion available on cask and beat all of the British porters available hands down. Tangerine Dream was an example of one of the better heavily hopped beer available, and curious to me because it did indeed smell and taste of oranges, but I wondered did the brewers smell the beer afterwards and name it or were they confident of producing such a beer from the outset?

This festival also afforded me the opportunity of trying a great many of the American beers I have heard so much about, the best of which for me was Gonzo Imperial Porter from the lunatics at the Flying Dog brewery. I was torn on this beer. I loved all the hops but do they really belong in a dark beer of such richness? Their Doggie Style Classic Pale Ale was as intensely hopped as a great many of the IPAs I had tried and just when you think you are getting to know a brewery they throw Kerberos at you which was mellow and easy going. Perhaps they ran out of hops. You can always trust the Americans to give you something to think about. Yeti Imperial stout from The Great Divide was another heavily hopped dark beer to challenge the body and mind, but I enjoy such challenges and just wish I could be challenged in this way more often.

There were a great many other beers during my time in Copenhagen and enjoyed pretty much all of them, even the asparagus beer from a brewery I cannot recall the name of. It stank to high heaven of the green shoot but really didn't taste bad at all.

If you love beer you must attend this event. No excuses.

Beer festivals and lessons learned

I haven't attended many beer festivals, which is a terrible shame because they excite me greatly and being in the prime of youth with an understanding finacee and without any children to hamper me I should be trotting the globe in search of wonderful beer in all its forms. For reasons that I don't fully understand this does not appear to be the case. Those which I have attended proved to very enjoyable, especially those I have shared with unashamed beer geeks and enthusiasts. The beer talk often peaks at a level quite unsafe to those who do not share our passion, and for this reason civilians really are better off tucked up in bed while we drunkenly wax lyrical about hop aroma and residual extract and get into fights about beer styles and definitions.

Beer festivals in Ireland really are few and far between, but this is a situation which is rapidly improving much to the excitement of the beer loving community. We have one dead cert annual fest held in Cork each year which is eagerly anticipated, and a further one in Belfast which doesn't get as much attention by those in the South of Ireland, but provides the opportunity to try quite a number of cask ales should the need fall upon you. With the availability of cheap flights around Europe, London is a short hop away and the Great British Beer Festival is always worth a visit.

It was at the GBBF that I had my first proper beer festival experience, an experience I will never forget for a number of reasons, good and bad in equal measure. I was almost light headed with excitement at the thought of trying so many real ales and eased my way in with a third of a pint of mild. A timid start I think you'll agree, but the beer selection on offer was vast and a small part of me thought I was going to get through them all, a third at a time. I stuck faithfully to these small measures for quite a while until the ethanol started to exert its insidious influence and my temperate regime was slowly eroded, not helped by my brother who fell in love with Badger's Tanglefoot and kept on returning with pints of the stuff, which I dutifully finished off because the various pies I had eaten had made me bloody thirsty. I was helpless, really. All common sense had been muffled by the alcohol and the pies contained more salt per ounce than the Dead Sea. My carefully thought out survival guide was in pieces, and I finished the night drinking the strongest beer in the place, of which I recall an American Imperial Stout hopped as aggressively as an IPA. It was an intense and potent beer which left a tar like residue in my glass and no doubt my internal organs also.

We had been in the beer hall for 6 odd hours, but a lack of any natural light and the effects of drunkenness had completely thrown my sense of time and it was with a an intense sense of temporal vertigo that I stepped into the bright light of the near setting sun at around eight pm, certain in my fuzzy head that it was the early hours of the morning. It was horribly confusing, but I soon gathered my senses and managed to hail a cab for my return to the hotel. While in the back of the taxi I recall that the driver stole furtive glances at me through his rear view mirror. It never occurred to me that I looked the worse for wear, but when I stood in the back of the taxi to pay the fare I chanced a peak of myself in the mirror and realised the taxi driver had good reason to be fearful. I looked not dissimilar to Richard E. Grant in 'Withnail and I' when he was pulled over in his car by the police. I almost felt the urge to blurt out 'I've only had a few ales!', but I resisted, the relieved taxi driver bid me adieu, and I made my way to the hotel where I promptly smashed against the revolving door my souvenir over sized pint glass that a kindly CAMRA volunteer had help me negotiate into a plastic bag. Despite the disgusted looks of my fellow hotel guests in the lobby, I did not break my stride and headed for my room to inflict myself upon my unwitting fiancee, because despite my love of beer, this level of intoxication was very rare for me. Luckily I was taken great care of, and M ventured out into the unfamiliar streets of London to track down a Big Mac and Fries for me (It is for this reason and myriad others than she will become my wife later this year).

Thanks to our early finish I was in a position to stay awake for a few more hours during which time I polished off a burger, fries, two litres of water and bucket like measure of Coca Cola. All of these helped stave off what would no doubt have been a monumental hangover and I was in a position to fly to Prague the next day and enjoy yet more wonderful beer, albeit in a far more responsible manner.

So, my contribution to The Session this month is perhaps a lesson in how not to do a beer festival. But as Robert Byrnes said; 'The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley'.